The Director of Fun
Posted in Individualism, Politics on 25. Aug, 2009
D’aaaaw, isn’t that cute? A six year old applied to be “Diwector” of the National Railway Museum in York. He was only offered the new position of “Director of Fun” and obviously happy to accept the lesser appointment due to the economic situation.
Sam Pointon, I hope this whole exercise is a lot of fun for you and get to enjoy yourself.
But I’m going to talk about how this makes me sick to my stomach. First, watch the video in the BBC article. Now watch this.
You see, not only are they exploiting the cutesy factor of a six year old boy to act as the brand-padding to their “child-friendly” image, it’s not even an original marketing ploy.
And this gets down to the crux of the issue for me. Any of you who thought, “That’s so nice of the museum to do that” or “That museum is so child friendly”. Stop. This is what they want you to think. Is it nice for a museum to use a child to get column inches? We normally think these actions appalling when a celebrity does it, pushing their children around in the vain hope that it will get their picture in the glossy magazines.
Is the museum “child friendly”? Personally, I’m beginning to despise the term. But this story tells you nothing -- nothing -- about the policy, design or ethic that make this a child-friendly place. If it is being geared towards access for children, it’s more likely because there are 4 or 5 curators or education officers working damned hard to make it so.
You know what alerted me? How many six year olds do you know that post letters? This report may give the whole idea that it was the kid’s “application”, but come on, there are adults behind this. An adult would help him write it, and adult would have given him the stamp and told him how to address is (if this even happened at all), and adult read this and passed it onto someone who saw the marketing potential and an adult arranged the press releases.
From Culture 24: (Do you think Sam honestly had anything to do with this?)
Sam is taking his new appointment particularly seriously and is already canvassing the public for suggestions on how the NRM could be made more fun. If you have a suggestion for Sam and his team then you can fill in the online comments card.
Not so cute now, huh?
And one kid, just one, gets to act as poster child for a museum’s excellence with children and you all go “Awwww”. Suckers. You’ve allowed yourself to be completely taken in by a highly orchestrated event masked as a spur-of-the-moment altruistic occurrence. They didn’t show you the education officer dealing with 100 kids a day and getting industry based awards. They could have the best child-access-policy-whatever in the country that’s been made completely inauthentic because they showed you a kid in a tie being told to act like an advert.
There’s no such thing as “harmless PR”. I accept that every one of us at some point will tow the line or promote our bosses or say the marketing spiel to sell a little bit of our souls for the sake of hopefully benefiting the whole rather than the individual, but can we wait until they’re reaching voting age before you single one out to be your branding puppet? The misdirection was good in this but I can still see the strings. This boy is being used to increase visitor numbers.
I find that sad. Museumchausen by proxy.
I wonder who was behind this. I wonder if it was more a “marketing” person than a “museum” person. I would think the former because a marketing person is more likely to have the contacts/abilities to get BBC News to cover the story and I like to think a museum person wouldn’t be insensitive to the thousands of under-threat or laid-off museum workers by showing that a cute/marketable six year old can get job when you can’t.
Hopefully, Sam will get the authority of governance to remove someone when they’re not being fun enough.
It’s such a shame since kids are learning machines. It would have been a much better advert if it showed grown ups demonstrating the curiosity and passion of a seven year old, instead of the other way round.
Well said
Oh now I understand your cryptic twitter reply from yesterday or the other day!
This is a pretty weird story. I used to volunteer at the NRM, when I lived in York. Unfortunately, I don’t know who’s working in marketing at NRM (I could probably scratch my head and remember who’s doing that at other prominent York-based heritage orgs, though).
I’m afraid I cannot agree. Marketing is an essential part of a museum just as it is a part of any non-profit or for-profit venture. A museum engages in marketing every time it advertises its events, writes articles for the local paper, sends out newsletters or engages its community in any way. Often marketing within the museum community is done by happenstance rather than by design, and too often its marketing is done without regard to the institution or its audience. This is a cute story, and yup likely just one of thousands of programming events that the museum engages upon through its educational officers. Most people don’t want to read about the stats and policies regarding children, they want to know a personal story. This is similar in telling a story within the museum context itself. We give the artifact context in order for our visitors to relate to the object and see something of themselves in the story. I took my daughter, who is 7, to a historical house today and she related much more to objects that told a story she understood. She stood in awe of an artifact that another 7 year old played with over 100 years ago and wanted to talk about it for ages, whereas other artifacts she only glanced at as they didn’t relate to her so much. This is human nature.
I don’t see an unhappy child in the BBC article, I see an excited kid who wants to be involved. If my own daughter wanted to be involved on that level at any of our museums I would be glad to supply the writing material, stamps etc. and support her. The more children are involved in our community the better our community is as a whole, especially in heritage. This might be about marketing, but its also about community involvement. Too long museums have missed the mark when it comes to marketing – it is often believed to be an evil thing and that as museum professionals we are selling out if we engage in marketing. I think all that ideology shows is a total lack of understanding of what marketing is and can be, and how it can be best used by the museum world.
It shocks me eveytime I’ve been told “It’s okay! It’s Marketing!”, like thats sound kind of excuse. Critical functions seem to completely disappeared everytime someone has said “It was good PR”. It’s like you can half recognise what’s being told to you and just accept the half-truth.
Dana, I’m going to try to pick through your response, but I’m trying to make sense of it. At no point did I say I was some Kleinesque anti-marketing zealot. Otherwise, why I’m I constantly pointing to Maryann Devine? Why has my Tumblr got bilboard advertising on it? Why are these marketing managers emailing me with stuff I might like the look of?
“Marketing” as communication is good. Branding is focussing your professionalism into a particular mould.
This fluff story is nothing. You are not relating to a happy, excited six year old. You are relating to a image, a facsimilie, a ghost of moving light on a screen. Don’t pretend you know him. Don’t pretend he’s like any other six year or, more importantly, anything like your six year old. What you saw was not a six-year old, but an two-minute old advert. It upsets me when someone so young is reduced to that.
Marketing is communication, useful for hundreds upon thousands of things. It is shitty when it’s used to lie to or bullshit us.
I have no idea where you get this opinion that museum workers think marketing is evil like everyone in a museum is some kind of hippy. At worst, they maybe apathetic or too busy with other things. But as you’ve just demonstrated, a lack of understanding also creates a lack of critical analysis, and if you think this “Director of Fun” fluffy, meaningless, inane and infantile news piece that is aimed at your children is okay, then there are greater problems.
“I wonder who was behind this. I wonder if it was more a “marketing” person than a “museum” person. I would think the former because a marketing person is more likely to have the contacts/abilities to get BBC News to cover the story and I like to think a museum person wouldn’t be insensitive to the thousands of under-threat or laid-off museum workers by showing that a cute/marketable six year old can get job when you can’t.”
Are the two mutually exclusive?
No, but I expect that one would lean to one or the other a bit more.