It was just a week ago that Princess Kate became Waldo, after Prince William tapped out of his godfather’s memorial service for “personal reasons” and social media lit up over speculation as to Kate’s whereabouts. She’s not been seen in public since Christmas, and certainly not since the Palace announced that she’d had abdominal surgery and wouldn’t be expected to be back on duty until after Easter.
The social media uproar went on for days with wild theories being circulated about what, really, was happening behind the scenes, and it would have been impossible for the Firm not to know what was out there – that one of the most senior members of the British royal family was trending…and not necessarily trending in a good way.
Cut to yesterday, photo agency Backgrid acquires ostensibly new photos of Kate sat passenger side in a car driven by her mother, Carole Middleton, near Windsor Castle. TMZ was the first to publish them. You know who hasn’t published them? The British tabloids. Suddenly the Daily F-cking Mail is respecting someone’s privacy!?! Seriously, the way the Daily Mail covered these photos, without publishing them, is by scolding American news outlets for doing it, while citing the Palace’s wish for the princess to be able to recover out of the public eye. I’m sure I don’t need to point out how rich it is for this publication in particular to be claiming the high road … but they can’t even get that right because in this same article where they’re chastising other media over the new photos and chastising those who are advancing crazy theories about what health procedures Kate is healing from, in the next paragraph they go on to NAME those crazy theories which kinda defeats the purpose of being all morally superior.
Also, according to the Daily Mail, these latest pap photos of Kate “were not authorised by the palace”. Translation: the Palace does not want us to think that these were set up to offset all the rumours from last week. Newsflash: didn’t work.
All they did was reignite the conversation – a conversation that was actually starting to subside, with an assist from Meghan Markle, of all people. It was announced yesterday that Meghan would be part of a panel to kick off SXSW later this week. Also, it’s Oscar week. People had already been distracted by all the everything else that’s been going on and as we get deeper into the week, there will naturally be so many more Hollywood events and celebrity sightings preceding the Oscars that the internet’s attention would be diverted, at least temporarily, from playing Kate Waldo.
So this, ONCE AGAIN, is a royal communications misfire, no matter how strenuously they try to deny that they had anything to do the paps conveniently being able to get eyes on Kate. And also, “were not authorised by the palace” is a stupid f-cking thing to say because it implies that, sometimes, there ARE photos that are “authorised by the palace” – WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE SO BAD AT THEIR JOBS? It’s amateur hour all the goddamn time!
Everything is wrong here, from the timing to the insistence that they weren’t behind it to the shots themselves. The shots of Kate are grainy (I’m not spending money on them, I’m sure it won’t be hard for you to find them), she’s wearing sunglasses, and if they are meant to dispel all the f-cksh-t that’s been out there, they’ve succeeded in achieving the exact opposite. Blurry, low resolution images don’t eliminate doubt, they only encourage it. There are some who are saying that the person in the photos looks more like Pippa Middleton. There are others who are doing forensics on her physical features. And also questioning whether or not these were actually taken recently.
While it’s true that any move that the royals made would have resulted in skepticism from some corners, at least put in some more effort. This is lazy AF, it lacks imagination (because there are literally thousands of photos of Kate over the years photographed through a car window), and it has exposed for the 1000th time that the British royal institution and the people who are employed there have no understanding of how modern media works and are also woefully short on the commitment required to actually engineer a pivot.
If they had decided in the war room that the social media frenzy from last week needed to be addressed, in subtle fashion, like if that was the decision that was made among the key stakeholders, to let the public know that she’s fine, that all the chaotic speculation is way off base, then go for it. Really go for it. But this isn’t going for it, not when the shots are low resolution, not when we can’t see her moving, at best it’s a half-ass attempt. Which is the worst thing you can do in these times – because you know what the internet can sniff out better than anything else? The absence of conviction. In times when nuance is becoming extinct, anything short of emphatically definitive is a fail. You might as well not bother.
But these people don’t understand this, they haven’t tried to understand it, they refuse to understand it, and this is why they keep putting themselves in these positions where they look unprepared or irrelevant or sloppy or all of the above and ridiculous. And what’s most infuriating is that it doesn’t have to be like this! Work doesn’t have to be bad. Comms and strategy don’t have to be bad! But they are making it bad by refusing to be better, and that’s what’s so insulting about this archaic institution. When you have the most privilege, but repeatedly reject the opportunity to improve, it’s not only arrogant, it’s a blatant and offensive repudiation of the need to evolve.
We're Squawking about this today. (app link here)
