The ManicaPost
OSCAR Pistorius isn’t quite human. He hasn’t been for a while. As fame turned the “Blade Runner” into a marketable commodity, his legs became a logo, his mouth became a media channel, and Pistorius the man morphed into Pistorius the brand. A chiselled symbol of triumph-against-adversity with a million-dollar smile and multimillion-dollar endorsements. Then, in 2013 on Valentine’s Day, that symbol of triumph-against-adversity shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.
But then men might violently kill their girlfriends, but brands don’t. Brands suffer regrettable reputational events. These tend to result in serious financial loss that then catalyses public relations activity.
All of which is not to imply that the buzz around Pistorius’s sudden social media activity, which comes just three days after his defence team closed its case in his trial, and amid controversy around his involvement in an altercation at a nightclub, is calculated public relations activity.
Nevertheless, a PR storm has been raised by Pistorius’s choosing, after months of silence, to suddenly tweet religious messages, a collage of pictures of him posing with amputee children, and a passage from Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.
Though it may not be available to Pistorius, who has the complication of ongoing legal proceedings to deal with, there is a pretty standard apology/absence/atonement formula when it comes to celebrity image repair.
Apologise — fast and preferably on Oprah. Suffer, but not in silence. Then absent yourself for a number of months, usually in rehab or with your family. Return reinvented, armed with a new charity, a new religion, or other such accoutrements of atonement. Tiger Woods applied this formula with almost scientific precision after controversy about his extramarital affairs in 2009.
He took the blame quickly, left golf to “be a better husband and focus on his family” and largely disappeared for three months. He returned to public life gradually and rebuilt his reputation.
Search for Tiger Woods on Google and articles about his golf come up before articles about his PR disasters. What Google says about you has become an important part of celebrity brand management in a digital age, and some celebrities are now seeking out agencies who can help them game the Google algorithm so that past transgressions are buried in the depths of internet history, and associate their name primarily to good-news results.
More murkily, PR agencies have also been known to perform “paid advocacy editing”, a technical term for “shamelessly lying on your client’s Wikipedia page”.
The construction of modern celebrity has created a worrying blur between a brand and a person. Indeed, the extent to which the image of a man can become more important than the living person can be seen in how Paul Walker, who died last year, lives on in his Twitter avatar. The Fast & Furious star died last year but his official profile, is still being updated.
A celebrity’s image isn’t a reflection of who they are as a person; it’s a fiction based on who the public believes they can be. Take Mark Wahlberg, for example, who is well known for underwear modelling, TV producing, and roles in movies like The Departed. What he’s not so well known for is his time in prison as an adolescent for a racially motivated assault on a Vietnamese man, which left the victim blind in one eye. It’s a pretty shocking rap sheet, but it doesn’t appear to have hurt Wahlberg’s subsequent career.
In fact, earlier this year the actor hosted the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. You see, while human lives might be irrevocably ruined, images can usually be repaired. — The Guardian
