Elvis sings for the BBC: broadcast branding and digital media design
Paul Grainge
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 45
DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350097
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Introduction
In the autumn of 2006, Elvis came back from the dead and appeared ‘live’ on British television screens. This took the form of a brand promotion, aired on the BBC, designed to make audiences sit up and marvel. Using archival footage, the promotion featured a concert performance by Elvis Presley, focusing on the moment when, with characteristic stage presence, he introduces his band. Inexplicably, the band comprises the contemporary girl-group the Sugarbabes on backing vocals, Marvin Gaye on vocal accompaniment, Jimmy Page on lead guitar, Noel Gallagher on rhythm guitar, Keith Moon on drums, Sheryl Crow on bass guitar and ‘the legendary’ Stevie Wonder on piano. The concert footage appears as if pulled from the vaults, specifically as a lost encore from Elvis’ 1973 Aloha from Hawaii television special. Resplendent in his white jumpsuit, Elvis gestures and jokes with his band members; he even smiles wryly when interrupted by an impromptu drum solo by Keith Moon. Playing to a rapturous crowd, the atmosphere of the event is tangible. With introductions complete, and a camera shot of Elvis looking into the glaring stage lights, the sequence ends with the strapline: ‘What an amazing line up’. This is underlined by the brand message ‘all day, every day’ and a closing shot of the station logo of BBC Radio 2, the UK’s ‘most listened to’ radio station.
While ephemeral in its life as a promotional text – appearing briefly within television and cinema advertising before developing a more extended life on YouTube – Radio 2’s Elvis promotion is suggestive of two related developments in contemporary media culture that I want to explore in this article. Primarily, it offers a paradigm of ‘brandcasting’, the attempt by public broadcasters such as the BBC to project their brand identity in more dynamic and tactile ways to meet the demands of a competitive, multi-channel environment. Second, it is emblematic of a style of promotional design that is partly encouraged by the remix proclivities of YouTube and is reliant on the digital assemblage and appropriation of found-footage. In each respect, the Elvis ad articulates key tendencies within industrial and textual media practice in the 2000s. It highlights the performance of brand identity and, with it, the role of the specialized digital media companies that produce onscreen logos and promos. At the same time, as a form of techno-spectacle, it provides an especially telling instance of contemporary ‘digitextuality’, what Anna Everett describes as: ‘the technological process whereby digital fabrications function as real-time experience of a sort to overcome not only time and space, but life and death’ (2003: 10).
While branding imperatives have been discussed as part of broad developments in the contemporary film and television industry (Grainge, 2008a; Johnson, 2007; Murray, 2005), less attention has been paid to the aesthetics of brand logos or to the specialist companies that give life to promotional texts. In critical terms, John Caldwell argues that secondary symbolic forms such as logos, promos, trailers and channel idents provide a rich source for understanding contemporary industrial and audiovisual culture. The Elvis ad is suggestive here; it is an example of what Caldwell terms a ‘deep text’ (2008: 26). This describes an artefact of production culture that functions as a ‘mediated, textualized and produced form of trade communication’ (2008: 26) by media industries about the nature of corporate media identity and aesthetics. Made by a digital media company called Red Bee Media, the Elvis ad is a curious visual object: a radio promotion made as a television ad using an aesthetic reminiscent of a YouTube video
Paul Grainge
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 45
DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350097
Introduction
In the autumn of 2006, Elvis came back from the dead and appeared ‘live’ on British television screens. This took the form of a brand promotion, aired on the BBC, designed to make audiences sit up and marvel. Using archival footage, the promotion featured a concert performance by Elvis Presley, focusing on the moment when, with characteristic stage presence, he introduces his band. Inexplicably, the band comprises the contemporary girl-group the Sugarbabes on backing vocals, Marvin Gaye on vocal accompaniment, Jimmy Page on lead guitar, Noel Gallagher on rhythm guitar, Keith Moon on drums, Sheryl Crow on bass guitar and ‘the legendary’ Stevie Wonder on piano. The concert footage appears as if pulled from the vaults, specifically as a lost encore from Elvis’ 1973 Aloha from Hawaii television special. Resplendent in his white jumpsuit, Elvis gestures and jokes with his band members; he even smiles wryly when interrupted by an impromptu drum solo by Keith Moon. Playing to a rapturous crowd, the atmosphere of the event is tangible. With introductions complete, and a camera shot of Elvis looking into the glaring stage lights, the sequence ends with the strapline: ‘What an amazing line up’. This is underlined by the brand message ‘all day, every day’ and a closing shot of the station logo of BBC Radio 2, the UK’s ‘most listened to’ radio station.
While ephemeral in its life as a promotional text – appearing briefly within television and cinema advertising before developing a more extended life on YouTube – Radio 2’s Elvis promotion is suggestive of two related developments in contemporary media culture that I want to explore in this article. Primarily, it offers a paradigm of ‘brandcasting’, the attempt by public broadcasters such as the BBC to project their brand identity in more dynamic and tactile ways to meet the demands of a competitive, multi-channel environment. Second, it is emblematic of a style of promotional design that is partly encouraged by the remix proclivities of YouTube and is reliant on the digital assemblage and appropriation of found-footage. In each respect, the Elvis ad articulates key tendencies within industrial and textual media practice in the 2000s. It highlights the performance of brand identity and, with it, the role of the specialized digital media companies that produce onscreen logos and promos. At the same time, as a form of techno-spectacle, it provides an especially telling instance of contemporary ‘digitextuality’, what Anna Everett describes as: ‘the technological process whereby digital fabrications function as real-time experience of a sort to overcome not only time and space, but life and death’ (2003: 10).
While branding imperatives have been discussed as part of broad developments in the contemporary film and television industry (Grainge, 2008a; Johnson, 2007; Murray, 2005), less attention has been paid to the aesthetics of brand logos or to the specialist companies that give life to promotional texts. In critical terms, John Caldwell argues that secondary symbolic forms such as logos, promos, trailers and channel idents provide a rich source for understanding contemporary industrial and audiovisual culture. The Elvis ad is suggestive here; it is an example of what Caldwell terms a ‘deep text’ (2008: 26). This describes an artefact of production culture that functions as a ‘mediated, textualized and produced form of trade communication’ (2008: 26) by media industries about the nature of corporate media identity and aesthetics. Made by a digital media company called Red Bee Media, the Elvis ad is a curious visual object: a radio promotion made as a television ad using an aesthetic reminiscent of a YouTube video
In corporate terms, it serves to ‘mediate’ the BBC’s brand identity (more specifically that of BBC Radio 2) in relation to the new interchangeability of digital media. In doing so, the ad ‘textualizes’ developments in film and video production, making a song and dance of the BBC brand by using the latest digital technologies and aesthetic styles. Striking in this last respect is the sudden and spellbinding feat of bringing Elvis back from the dead.
Describing the means by which digital image manipulation helps to ‘seamlessly construct enthralling diegetic images’ (2003: 10), Anna Everett considers the way that, in one contemporary sub-genre, archival images of the deceased interact with those still living, a spectral fabrication that has been especially apparent in the form and selling of music/television. While the conceit of having music stars perform ‘beyond the grave’ was developed in the early 1990s, Natalie Cole famously singing ‘Unforgettable’ with her deceased father Nat King Cole in a 1991 music video, advancements in digital compositing and effects technology enabled a number of hypermediated television events in the 2000s that saw Robbie Williams sing with Frank Sinatra in Live at the Royal Albert Hall (BBC, 2001), Celine Dion duet with Elvis Presley on a charity episode of American Idol (Fox, 2007) and a range of contemporary British pop acts perform with the superimposed images of Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield and Peggy Lee in a BBC Christmas special called Duet Impossible (2006). While these digital resurrections were something of a fad, a vehicle for showing off new kinds of technological wizardry, they do ask questions about the role of new media technologies in re-imagining cultural and audiovisual temporalities. In connecting ‘off-screen industrial activities with on-screen stylistic tendencies’ (Caldwell, 2008: 274), I want to use the Elvis ad to open out perspectives on the current branding and broadcast environment, investigating, through a prismatic case example, the creative design and corporate function of promotional texts within the recent history of the BBC.
Concluding Remarks
In representational terms, the Elvis ad is symptomatic of a media sensibility developing in relation to the ‘spatialization of audiovisual culture’ (Straw, 2007: 11). Will Straw associates this with the enormous storage capacities of media technologies like the videocassette, CD, DVD and especially the internet. He suggests that new storage media have led to the piling up of cultural artefacts (texts, images, sounds, objects, technologies) the random availability of which has engendered a situation where ‘the circuits of cultural reference that bind one artifact to another reverse chronologies or cross sequences of development in a way that muddies any sense of historical time’ (2007: 11).
This has implications for what Amy Holdsworth calls ‘medium-specific interrogations of memory’ (2008: 138). In a world of archival and semiotic abundance, memory has become subject to renewable configurations and articulations within the cultural terrain. If ‘new technologies have consistently rendered the past more richly variegated and dense’ (Straw, 2007: 12), media corporations like the BBC have sought to translate this density for its own corporate ends. Through promos like the Elvis ad, the BBC has projected an archival imaginary that reflects an institutional moment where the Corporation’s broadcasting past – especially its back-catalogue of television and radio programmes – has become a newly significant asset accessible because of the changes brought about by digitization, DVD and online archives.
With radio adjusting to new technologies such as DAB, iPods and on-demand listening, and with plans to create a homepage for every BBC TV and radio programme ever made (Gibson, 2008a), it is perhaps unsurprising that the BBC should develop a brand promotion that marries an aesthetic of liveness and the archive. According to Jenny Abramsky, director of audio and music at the BBC between 1999 and 2008, ‘if radio didn’t go digital, it would eventually die a long, slow death’ (Gibson, 2008b: 2). Like the ‘Perfect Day’ video in 1997, the Elvis ad captures a particular moment in the BBC’s contemporary broadcasting and brand history. Through remix promotion, the ad is a network performance that embodies the challenge, in Abramsky’s words, of getting people ‘to fall in love with radio’ (Gibson, 2008b: 1) on terms that befit and anticipate a multiplatform future.
It has not been my intention to provide a full account of the dawn of digital radio (Crisell, 2002) or the history of the medium’s visualization (Griffiths, 2007). Instead, I have used the Elvis ad to bring to light a number of interrelated developments in the contemporary branding and broadcast environment – specifically, the projection of network personality in the multichannel era, the (often overlooked) function of digital media companies in the brand/design process, and the operational and ontological transition of companies like the BBC towards a world of digital content provision. Understood as a ‘deep text’, the Elvis ad reveals embedded attitudes, practices and ideologies within contemporary production and promotional culture. To borrow from John Caldwell, it demonstrates:
With radio adjusting to new technologies such as DAB, iPods and on-demand listening, and with plans to create a homepage for every BBC TV and radio programme ever made (Gibson, 2008a), it is perhaps unsurprising that the BBC should develop a brand promotion that marries an aesthetic of liveness and the archive. According to Jenny Abramsky, director of audio and music at the BBC between 1999 and 2008, ‘if radio didn’t go digital, it would eventually die a long, slow death’ (Gibson, 2008b: 2). Like the ‘Perfect Day’ video in 1997, the Elvis ad captures a particular moment in the BBC’s contemporary broadcasting and brand history. Through remix promotion, the ad is a network performance that embodies the challenge, in Abramsky’s words, of getting people ‘to fall in love with radio’ (Gibson, 2008b: 1) on terms that befit and anticipate a multiplatform future.
It has not been my intention to provide a full account of the dawn of digital radio (Crisell, 2002) or the history of the medium’s visualization (Griffiths, 2007). Instead, I have used the Elvis ad to bring to light a number of interrelated developments in the contemporary branding and broadcast environment – specifically, the projection of network personality in the multichannel era, the (often overlooked) function of digital media companies in the brand/design process, and the operational and ontological transition of companies like the BBC towards a world of digital content provision. Understood as a ‘deep text’, the Elvis ad reveals embedded attitudes, practices and ideologies within contemporary production and promotional culture. To borrow from John Caldwell, it demonstrates:
… the extent to which textual production – and the analysis of texts by industry – stand simultaneously as corporate strategies, as forms of cultural and economic capital integral to media professional communities, and as the means by which contemporary media industries work to rationalize their operations in an era of great institutional instability. (Caldwell, 2006: 102)
Memorable for its found-footage chutzpah, the Elvis ad also, more pointedly, signifies a moment in which corporate media brands such as the BBC are responding deliberately and reflexively to a situation where concepts of media time and space, present and past, liveness and the archive, have become, if not entirely revolutionized, then at least, as the King would have it, ‘all shook up’.
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