The puffing up of Vice Media, Succession’s sports-style interview strategy, a deluge of IPL broadcast records, concerts by the famous for the rich, and AI’s Waluigi Effect all feature in this week’s Trippant Takeaways — our selection of stories on communications trends in sport, tech, entertainment and media.
The FT on private equity and the fall of Vice Media
When Vice Media, one of the business darlings of the 2010s internet, filed for bankruptcy in May, it was viewed as the end of an online era — both culturally and commercially.
But as the Financial Times explains, it is also the story of how private equity’s worst excesses can warp and distort public perceptions of value and a whole industry’s direction of travel.
The Ringer on Succession’s post-game playbook
You may have heard something about the finale of an HBO TV series over the weekend.
The last episode of corporate tragicomedy Succession aired on Sunday to ecstatic reviews and a now-familiar avalanche reaction features and dedicated podcasts. Over the course of the show’s five-year, four-season existence, HBO has picked up on this appetite for digestive analysis — feeding the cycle by offering up actors and writers for sports-style post-game interviews every week.
SportsPro on the IPL’s massive media year
After a day and a half of rain delays, the 2023 edition of cricket’s Indian Premier League reached its own spectacular conclusion on Monday. Chennai Super Kings all-rounder Ravi Jadeja scored ten runs off the last two balls of the tournament to snatch the title from the Gujarat Titans.
It was a suitably box-office finish to a season that had obliterated league media records in the first year of a $6.2 billion set of broadcast deals. The loss of digital streaming rights to Viacom18 had global ramifications for Disney+ but in India itself, the traditional TV output generated a big return for Disney Star.
Sanjog Gupta, the network’s head of sport, told SportsPro editorial director Michael Long about a game-changing campaign.
Fast Company on an ‘underwhelming’ Fifa World Cup logo
The organisers of the next men’s Fifa World Cup — set to take place across the US, Canada and Mexico in 2026 — have released the official tournament logo to a decidedly muted response.
It is a launch that underscores how difficult it is to land a visual identity that is both compelling and flexible enough for an event of this breadth and scale, while also pointing to the wider brand challenges that currently face football’s global governing body.
The Drum on Oatly’s self-reproaching strategy
A few weeks ago, breakout oat milk brand Oatly decided to tell on itself with FckOatly.com, a website detailing popular online campaigns against its practices.
The campaign is intended to neutralise its critics by engaging with controversy head-on as reframing it as the cost of doing business more sustainably. But is its self-conscious snark making the right impact?
The New Yorker on pop copyright and private concerts
These continue to be interesting times for the music business and for artists trying to make a living from it, and twin pieces from the New Yorker this week explore trends at the fringes of recording and performance.
First, John Seabrook reflects on an unsuccessful recent copyright infringement lawsuit against Ed Sheeran, which raises new questions about the ownership of ideas in music authorship at the dawn of the generative AI era.
Then Evan Osnos steps into the wild world of high-end private concerts, where megastars like Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Flo Rida and Andrea Bocelli command seven and eight-figure fees to appear in front of small audiences of extremely wealthy people.
Wired on the ‘Waluigi Effect’ in AI
Fears about the dangers of overdeveloping or misapplying artificial intelligence were aired again this week as experts including the leaders of OpenAI and Google DeepMind supported a statement from the Center for AI Safety warning of its ‘existential threat’.
Elsewhere in the AI community, engineers are already grappling with how to contain the potentially chaotic effects of letting existing systems loose on the expanses of the internet. They have taken to calling any unintended consequences the ‘Waluigi Effect’, after the dark alter ego of Super Mario’s younger brother.
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