Taylor Swift, remember this moment. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow morning, the world wakes up and says a collective, “Taylor who?”. Call your label, fire your publicist and put Kanye West on payroll; your career (which is notably already big) just blew up.
If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the clip (until Viacom, in their infinite wisdom takes it down).
Let’s get the the obvious out of the way
- You should not invite Kanye West over to dinner.
- Taylor Swift is a nice person and a talented artist. She is also a professional entertainer.
- Kanye West understands promotion and publicity.
- MTV, music videos, awards shows and record labels center around one thing; money
MTV knows Controversy.
MTV is a publicity machine, built from the ground up to promote artists and make money. Anyone remember Nipplegate? Poor Janet, her dress fell off. Its a good thing that only happened on television, with no social internet around. If Twitter had been around then, boy, that would have sure been embarrassing for her.
MTV knows social media
Is it a coincidence that this happened on the same year that MTV emphasized Twitter as a vehicle of promoting the events of the evening? Just a total fluke that they hired iJustine to live-tweet the event and educate the masses about #vma hashtags? That they worked alongside Radian 6 to create a social measurement tool that captures the buzz about the performers and award winners? Maybe. Probably not, but maybe.
Controversy is Currency. Emotions Are The Final Frontier
This is not a conspiracy theory post. Was it a setup? Who cares. Does it translate into serious money for everyone involved? Certainly.
We live in a world where channels are infinite, and attention is increasingly fractured. And yet because of technology and the social connection that it enables, the value of even a shred of our attention is skyrocketing. We live in a world of “what are you doing, watching, caring about”. Whether we like it or not, we are continually subjected to whatever is capturing the attention of those around us. Attention is the ultimate peer-to-peer phenomenon.
Simultaneous with the number of channels vying for attention, our sensitivity to attention-requests has also decreased. It used to be that filling a need was the key to our hearts; give us something we need and we’ll give you our attention. We used to all want money until Nigerian Princes offered it to us. We used to all want better jobs until we saw how easy it was to work from home. We used to all want to be skinny and please women until cheap pills overflowed our inboxes.
Emotions are the last frontier of marketing; make us happy and we’ll love you, make us angry and we’ll step up on our soapboxes and tell the world. We are all emotional, passionate billboards.
Curiosity is King
Who is Taylor Swift? Who is Kanye West? What is this controversy everyone is talking about? If the information was hard to find, all this publicity might not be worth much. We’d read about it in the paper, see it on the news, hear about it around the water cooler and then move along. It would simply be too difficult for that information to immediately translate into anything of value to us. By the time you started telling people about the story, you would have forgotten the names of those involved. By the time you made it to a record store, your curiosity would have waned and you’d pass the innocent country singer and the abrasive rapper without feeling any remorse.
Google Trends Screenshot of Kanye West, Taylor Swift VMA Controversy
Information is now instant and overflowing. We don’t need to know the whole story. We don’t even need to know how to spell the words correctly! We just need to see a flurry of attention, hear a few heated words that drop the same names and Google does the rest.
“What happened to Taylor Swift?”
Kanye dissed her, want to hear their music? See some pictures? Buy some tickets? Become a fan on facebook?
It’s all instant. And powerful. Every tweet, click, bookmark and purchase drives the machine faster. The same way pundits were able to predict US election results based on search engine queries, you can be sure that Taylor Swift will be sitting atop the iTunes and Amazon charts by morning – and Kanye won’t be far behind. Remember what we said about attention, curiosity and instantaneous satisfaction?
Are Taylor’s feelings hurt? Maybe. Is Kanye sorry for what he did? Probably not. Was it all a conspiracy? A set up? VMA WWF? It really doesn’t matter. Attention. Emotion. Curiosity. Click. Buy. They laugh all the way to the bank, as the machine whirs quietly in the background.