Rewards and punishments

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 375.

Sellable news and pictures gave journalists a keen financial interest in identifying celebrities. Given the low costs of entry into freelance journalism (buy a notepad and a good camera), it is not surprising that the competition for the scoop or the shot has been so intense since Lindbergh's day.

The rewards (and costs) of fame have enormously increased as the market has become global. This again has been partly the result of technological change. The launch in the early 1960s of geostationary satellites, which could bounce broadcast signals around the planet, allowed an event to be watched live around the world. When Princess Diana married Prince Charles in 1981, almost 1 billion people watched the event. Since then the number of television sets for e­very 100 people in the world has doubled, from 11.7 to 23.4. Since quick and convenient videotape replaced cumbersome film in news gathering, broadcasters have been able to jam a story together in packages of words and pictures, which can roll around the world, 24 hours a day, as the details of Diana's life and death rolled the week she died.

This globalisation of the media creates a special market for universally recog­nisable faces and stories. Many are English-speaking, reflecting the American, British and Australian domination of the global news and entertainment industries. Many are women: being a celebrity is one of the few jobs where women seem to compete on equal terms with men.

Princess Diana, probably the world's best-known face, had another quality: rarity. Hollywood can produce any number of lovely young stars, but lovely young royals are extremely scarce. So a product in scarce supply came to have a global market: one good picture could be sold, not just in Britain but around the world. The production costs were tiny, compared with the immense potential rewards.

This combination of global distribution with largely fixed production costs is part of a phenomenon described by two American economists as "The Winner-Take­s-All Society". It thrives particularly in the worlds that celebrities dominate: entertainment and sport. The best performers in these fields are often only a tiny amount better than the second-best, but their rewards are vastly greater. People derive far less satisfaction from listening to or watching second-bests than the global names that their friends will also recognise and want to discuss.

However, the rewards of fame accrue differently to different kinds of celebrities. One son of reward is public approbation. That is something that society can produce inexpensively; and the approbation that ordinary citizens can produce costs them no more than it costs the rich. So fame is essentially an egalitarian commodity and society's approval is most readily earned by those celebrities who are seen to have the common touch - or, in Diana's case, to be "the people's princess".

In addition, for most celebrities, fame brings a direct financial reward. Film stars, singers, footballers, fashion designers and supermodels see their fame reflected directly in their pay - or in the sales of the products with which they are associated. Celebrity endorsements, reckons Mr Cowen, have risen sharply in value in recent years - a reflection of a gap in the market. Companies spot that fans are not being offered enough of their idol, and step in to increase the supply, paying the celebrity and taking a cut of the reward in bigger sales for their products. In a world of infinite information, hiring a famous face is a way to stand out from the crowd.

Royals rarely reap the second sort of reward - although Sarah Ferguson, Princess Diana's sister-in-law, earned perhaps £4m-5m in the space of a few months from her autobiography and promotions for Weight Watchers, cranberry juice and a motley assortment of other products. Royal endorsements, of course, are nothing new - even the Al Fayeds' Harrods boasts a "by royal appointment" banner, an old­fashioned way to signal that it is favoured by the royal family. But previous royals have not pocketed the fee. Most royal endorsements, though, are not for commercial products but for good causes: in Princess Diana's case, homelessness, AIDS, the banning of landmines. In this, she merely developed the concept of the "welfare monarchy": a phrase coined (in a book by Frank Prochaska) to describe the way the British royal family has found a new role by associating itself with charities and good works.

Because royals are worse placed than other celebrities to exploit the financial rewards of their fame, more of those rewards accrue to others: the tourist trade, for in­stance, and especially to the media. A former editor of a popular British tabloid de­scribes the calculations he used to make:

If, say, Charles's butler came along with a kiss-and-tell story, you would get one good go at the story before the Royals went off to the High Court. So you would do a contract saying that if, say, the story runs for three days, the butler gets £I00.000. You wouldn't expect to pay all that, because the story would be stopped after the first day. And the story might still wash its face, because you might sell the world rights for £50.000, and the injunction wouldn't affect those.

Someone from a television soap opera would be much less likely to turn up with an unauthorised tale, he says, because producers devise contracts to allow them to control news more tightly. Anybody selling an unauthorised story would be required to share the payment with the television company. The difference is that news stories about soap stars are a means of promoting the value of the soap; the royal family has no such financial interest in news management. But newspapers have a huge interest in a good royal tale: on Monday after Diana's death, for example, Britain's Daily Mail increased its usual press run by 30%.