MxMIndia

Tag: Devil’s Advocate

  • We are now slaves to the virtual universe and while we all believe we know the difference between the real world and the virtual one, writes Jaideep Shergill

    Jaideep Shergill: Mirror, mirror…

    By Jaideep Shergill

     

    Our lives are no longer ours to control. We have given up our lives up to the 24×7 world we live in and social media rules us now.

    We are now slaves to the virtual universe and while we all believe we know the difference between the real world and the virtual one, the truth couldn’t be further away. Remember what the evil Queenalways said in the Snow White story: “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest of Them All? In our quest to be loved and liked, to be accepted into society, to be embraced into the established norms of friendship and kinship, we are all turning into the very same evil Queen and all we now desire is constant reassurance and acceptance and the social media platforms on our devices are now like mirrors into which we stare every waking hour of every day only to ask “Who Is the Fairest of Them All?” in our equivalent of the perennial and instant gratification we seek via the number of “so called friends” we have to the number of likes we get, or retweets or Instagram shots we can garner.

     

    One of the recent shows I really enjoyed watching is Black Mirror which is a science fictionanthology examining dark themes in modern society, particularly highlighting the ramifications and unanticipated consequences of new technologies and social media. While I enjoyed most of the stories told across three seasons, two stories in particular stand out: “Fifteen Million Merits” from Season 1 and “Nosedive” from Season 3. The first is set in a satirical, dystopian world where everyone has to mandatorily cycle on exercise bikes in order to power up their needs including electricity and other utilities and they are paid using a currency called Merits. The citizens of this alternate world are constantly distracted by advertisements which play around them and they are not allowed to skip these without financial penalty. In this world, obese people are treated as second-class citizens and only the ones who stay fit cycling are rewarded with more merits. The latter, “Nosedive”, tells the story of a female character who lives in an alternate world or possibly even our world in the very near future where everyone can rate one another or be rated constantly. Everyone’s popularity is tracked on a five star rating and owing to the available technology, everyone is judged all the time, everywhere. Not only does this technology and constant pressure to get good ratings affect day-to-day lifestyles, it also affects social standing, employability, perks and benefits and even home rentals!

     

    Now while all of this can be brushed away as fiction, isn’t real life quickly turning to emulate art when it comes to how we all live today? Children around the world are suffering cyber bullying, peer pressure and are becoming introverted. Adults are living out their alternate lives in chat rooms, dating sites and in consuming porn and all of us together are trapped in the virtual world we have created around us where success and fame is measured by how well we are liked or how we look on social media platforms. What scares me most is how everything revolves around how we are perceived, how well we can show a brave face and always smile for the camera and put up our best pictures, always dressed sharply. How many times can we show pictures of the most exotic restaurants we went to or the food we ate or the holiday we took or the friends we partied with every week?As a society, we have become socially unstable than ever before and are becoming incapable of remaining real people anymore.

     

    I recently read somewhere that in the time an average person spends on social media in a year could have been replaced by reading 200 books. Incredible! Of course, we are all to blame and if there is one thing I would like to change; it will be to go back to doing more real things with real people. After all, that’s how our life was before we became slaves to our screens and turned them into ugly, dark mirrors!

     

    Or to put it differently, in the words of the legendary Freddie Mercury and Queen…Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality…

     

  • At the Cannes Lions, Indian agencies had pinned their hopes on this category on the back of the shortlist they had received, four in PR. Unfortunately, none of these shortlists converted to any metals, writes Jaideep Shergill

    Jaideep Shergill: Diary of Odds and ends!

    By Jaideep Shergill

     

    I decided to have an occasional stab at compiling some oddities and such from the smorgasbord which is our world, the highlights and lowlifes of the world of media, marketing, PR and communication. So here goes:

     

    1. Fly in the ointment? Raghuram Rajan’s non-continuance, non-extension, exit or whatever else one would like to anoint this move as, has caused quite a storm especially since everyone in the media and some seem to know more about everything that happened (or didn’t) than even Mr Rajan himself. I loved what Rajan said to a leading newspaper recently- “I’m still here for two-and-half months in this job. After that I’m going to still be around somewhere in the world, probably a lot in India, so don’t write me off”

     

    2. Can Cannes?The winners’ list at the PR Lions has recently been announced at the ongoing Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Indian agencies had pinned their hopes on this category on the back of the shortlist they had received, four in PR. Unfortunately, none of these shortlists converted to any metals. A total of 84 Lions were given away in PR.

    Serves the advertising firms right for masquerading under the PR category considering how little they respect and understand the PR business to start with.

     

    3. Storm in a tea cup: Nikesh Arora’s exit from SoftBank owing to the fact that Masayoshi Son choosing to hang around longer has caused a lot of stir in the business world and feeding frenzy has begun. A victim of retirement reversal, Nikesh is grabbing all the headlines this week. Once again everybody in the media always knows more than the people at the heart of the story. On a lighter note, Rahul Yadav (remember him, enfant terrible? aka The Housing.com boy) has been enjoying putting up fun posts about Nikesh Arora’s exit. Déjà vu?

     

    4. Feed Salman to Ramsay Bolton’s hounds: Salman Khan is still making news for all the wrong reasons and is also receiving lots of support for the shameful remarks he makes. We still have PR pros, celebrities and media moguls defending him. For god’s sake, can we get over with the celebrity hangover in our country? I loved what a friend posted on Facebook recently: At least we know its Salman tweeting since every tweet has at least one spelling mistake and another friend put this up: It’s reassuring to see every tweet in support of Salman Khan has at least one spelling error. Salman needs to be quickly fed to Ramsay Bolton’s hounds especially since their next meal isn’t so certain after the hounds just gobbled up Ramsay himself!

     

    5. “You’re in the great game now, and the great game is terrifying”- Continuing with the Game of Thrones narrative (minus Salman), what a great PR story this one has been and who would have thought so. Season after season, GOT continues to amaze and confound us with one of the greatest PR stories in recent history. Now, coming in at 69 minutes, the finale of the Game of Thrones’ sixth season will be the longest episode in series history, meaning there will be ample time for the show to both tie up loose ends and set the groundwork for next year’s premiere. Dubbed “The Winds of Winter,” Sunday’s installment will look to King’s Landing to see the outcome of both Cersei Lannister and Loras Tyrell’s trials — a storyline that many believe will come to a fiery conclusion.

     

    Jaideep Shergill, Co-Founder Pitchfork Partners Strategic Consulting LLP is a PR and communication veteran and has always been contrarian about most things, drawing extraordinary amounts of irk and ire from industry peers. He can be reached at jaideep.shergill@pitchforkpartners.com 

     

  • Our homegrown lists are too skewed towards the following types: Advertising CEOs, Men, Old men, writes Jaideep Shergill in a new weekly column

    Devil’s Advocate: Introducing a new no-holds-barred column by Jaideep Shergill

    By Jaideep Shergill

     

    This is what Umberto Eco (who sadly passed away recently) had to say about lists:

    The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

     

    AdWeek recently released the ubiquitous Power List 2016: The Top 100 Leaders in Marketing, Media and Tech. What a great list. Such depth and insightful commentary and more importantly covering a broad spectrum of leaders, ranging from tech CEOs to media moguls to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to Marketing Directors and head honchos of large marketing services (ouch, was I supposed to say advertising) holding companies. Sadly, like we do every year when such lists get released, we scour every listing only to see the disappointment grow manifold by the time we reach #100 and as always the predestined result follows our disappointment. We never (rarely ever) have any leaders directly representing the PR/communication fraternity.

     

    I did notice one “outlier”, Harris Diamond, CEO, chairman, McCannWorld group who comes in at #76 on the list. Having said this, the last time Mr Diamond was in a role in the PR industry was back in 2012. So that’s that as far as the PR and communication industry goes. Nada, zilch, Zero!

     

    Of course the holding company chiefs on the list can also claim to have something to do with the PR business but we all know how little they care or mean to do for the PR fraternity barring the lip service of course.

     

    A completely different list, the GQ magazine 100 most connected men in Britain 2016 has a great list with very different criterion for one to appear on it, however, this list at least has a handful of leaders from the PR industry on it including Matthew Freud, Chairman, Freud Communications, Paddy Harverson and DJ Collins, Co-founders, Milltown Partners, Simon Kelner, Chief executive, Seven Dials PR, Benjamin Webb, Founder, Deliberate PR and James Chapman, Director of communications for George Osborne. More importantly I didn’t see many of those “lip-service” folks listed!

     

    Looking at the latter, there is hope yet!

     

    Now coming to some of our very own homegrown lists which I have been reading with a great amount of amazement and consternation.  Invariably, we end up with list which are too skewed towards the following types:

    1. Advertising CEOs

    2. Men

    3. Old men

     

    While this applies to some of the large marketing media and so-called industry leading titles who create these lists, the PR-specific lists are equally lopsided and represent “the old school” definition of Public Relations and Communication. Unusually, only those from the “establishment” make it to these lists.

     

    I personally believe that these lists need to be expounded a lot more and comprise a much wider constitution and deeper thinking needs to go into curating them rather than providing the standard, dull fare to readers. Let’s give our brothers and sisters more credit for their intellect.

     

    Within the world of lists, the PR industry and our representation on these lists is like the innermost and smallest doll of the Matryoshka doll (Russian doll)

     

    Sorry, Mr. Eco, we have a long way to go yet!

     

    Jaideep Shergill, Co-Founder, Pitchfork Partners Strategic Consulting LLP is a PR and communicationas veteran and has always been contrarian about most things, drawing extraordinary amounts of irk and ire from industry peers. He can be reached at jaideep.shergill@pitchforkpartners.com.