The Fun of Public Outrage

For most of your life you are going to be regarded as 'the public.' It's quite depressing to think that no matter how much you try and define your life you're still going to be grouped into such a diverse range of people, but it's true. No matter what you do, someone will always look at you as someone who can provide the thing they crave: public opinion.

The risk with using the public to provide an opinion is that you can never really predict what they're going to say.

Take the highly original, totally unscripted show that is The X Factor, for example. Last night the bird with the BEST VOICE, THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD BLOODY SING got voted out. Fury took over social media like crabs take over the local bike. People were incredulous. Death threats were made. Thousands vowed never to watch the show again.

However, it was those very same people who made the decision to kick her out. Whether that had been through voting for someone else or just not voting at all, it was still partly their fault that she left the competition. Who, in that case, were they angry against? Do The X Factor want someone who can't sing to win and make their show a joke? No, of course not, they'd quite like for the one with the talent to still be in it, but that's the game they play by letting the dirty, unwashed public masses decide.

Girl's got pipes.

The risks with this approach don't stop with 'talent' shows either. While reality TV thrives on the viewers involvement, advertising can and has survived for years without it. Only now with the rise in social media (wooo!) does it open itself up to other people having an opinion more than just choosing whether or not to buy a product. Lots of campaigns have even gone out of their way to attract such an opinion, with McDonald's and Mercedes Benz being just a couple of brands who have asked for comments via hashtags on Twitter. More recently M&S tried to get people chatting about their store by offering a prize out to anyone who could name any of the songs in their new terrible Christmas ad. Not only did their TV presence lack any imagination, but their social campaign caused a stream of really dull, boring tweets just saying song names. Yawn. There's a hashtag no-one will ever look at again (for 'no-one' read 'I'.)

So is this fear of public reaction limiting the creative thought brands put in to social media campaigns? Is it better to play safe, like M&S, and more easily be able to predict the response? Or should more people take a gamble and try something new? Personally I'm bored of seeing a product shot in a Facebook update or a cheesy tagline used in a hashtag. 

I'm also bored of people voting for f*cking Rylan on The X Factor. Sort it out, humanity, before I have to sort you.

You made this happen.