On the occasion of the Melbourne Cup

Note for non-Australians: The Melbourne Cup is, believe it or not, a horse race that the whole nation stops to watch. It occurs on the first Tuesday in November each year. It is to Australia as the Superbowl is to the USA in terms of sporting popularity.

Our live coverage begins at 6am on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox and finishes sometime after the promise of that day is fulfilled.

The event itself, like so many other “events” that are subjected to live coverage, takes about 3 minutes and is, apart from the difficulty the horses have running on a track packed with Steadicams and journalists on horseback, no different from any other horse-race. It has the obligatory Fisher-Price colour schemes on the jockeys, the repeated sense of disbelief that the bloke whose job it is to drag the horses into the little boxes has escaped with his life again and the incomprehensible commentary delivered by that one guy who apparently calls every horse race in the world.

I’m pretty sure that bloke, let’s call him Ken, is making it up, by the way. The horses and jockeys are about three leagues away and bunched so tight that the static from the shirts makes them cling together like polystyrene balls. There’s no way known that Ken could pick What a Nuisance from Rogan Josh outside of Makybe Diva then a long length back to Americain and then Eclectic, Stupid and Downright Loopy bringing up the rear.

(The first four in that list were real Melbourne Cup winners).

It’s all just an excuse, in any case, to trot out the awe and majesty that is “live coverage” – which is another way of saying “a chance to bleed some sponsors anaemic for advertising spots”. And there’s no shortage of leeches, sorry “opportunities” to attach your brand to something that is, itself attached, to something that is tangentially related to the event. Only amateurs stop at naming rights for the event itself. What you can buy rights to is limited only by your imagination. There’s the action replay sponsor, the wardrobe sponsor, the track sponsor, the drinks partner, the official airline and the IT systems provider. Go further with the telecast coffee mug sponsor, the port-a-loo provider and the closely related purveyors of certified organic fresh air and environmentally friendly oxygen.

Live coverage also provides an unparalleled opportunity to flog merchandise. After all , the heavily made up anchors with the wired-on smiles and the puppeteer’s hand probably inserted somewhere uncomfortable, have to talk about something hour after hour – they might as well be making some money in the process. Again, take some good LSD and the merchandising opportunities will just flow into your mind.  Mural sized framed prints of every winner since 1861 (designed to sit in your garage until you die because there’s nowhere big enough your wife will let you hang it) , genuine lapel badges that are authentically badge-like and really designed to be worn in your lapel, collector’s edition hankies that the winning jockey used to wipe his brow after training sessions and, if you can guess the weight correctly, a bag of manure from last year’s winner– guaranteed to make your roses a cup winner every time!

I am, however, becoming highly suspicious of the ability of news networks to get people on the ground at the speed they do to run these live coverage extravaganzas. Wherever something is happening, whatever it is, there’s always a journalist there with a microphone and a camera and presumably a technical support crew, makeup artist and coffee van. Unless they’ve invested in some military grade, double bladed helicopters, these guys’ ability to get there is uncanny to the point of unbelievable; which makes me think that these guys are creating the news and suggests the question “Why aren’t they doing a better job of it?”

Really, if you were going to create events and disasters just for the cameras, surely you could make sure they were a bit more photogenic and get some more sponsorship dollars from them. Could companies not be talked into having naming rights to the catastrophe?  They had a go in Germany a couple of years ago and VW had a storm named “Cooper” after one of its car models. Fair enough, the storm did go on to kill 100 people, but the brand was on everyone’s lips for weeks. You have to be Miley Cyrus to get that kind of exposure these days!

The recent Sydney bushfires were an example of a badly handled production. We were on the cusp of a “mega-fire”. Good naming, good branding and great preview material. Then some clowns went and put the fire out. Who’s producing this show? Who’s writing the script? Let the thing go, get a house-burnt-down tally in the thousands then generate revenue in spin-off coverage of the recriminations that follow. Geez people!

Tropical Cyclone Yasi was another case of “live coverage” being produced by the work-experience kid. The storm covered five degrees of latitude when it crossed the north Queensland coast in the early hours of 3 February 2011 and yet, the anchor sent to Cairns to cover the event, was left standing awkwardly in front of a placid harbour with lights twinkling across water you’d be happy to be seen drinking champagne in front of when the storm missed entirely. To his credit, he wore his raincoat throughout the event and hooked in some local kids to spray him with a hose every so often but it still wasn’t anything like what it could have been.

Here are a few tips to running a successful rolling coverage show:

Have a news ticker – that little headline banner thing that runs across the bottom of the screen. It could show football scores, stock market prices and pithy calendar quotes if you need to but nothing says “urgent” and “now” like a news ticker.

Partner your key anchor with a “facts guy” off to one side. He needs to have at least two laptops in front of him and be seen in shot, from time to time, taking mobile phone calls. The first thing out of his mouth at each cross should be “Yes, I can confirm that …” It makes your anchor look smart – even though he was fed his “speculation” from the same guy - and makes it look like you’re at the nerve centre of events. Just don’t show anyone what’s actually on the screens of those laptops.

Make some technical mistakes. Have the audio drop out during one or two of your live crosses, cross to the wrong person … that kind of thing. You’re there in the fast-changing, do-or-die, gritty “now” of the situation; no-one expects you to be perfect and the audience feels a lot more connected to the unfolding crisis when reality bites like this.

Find some bogans to be the vox populi. You don’t want to be interviewing real people who are intelligent or articulate – who can separate observed fact from emotional overreaction or hysteria. Your audience is being kept tuned in by feeling like they’re part of the tragedy unfolding so find someone to feed their need for vicarious excitement; someone who’ll cry on cue or someone who can scream a little in that girly way at the overwhelming joy of it all. In a tragic situation, you want someone middle aged, over-weight and posed against a sombre background with some photos of relatives (who cares whose relatives) somewhere in shot; someone the viewers can thank God that they’re not. For something like the Melbourne Cup, you want early 30s women – still attractive – wearing clothes that look slightly but are not really all that expensive; people the viewers can relate to. Go too young, too attractive or too rich here and you’ll make your viewers feel inadequate and not in the mood to buy your sponsors’ stuff.

Note there’s nothing here about having a story worth taking up people’s valuable time on this rock. Frankly it doesn’t really matter. Provided you leave people feeling that they’re at the centre of something important, no-one cares what it’s actually about. Get a good producer, some photogenic anchors and new ticker and you can milk ad spots every fifteen minutes for eight hours out of three minutes of incomprehensible gibberish and a 24kg bag of pedigree horse crap.