COLUMNISTS Andy Warhol said that in future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. He was wrong. In future everyone will be in their own 15-minute webcast. But no one will watch it.
Business leaders will feature significantly in this trend, which is supported by faster PC processing speeds and broadening telecommunications bandwidth. They have the budget and rationale to pay for promotional webcasts. And, most importantly, they have the egos needed to star in them.
Executive blogging was heavily promoted by technology pundits, but never really caught on in the UK. In contrast, corporate home movies are proliferating on the web. Their advantage is that they require little additional effort from bosses. Often the camera only captures what the boss would be doing anyway. Presenting results, for example.
In the simplest manifestation of the genre, a single camera is trained on a podium where the executive stands. Eye contact with the lens will be rare. His tie may be askew. Graphs and bullet points will intermittently flash up on screen. It is all rather reminiscent of 1970s Open University science programming.
Such webcasts do, however, give the viewer a fleeting impression of a boss’s personality, which a results statement rarely does. Tony Hayward of BP, for example, comes across like a groovy physics lecturer when presenting his numbers to analysts. The head of a well-known bank is meanwhile fervent in extolling “the continued robustness of the diversified funding platform”. He would be more convincing if Northern Rock had not run out of cash soon after the recording was made. Adam Applegarth’s webcast lingers on in cyberspace, a ghost of his good intentions.
Some businesses reveal nervousness over the new medium by offering only audio and stills. For instance, Northern Foods allows websurfers to hear, but not see, chief executive Stefan Barden talking. Perhaps his performance is too sexy for the small screen, like that of the young Cliff Richard. Instead, an arty black and white photo of Mr Barden alternates surreally with colour shots of spaghetti and similar comestibles.
Other organisations have, in contrast, embraced webcasting passionately. The website of the Institute of Engineering and Technology warehouses enough low-cost content to keep a repeats channel supplied for years. In one static-camera webcast “from Michael Faraday House, Stevenage”, Robin McGill, chief executive, talks for 37 minutes about such topics as the institute’s bylaws. A home video of a family camping trip to Wales is electrifying in comparison. In another IET web clip, an official heralds “the 17th edition of the EU wiring regulations” in the barely controlled tones of a Bloomsbury Publishing executive announcing a new Harry Potter.
Some companies pursue the more sophisticated approach of hiring a PR agency to shoot an interview with the chief executive. Here the supremo will field such Helloesque questions as: “What were the highs for you in today’s results statement?” These must come as a great relief after all that nit-picking from the analysts over the depreciation policy.
Bosses need pachydermous rinds to send themselves up on video, as Bill Gates recently did. Being the world’s second richest man bolsters a chap’s self-confidence. In a webclip marking his retirement from Microsoft, Mr Gates pulled such goofy stunts as putting a box of desk oddments on the roof of his Prius, then driving away with the box still on the roof! You can imagine the dutiful laughter among his managers when they first viewed this mirthfest.
One wonders where the webcast trend will end. Giving communications directors control of camera crews is a sure way to turn them into megalomaniacs. I foresee that corporate home movies will become progressively more elaborate and pretentious. I await the first film noir interpretation of a profits warning. Or a Leni Riefenstahl-inspired take on a trading update from a sports shoe maker.
That way madness lies. Chief executives would waste hours “on location”, waiting for the light to change or the rain to stop. Talented but incoherent businesspeople would be overtaken in the race for promotion by money honeys who performed well on screen. Women executives would be most exposed to the appearance-based discrimination already rampant within conventional broadcasting. Men would have greater immunity, as suggested by the success of the BBC’s Evan Davis and Nick Robinson, gifted communicators with faces that could adorn cathedral waterspouts. There’s hope for me yet.
It is necessary to mention in this self-referential context that the Financial Times is offering readers increasing volumes of video reports via FT.com. Business is the perfect example of a specialist market where internet-based video is a useful tool for reaching small, influential audiences.
But the medium has one big disadvantage. It is slow. A webclip lasting a couple of minutes may contain just 200 spoken words. You can read 1,000 words of text in the same time. A video can show you what sort of person the chief executive is. But for assessing what he or she has done, you need the full report and accounts, plus the press cuttings. In the beginning of mass communications was the printed word. It will remain crucial until the end, too.
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