Yo - listen up: Dead American rap stars may soon be coming to a stage near you.
One of the biggest hits/creepiest moments of last weekend at Coachella, the world’s biggest music festival, was an appearance by Tupac Shakur who joined recent Australian visitor Snoop Dogg on "Come With Me”, "Hail Mary" and "Gangsta Party."
This was a surprise to almost everyone at this show in the middle of the Californian desert because Tupac died in a hail of bullets 15 years ago.
The appearance was at night so there’s no blaming sunstroke.
Another Tupac song, “"I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto", went unperformed.
Tupac got the virtual gig on the strength of being a computer generated image. You can watch the video here. It’s a stunning example of augmented reality, where a live view of a physical, real-world environment is supplemented by computer-generated sensory input.
It’s one of the fastest-developing new media frontiers and has the potential to take news and entertainment off our TV flat screens and onto a coffee table or living room floor, in 3D.
There's some technical discussion here (and an explanation why it wasn't a "hologram".)
There’s no word yet if Dead Tupac will take to the road and play venues around the world. This takes Madonna and Milli Vanilli's miming to another level.
Presumably Tupac’s image projection equipment will need a first-class airline seat. At least promoters can rest easy knowing his backstage food, booze and drug requirements will be light on.
You can tell a lot about a sporting club from the way it markets itself for new members. Take the Magpies of the AFL, Collingwood Football Club, 120 years old this year.
It brags that it’s the biggest and most famous sporting club in Australia. It’s won 15 premierships. It’s contested 43 grand finals, more than any other club. It’s also lost 26 grand finals (two draws), more than any other club.
Its club song ends embarrassingly with Oh, The Premiership’s A Cakewalk For The Good Old Collingwood. It’s said that Collingwood supporters believe the last words of Advance Australia Fair are Carn the Pies.
But all this, like pointing out its premiership droughts from 1958 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010 is nitpicking. Where Collingwood excels is rabid cradle to grave supporters, a record membership base of almost 73,000 and a financially astute club management led by Eddie McGuire that, like AC/DC, is strongly Back in (the) Black.
For 2012, it introduced a clever piece of membership marketing that draws on Collingwood’s reputation as the club other clubs love to hate. “It’s Us Against Them. Now is the time to decide. Are you with us?” the ad asks as new coach Nathan Buckley, ‘side by side’ with his players, faces the opposition hordes like William Wallace and his army in Braveheart.
Collingwood’s masterful ad has fine heritage. The voice-over is by Jack Thompson (They hate the sight of black and white that fills the battleground; and they hate our army chanting its intimidating sound).
Our Jack starred as coach Laurie Holden in the classic 1980 movie The Club, the Bruce Beresford/David Williamson homage to Collingwood and football club intrigues everywhere.
Marketing the Australian Football League’s newest team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, has been a different kettle of fish. There is no tradition. No century of history. An untried team of teenagers based in rugby league heartland.
A confusing name: try GWS and you’ll get Melbourne insurance brokers or a Sydney recruitment company. Or worse. At least, there’s nothing to match the scores of tasteless jokes about Collingwood supporters. Yet.
The marketing saviour for this multi-million dollar AFL investment is one man. Kevin Sheedy. The former plumber, Richmond champion and Essendon super-coach over three decades, he is the voice, the face, the historian, the sage and the stuntman of this new club.
He’s brought his media smarts, his guile and tricks, his play-acting with Eddie McGuire, and above all, his deserved reputation as an innovator of the game and a leader in recruiting indigenous players, to Sydney. GWS membership is 7755. The membership drive features coach Sheedy as much as his largely unknown players.
Sure, the billboards feature rugby league import Israel Folau but, in Western Sydney, he’s hardly a giant alongside Nathan Hindmarsh.
It’s been Kevin Sheedy on the front cover of glossy mags, Sheedy in front of the 80-year-old Harbour Bridge, Sheedy the newspaper columnist and TV guest. And it will be Sheedy who commands the headlines until tomorrow night when they play the club song, described by one wag as backing music for a dancing Boris Yeltsin.
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That’s when the youngsters of GWS hit the turf at Sydney Olympic Park against the ‘Moneyball’ team of the AFL, the mighty Sydney Swans*, with the AFL hoping for a crowd of 40,000. That’s when the nation’s top draft picks play their historic first game and maybe then the GWS marketing can move from the coach to the players’ achievements.
What’s inducing that queasy feeling? The revelation that Network TEN is making a reality TV show called “The Shire” or the sneering comments from latte-sipping journalists who couldn’t find their way out of Sydney’s inner-west with a seeing-eye dog and a GPS?
“Reality TV” is an oxymoron. There’s nothing “real” about it. What goes to air is selectively-edited lowlights, cut in a way to bring out the worst in us.
A declaration of interest: I lived in the Sutherland Shire for 20 years. I’ve swum at Cronulla Beach. I’ve shopped at Miranda Fair and I’ve sat on the hill at Shark Park. I didn’t go to the Australia Day riots - but I know someone who helped start them. On the advice of police and following death threats, he was last heard of living in Melbourne with a shaved head and under an assumed name.
I don’t have an emotional connection to The Shire and recognise that some people who were born there will die there without ever feeling a need to cross the Georges River.
The Shire is an up-market version of Sydney’s Northern Beaches – like Manly-Warringah it’s an insular peninsular but without the bush ticks.
The Shire’s coastal end shares the same characteristics of most urbanised beach suburbs with a high transient population. The inland parts are middle class suburbia dotted with older houses and more recently built McMansions.
Four-in-ten people who live in The Shire also work there. Eighty percent of the locals are Australian-born. There are fewer Chinese as a proportion of population than anywhere else in Sydney and it’s generally an ageing and conservative area.
So what’s in it for reality TV?
Big audiences. It’s OK to hate The Shire. It’s not elitist and it’s not like deriding lower socio-economic areas like Sydney’s south-west. Having a football team that’s never won a premiership is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s Lara Bingle, the stereotypical blonde Shire girl. Ricky Pointing also calls the area home - but let’s gloss over that.
Filming someone making a fool of themselves in Cronulla Mall after the pub shuts is like filming interviews with Mid-Western Americans and leaving in only the idiotic statements. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
When the local mayor - fittingly, a former fashion catwalk veteran- starts threatening legal action and says she’ll barricade roads into the area, you know the producers are going to have plenty of material to work with.
For some, the appeal of visiting the Big Apple is the ritzy restaurants, shows on Broadway or a peek at the New York skyline from atop the Empire State building. But when it comes down to it, your age and personal interests are clearly the deciding factors.
One recent visitor to America’s biggest city certainly wasn’t overwhelmed despite the fact she was about to meet one of the world’s most famous movie and TV stars and appear with him on a television story.
Oh no, for 10 year old Zoe Campbell It wasn’t meeting celebrity movie and TV star, Michael J. Fox, or appearing on television, that turned out to be best thing about going to New York. It was meeting another kid.
Zoe flew to New York with her father, Clyde Campbell, Sydney businessman and founder of the Shake It Up Parkinson Disease Foundation, to be part of Channel Seven’s Sunday Night program. It will feature an interview with Fox (who has Parkinson's) and the work Shake It Up is doing in Australia to find a cure.
Clyde was diagnosed with the disease a couple of years ago and set up the Foundation, to partner with Michael J. Fox in a global medical research effort.
The real fun for Zoe was meeting one of Fox’s four children, Esme, who was the same age as her. Clyde told me when Seven’s reporter, Rahni Sadler, introduced her to Michael, Zoe was able to name Back to the Future as one of his films because she’d just seen it on the plane going over.
Michael J Fox, Zoe and dad Clyde.
Zoe and Esme got on like old mates and had a lot of fun together while dad and Michael talked about more serious things.
Seven’s program airs this Sunday night (18 March).
The research work by the Shake It Up Foundation in Australia to find a cure takes its next big step after Sunday, calling for Parkinson’s Disease patients to be part of a global research program.
The Shake It Up Foundation, together with Macquarie Neurology at Macquarie University in Sydney, is ready to accept enquiries from Monday from patients with recent diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease into the Australian medical research trials.
More detail about the study is on the MJFF and Macqaurie Neurology websites. You can learn more about Shake It Up and make a donation here.
It’s a blip in the scheme of things but a clear case of Do As I Say, Not Do As I Do. I’m talking about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ticking off of a journalist at her Adelaide media conference this morning.
Press Gallery journalists rightfully praised Gillard for giving one of her strongest performances ever in front of a media throng. That was until the final moments when The Australian’s Michael Owen asked about her role in the downfall of Kevin Rudd.
"So you just fell into the leadership?" he said at one stage – and kept going. Her response showed what not to do in front of an otherwise benign media pack.
"I’ll answer your question but, ah, just ... I’m not listening to this rudeness, I’ll answer your question and then I’ll give a question to your colleague, thank you very much... “I’m not going have you just speak to me like this. End of sentence. I’ll answer your question and I will take a question from your colleague.
"Your question is internally inconsistent. Let me answer it...well, I’ll answer it thanks very much... If you stop talking then I’ll give you an answer, but I can’t give you an answer if you keep talking.”
The appearance of Angry Julia not-so-deft sidestepping an issue might have been a play aimed at presenting her as a PM with renewed authority, but went dangerously close to portraying her as out of control.
That the reporter has since apologised doesn't quarantine footage fo the incident making the nightly news.
It wasn't quite on the scale of K Rudd’s Unhappy Little Vegemite YouTube video, mind you, but it's still not a good look.
At Lighthouse, we use media training to enable clients to handle questions exactly like this. So here's some free advice.
The most graceful response is to pause, stay silent until the questioner has run out of steam, acknowledge the question and answer or re-direct it, on your own terms.
Remember, it’s a reporter’s job to ask hard questions and probe. Ripping strips off them just distracts from the messages you were trying to convey.
The Australia Day melee in Canberra is the gift that keeps on giving for PR and political junkies. Gillard media adviser Troy Hodges did what any political operative must – he took a bullet for his boss.
This isn’t suggesting the PM was a party to the chain of misinformation that provoked activists to lay siege to The Lobby restaurant. It’s just an observation that the public and media storm determined that a head had to roll. Hodges committed hari kari.
Many people would be unaware that political advisers from both sides routinely tip media to unfolding stories with the intention of reportage favouring their side. It's the way the game is played and sometimes this extends to events of public disorder.
In this case, Hodges pushed the envelope by indirectly inflaming a protest at an event where his boss was in attendance. If the protest hadn’t been so ugly nobody would have noticed and Hodges wouldn’t be looking for a job.
TV loves colour and movement and the footage of Julia Gillard being keel-hauled into her Commonwealth car will be a defining moment of her leadership.
It will be filed next to Mark Latham’s bonecrusher campaign handshake...
The difficulties Tiger Airways find themselves in have been compounded on a few fronts, three to do with PR but all of their own making.
The absence of a senior spokesperson from much of the media coverage when the Civil Aviation Authority grounded them made the embattled budget carrier look like it was unable or unwilling to act.
The resignation of the CEO should be the catalyst for further decisive action but don't hold your breath.
Selling tickets online to customers without appropriate warnings when it wasn't apparent if and when Tiger would fly again was a breathtaking act. Few companies take on the ACCC head-on.
Tiger's already battered public image also says something about the impact of reality TV.
If you missed it, Tiger took the plunge to be the focus of the "Airways" program, a local version of a long-running UK series. Here's a taste for how that panned out.
Tiger might have five percent of the Australian market but the enduring images in most peoples' minds is of an airline with frazzled staff and long lines of unhappy or oddball passengers. The happy customers don't make for good TV.
Reality TV is a useful channel for reaching people but you really have to wonder if Tiger Air knew what they were getting themselves into.
All of this suggests that if this drags on, this might be a story that's replicated in Australia before too long.
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