Eurovision, politics and marketing – speak your mind or not?

It’s time for a celebration, this weekend after two years, Eurovision is back!

This week the Avidmode ladies sat down for a chat about Eurovision, it’s inticate links to European politics and social matters and how this is reflected in small business marketing.

Our top picks from the Avidmode team at Eurovision 2021:

12 Points go to Darkside – Blind Channel for Finland

10 points go to 10 Years – Daði og Gagnamagnið for Iceland

8 points go to Love Is On My Side – The Black Mambas for Portugal

The following blog post is an edited transcription of the video for ease of reading. You’ll find links to the people mentioned in the chat in the text. Enjoy!


Gem:
*Attempts to record twice and fails.

Ladies, third time lucky. How’s everyone doing?

Kittie:
Cool. I’m really good. It was pretzeling day at the chiropractor this morning. So I’m a bit out of it, you know – Happy clappy. We’ve a couple of launches tomorrow. It’s a busy, busy week, so yeah. Good, but glad it’s Friday.

Gem:
What did the chiropractor do?

Kittie:
Well, you’ve not been to a chiropractor. They sort of fold you out, but then clamp down on you and your spine goes (makes crunching noise), so yeah, he only had to do that twice today to get to different points done.

Gem:
Is your spine meant to do that?

Kittie:
When you’re not doing what you’re meant to do with your body, probably. I’m still banned from running at the moment.

Gem:
How many weeks left have you got of that?

Kittie:
He said probably six weeks in total and today was my second week. So yeah.

Gem:
So you’re, planning your running?

Kittie:
Yeah. Well, I’ve got the 5k on the 4th of July, so.

Gem:
That doesn’t give you a lot of time to practice. (Help)
Can you get a scooter and just scoot along or something, no? Just checking.

So, Robyn, how are you? Lady of leisure, holidaying it up this week?

Robyn:
Hi, I’m good. I am orange, very orange.

Kittie:
You are orange, it’s a good look though, you always look good with orange hair.

Robyn:
Yeah, I wasn’t orange last week for the last video. So I thought I’d mentioned it that, you know, maybe quite a stark difference.

Gem:
Is it going to be different every week or is it just going to be a once in a blue moon thing?

Robyn:
Maybe I’ll keep the orange, the base and then highlight the bottom. So next week I’ll go hot peak shall I?

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Eurovision and Politics

Gem:
That would be cute actually. Although I’m not sure how your hair would deal with them having another batch of stuff on top of it

Well, this week we’re here to talk about something very exciting Eurovision, I’m so excited about it, it’ll be Thursday when this video comes out, which means Saturday coming up is Eurovision, which round of applause for Eurovision, because we didn’t get one last year because of the pandemic. But this year it’s going to be in Rotterdam again, which is so exciting. We were planning to go originally after Duncan Lawrence won in 2019 but.

Kittie:
To explain why we were going to go because your husband went to university in Rotterdam, didn’t he? He’s from Holland, or The Netherlands I should say, sorry Dutch people!

Gem:
But also, just because it’s Eurovision. So there’s plenty enough reason there, who cares about him. Today we’re doing a little bit of an interesting chat session because you have Eurovision coming up and they try so hard to not be controversial they want to be seen as nonpolitical in almost every single way. At least the European broadcast area do, and it never happens. Does it? It’s just the common theme for Eurovision, so let’s use that as a starting perspective.

Kittie:
I don’t think you’ve got any hope of that with music, its’ meant to be political. It’s meant to be a narrative of society. It’s meant to be storytelling. It’s meant to engage young people, old people and everyone with, with the stories of the day and with everything that’s going on. So I think they’ve made it really hard for themselves, because when I was younger, obviously I wasn’t there, I didn’t watch the Eurovision in the fifties or the sixties, but certainly in the seventies, there were always political songs always because you had the cold war, you had all sorts going on. It was still post-World War Two. And I know there was a lot of political songs in the fifties and sixties as well. It was well known for it. So I think, I think bless their cotton socks. They are trying to achieve something that isn’t achieveable.

Gem:
Yeah. And they eight it’s trying to achieve across such a broad space as well. It’s not just trying to achieve it in one country. It’s trying to achieve it in… I’m not sure like 40, I mean, there’s like 41 countries total in Eurovision. I think this year, I want to say 41, but how many countires are there in that broadcast area. That’s a huge variety of people with different thoughts, feelings, beliefs, political views.

Kittie:
I think that something that might be political in, in Eastern Europe or Australia may not be political somewhere else and vice versa. So I think it’s really hard to judge what is political and what isn’t political.

Gem:
Yeah. It’s a difficult job for them because it’s all well and good having that thought and wanting it to be, a nonpolitical place, but it always comes out as political. I guess in a way it’s sort of a safe way to do it.

Kittie:
It is, I think they’re playing it safe, but I also wonder from a marketing perspective something happens every other year, every year. Some political statement is made by one of the entrants. Something is going off in the news because they say that they’re, non-biased non political. I think that that makes, the newspapers and the broadcast media even more interested. And of course, no news is bad news. So the fact that they’re hitting the headlines actually keeps Eurovision top of mind, where maybe it might have slipped a bit before. So from a marketing perspective, that can be quite clever.

I’m not sure that they’re doing it on purpose, but you know, it, it’s quite a clever way to position yourselves and lots of organizations actually do that. I’m pretty sure that Eurovision aren’t because, you know, they’re, they’re the the Swiss of the music scene. They look totally neutral. But it can be a good marketing tactic.

Gem:
So, it’s like a marketing tactic they’ve accidentally landed on rather than being done on purpose. It’s organic.

Kittie:
There’s certainly no way that some of the things have happened, that they’d have wanted those to take place…

Gem:
No, definitely not. It’s interesting all of the bits of drama that surround it every single year as well, like there’s often whole LGBQTA situation with countries that’s not so popular in and countries where it’s just celebrated, and Eurvision is genreally considered quite a campy thing. So for those countries to be entered into it and have, that reaction sort of flare up or backlash and it’s always interesting to see how people are voting based on what the content of the song is rather than, you know, how good the song is or how catchy it is.

Kittie:
That’s great. I think that’s great exposure for the LGBTQ community, because I think the more you can get in front of people in countries where it’s not quite so accepted the better and that is one good thing. I mean, it is openly more broad-minded from that perspective, but that’s political. Whichever way you look at it, that is a political issue.

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Small Business Marketing and Social Matters

Gem:
Here’s a question. How do you – if you’re a smaller business, how do you infuse that into part of your marketing?

Kittie:
I think what you have to focus on is what is your mission? What are your core values? What do you believe in as a team? And, and stick to those and enter debate and enter conversation if you want to. And if you can, but have rules around it. You know, I was in corporate for 15 to 20 years and it’s, we were not allowed to talk politics at work. We weren’t allowed to talk religion. We weren’t allowed to talk this, that and the other. And I think if you take that stance as a business, then you have to stick by it and you have to do it.

I mean, we worked with many, many organizations in very many different spheres and they all have very different attitudes and let some of it, some of them won’t touch anything, at all contraversial, things that you wouldn’t think were controversial at all. So I think it’s a spectrum and you have to do whatever you’re comfortable with.

Gem:
It depends on who you are as a business, what you’re intending to do and your ability to be comfortable in discussing your beliefs, your business’s beliefs, or the beliefs of the teams that you work with, because it’s going to be so different, there’s always going to be people that disagree with you, no matter what your view is.

So to bring it back to Eurovision for just a second, I’m expecting that there has been some listening in done to any of the songs. Do we have any favorites from the team, from the Avidmode team? Let’s start with Robyn.

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Avidmode Eurovision Picks

Robyn:
Soon as you said that my mind went completely blank. Well, which were discussing the other day?

Gem:
Australia (Montaigne) – She’s not going to be there in-person. I think they’re still partaking, but they’re not flying out to Rotterdam, because of the old pandemic, sadly!

Kittie:
I have to say, I quite like the Swedish (Tusse) entry at the moment.

Yeah. I am. I’m always quite keen on most of the Scandinavian ones. And I don’t know why, because they, they range from massive pop to metal and rock most of the time. So there’s a massive spectrum. I do like the Swedish one, although I don’t think it’s as good as last year’s . And I like the Australia.

Robyn:
Okay. I remembered, Finland!

Gem:
Yeah. I thought that might be the case, it’s not a suprise that the two ladies that really enjoy rock music chose the rock entrants. Well, all three of us really, but you know, I think Finland definitely is onto a winner there. Iceland is my second choice. And then Ukraine is my favourite.

I think a lot of people are really interested in France this one this year and Malta as one, but neither of those have really grabbed me. So I’m looking forward to see what the stage shows are like, because we’ve just been watching the rehearsals and the ones that you can see on the screen now are all the video, like the produced version.

Kittie:
What’s your take on the Australian one then?

Gem:
From a song perspective? I’ve been up and down on it. I keep listening to it on my playlist and then going, I like that part. I don’t like that part.

Kittie:
That’s why it came second to mine, because it didn’t quite hit the point.

Gem:
I was sort of expecting that to be a bit more of a… it’s not sing-song. Until it gets to the chorus, which I really liked the chorus part and she really belts out. But then as soon as she sort of goes to the verse, yeah, it’s not my favorite.

I think I’m trying to think of the political moments of 2021 and actually all things considering the crazy year, two years that we’ve had there, hasn’t been a huge amount going on around it. Can you think of anything?

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Marketing

Kittie:
Not for Eurovision. That’s for sure. I mean, all, there’s still been some things that organizations do or don’t want to get behind and some of them to be honest, the mind absolutely boggles. I mean, still in America, you’ve got Black Lives Matter, which I think is something that you should be behind. There’s no reason not to have peaceful demonstration, which obviously is always in the forefront of my mind, but black lives matter. Absolutely. Why wouldn’t you get about, you know, get behind that, any kind of diversity and making workplaces diverse, whether it be neurological, whether it be other disabilities, whether it be racial, whether it be religious.

I think that’s something that is to be gotten behind and I don’t think any organization could be slated for doing that. So it does surprise me when I come across organizations that don’t want to mark certain events that are in the public eye.

Another one that’s come up recently has been obviously Basecamp. They’re an amazing software company, their founders are really, really outspoken on Twitter or have been. They’ve always been really open about talking about issues. They’re very progressive in terms of the solutions that they provide for both people who use their products, but also for the staff members, they’ve always been very progressive. And then all of a sudden, they’ve now gone the corporate side of, no politics discussed within the organization, which left led to a huge outpouring of their staff. And that’s really interesting from a cultural perspective, right?

That’s where you have to think, what do we stand for? What do we want to be known for? And they’ve obviously decided that at this point it’s causing too much strife. And I think probably because they’re an American organization, they were having issues with polarization because politics are really polarized at the moment. There are no shades of gray. You’re either for something or you’re against something. If you’ve got that in the work place and people feel like they’re in different camps and there’s no discourse, then resolution, agreement or moving on together, then you have got a massive cultural problem in your organization, but that comes back to the core values.

Gem:
Well, I assume they didn’t go in with the intention of, not allowing people to discuss things in the workplace. I presume they got to that point once they grew, because they started off fairly small?

Kittie:
Still only 52 members of staff, I think in terms of being a massive organization. But I think it just, it just started to overtake everything, it’s a hard one.

Gem:
I mean, I think it’s important stuff to discuss about, and it’s important that we look at how those discussions happen in the workplace.

*Notices Iceland on the Eurovision stream* These are my favorites. I’m sorry, but if he doesn’t win, I’m going to be so upset.

So yeah, it’s a tricky one because in some cases, I think, leading your business down the path of not being able to discuss certain things within the workplace means that you’re basically cutting off a lot of discourse between people and therefore you’re not really able to grow if you don’t discuss things.

Kittie:
Yep, you’re stunting creativity. Change comes all sorts of creative ideas that would, that may not appear if you’re not talking about it.

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Social Media and Social Issues

Gem:
Yeah. It’s true. So I guess this is a broader question, do you think that we ended up in it in a state currently where the landscapes are constantly changing or do you think that social media has just put a little bit of a spotlight on those changes that have come about?

Kittie:
I think it depends which circle you’re in. I think you can, especially on in places like Twitter, which is my absolute favorite social network, I have to say. You can get in a bubble where you’re just hearing everything the same from all of the people that, you know, and like, because they’re in your sphere. So I think you have to be really careful.

I think (not that) the wrong things could be spotlighted, but I think you can definitely have a bias in your feed and you’re not exposing yourself to other people’s points of view. And I do unfollow people, which is probably not the best thing to do. I think new sources and stuff. I follow a really broad range of things. People who deliberately provide misinformation, I do not follow, or I unfollow them when they appear in my feed. But the problem is then you are, as I say, causing that.

Gem:
An even smaller bubble. Yeah. Because having that ability to reach that person’s content may have helped you reach someone else’s has a more balanced view or a correct view in terms of not spreading the misinformation and talking to the point. Yeah, I felt like at the moment we’re dealing with a lot of, (as someone that works a lot in social media) we’re dealing with a lot of changes in the way that there seems to be a new event. Every single time I log in there’s something’s happened, whether it’s political, whether it’s religious, whether it’s, I don’t know, just sort of whatever it is, there’s a crisis.

Yeah. And it’s been like that for at least three years. I mean, I remember sort of Trump coming into power and there being all kinds of trouble around that.

Kittie:
So when it started, but I think that’s when it came to the forefront of social media, was that massive polarization of people for marketing purposes, it’s advancement, which I don’t think we’ve all been exposed to so much in the past because social media wasn’t there. It took longer, you read one newspaper and that was your world view. You listened to one radio station and that was your political view. Now we’re bombarded with it.

Gem:
It spreads a lot faster as well, which is great. It is actually amazing in one way and is not so great in other ways, for example, we had the Earth Day last month. The fact that it’s now gaining a lot of traction and that companies are now being bombarded with this. “You need to take a look at this. You need to look at yourself and see how, how you’re working and making sure you’re sustainable”.

That the social media push behind the cause has really helped that to become more, more mainstream because it was just a thought however many years ago, but the fact that social media is pushing these things is great. Without that, I don’t know what the we’d be in the same situation. We’d probably still not, not be quite as educated about it. And just not know it, we’d probably be ignorant to the fact that it’s even an issue for the most part, unless you work in certain sectors. I suspect. So actually on one side, I think it’s great. This guy has an amazing voice.

It’s an interesting world we’re living at the moment. Do you think that it’s better to avoid controversey or is it better to be staunch or should you as a business be more gray about things.

Kittie:
Does it matter what your, your web designers political views, or does it matter what marketers political views are, does it bleed through, into their work that they’re going to do?

Not necessarily. However, from a marketing person’s perspective, web designers perspective and from a small business owner’s perspective, I think that it’s one of those things that helps you to navigate who you want as clients, you know, understanding whether the client fits you and where you fit them is super important. And I’m not saying that you have to be totally outspoken about your politics, but you can give clues by, you know, the causes you get behind the charities that you follow, the, the things that you want to do in the community, the community events that you support, those are all political things that build your character. And part of who you are as a person and as a business. So I don’t think you should shy away from that. I don’t think you need to be hopping on and having arguments with people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, about politics. I wouldn’t anyway, maybe I’m not that argumentative.

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Conflict and Opinions

Gem:
Yeah. I was going to say, for me, the problem is that I don’t want to be in a confrontation with anyone. I have a belief and I would be happy to talk about my beliefs, but then to argue my point with someone over the internet gives me anxiety.

Kittie:
I got called out on Twitter at one point, do you remember? I am retweeted a tweet from, oh, what’s he called? James O’Brien on LBC. I was listening to his show one day and I retweeted something that he said, and then Nigel Farrage supporter literally came and attacked me in my profile. You know, he called me and champagne socialist. He, he called me all sorts of things and then very patronizingly. They said, “Don’t worry, dear Nigel, Farrage, will take care of you”. And I just thought, wow, I literally just retweeted a sentence that interested me.

I don’t agree with everything. James O’Brien says he’s a personality, right? I don’t not agree with, stuff he says, but you can lead yourself to being attacked. I also got attacked on that one YouTube a couple of months ago for absolutely nothing political, just for making comments, comment to a creator saying, “Thanks for providing great content to the community, It’s brilliant”. And then I got absolutely jumped on. So you do, you can, you can get mired in controversy, whether you’re talking about something controversial or not.

Gem:
Yeah. I think you have to be really aware that that’s just going to be the case. If you’re doing something on social media, if you’re commenting on YouTube or you’re posting things on Facebook or wherever that someone’s going to have an opinion about it somewhere, and they’re going to tell you about it and you don’t want to hear it, but you know, it’s the way of the world. It’s not as if that content that you posted is locked behind anything. It’s literally there for everyone to see.

Kittie:
It’s tough to keep a cool head, right. Prepared to either choose not to respond while really being trolled, or have a thought about what you’re going to say and make sure that whatever you respond does follow your values, but it’s also not aggressive and not stoking the fires of polarization even further, unless that’s what your business is about.

Gem:
Which it might be, you never know. I mean, there’s definitely people who are personalities, like someone like James O’Brien actually thrives in having people just constantly calling in and, offering their opinion.

Gem:
Or Piers, Katie Hopkins. We don’t tend to work with a huge amount of people that have that sort of…

Kittie:
No, we tend to work with people who want to shy away from any discussion of politics. And I think we’ve done a lot with people in the last couple of years is work with them around their values, what those core values are, how to express them, how to express them without being massively controversial, but just letting people know what their ethos is. Then also by helping them to build their ESG policies, that they have a policy around what they want to talk about, you know, where they stand, how they give back all of that kind of stuff and what their corporate governance is. And I think that’s a good way to start, you know, environment the social stance and your governance are really important as an organization, however, big or small you might be. Of course Robyn’s mired in politics because she not only works for Avidmode but she’s also a student at a university and we know how political students like to be so.

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Ethical Marketing

Robyn:
Well. It was actually an interesting lesson that I did quite early on this was about the ethics and morality behind web design and not just web design, but design in general. What would you do? And what wouldn’t you do depending on circumstance. So would you, support a certain cause or do certain things that could be connected or construed in certain ways? Like one interesting one which we all know about is cereal boxes.

Somebody designs those cereal boxes to be deceptive in their size, or to encourage children to eat them, even though it’s not good for them or make them want it more. And yeah, you’ve got to choose whether it ethically,morally and politically you stand behind it. It’s also a political thing as well. Like whether you stand behind certain subjects and whether you design for them and where you stand in that line and where that line in the sand is drawn.

Kittie:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve always been clear as a business haven’t we, and we discuss things all of the time that, you know, we don’t agree with dark patterns (foreshadowing next weeks video) in website design. We don’t believe in, scamming people into doing things through a website experience. We we’ve never done black hat SEO we’ve we haven’t really touched gray, some stuff, some white hat becomes gray over time.

But you know, we’ve always had very clear stances. We don’t work generally with political entities, we don’t work with porn sites, we don’t work with gambling sites. There are certain things that we don’t touch because not because I have anything against them, I don’t have a problem with people gambling, but it’s not something that I particularly want to promote as a business. So it’s something that we don’t do, you know, Daniel and I agree on that. You guys, and I agree on that. It’s a team effort. We don’t work with products or services that we don’t believe in. So I think that, and that’s another political statement in a way, isn’t it?

Gem:
Yeah. I’m going to say the word again, ladies, the authenticity is coming back.

Robyn:
I think we need to get a bell. Something that rings every time you say the word authenticity. That’s it I’m going to get one… like a buzzer.

Gem:
No, I’d prefer if it was more positive reinforcement, like chocolate or stickers or something, you can send me like dog cat pictures all day, I’m quite happy to take that.

Infiltrating those concepts into your marketing, in an ethical way, really help to show who you are as a business and give that idea without being overt about it. Personally, I like that because I like to go on to like Sprout Social and see that they’d liked something about Charity: Water, or one is the local ice cream makers and see that they’re talking about local. I think it was, there was a farming thing in Cheshire. They were talking about with the Cheshire dairy company or something. I love to see those interactions. And I think having an opinion can sometimes lead to your customers or clients having a better perception of you, it gives you depth.

Kittie:
And it makes people resonate, right? I think we quite often spot those and see the interaction because of the way that we think as marketers. But it’s just those little sublime signals that you’re giving out that helps people build an entire picture of your organization.

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Voting at Eurovision

Gem:
So I’m going to ask another Eurovision question. I want to know when you’re watching Eurovision, which we will be doing on Saturday. We have a party it’s in the calendar. So I expect you there on time…

I want to know when you’re voting for Eurovision, if you vote, how do you decide on what you’re voting? Do you vote on songs? Do you vote on countries that you like? Do you vote on the stages that you like? Is it based on the whole performance? What is it that gets you to vote for the country in particular?

Robyn:
I’m quite particular with music in general. Yeah. I generally, hopefully this isn’t going to sound wrong. I don’t care about the artists generally behind the music. I care only about the music. I listen to every genre imaginable and I don’t really, I don’t know the names of half of the people I listened to like their bands, that they’re their solo career names, whatever, because I care about the music pretty much exclusively when I vote, I am exclusively voting on my favorites, the music that I’m listening to, the staging and things into it. If I think it’s a really amazing performance that has helped the music in some way, like Australia. last year (2019).

Kittie:
Yeah. Oh God, I didn’t like that. Did I?

Robyn:
It’s such an amazing performance but was a bit out there and you weren’t expecting it.

Gem:
No, it wasn’t awful. So I’m going to share this because it needs to be seen if you didn’t watch it. So she was basically on a long stick.

Kittie:
I was scared she was gonna fall off!

Robyn:
Well, it wasn’t just her either. Was it? It was her two backing dancers. I did think they were going to clunk heads at one point.

Kittie:
I didn’t like the multi-colored skirt either. I have to say

Gem:
The ombre. You don’t like the ombre?

Kittie:
Well, no, it’s not that I don’t like the ombre. I don’t know. I just kind of didn’t like it. I didn’t like the song either. So I don’t think that helped.

Robyn:
I like this. I think that given what she was singing about, the movements kind of fit for me. So I wouldn’t say that I would have voted for this as my top for sure. But I would have voted higher for this because of the performance as well as the song working in combination, but nothing else would really come into it. But that’s just how I am in general.

Kittie:
Yeah. I suppose I have a slightly different, it’s the song, the performance, but it’s not the performance as in the staging and the lighting. It’s whether I connect with the person that is actually doing the performing.

Gem:
Yeah. I think I’m very similar. It’s the same for me. If there’s the music gets me and then the person draws me in. So it’s actually very varied. And that’s what I like about Eurovision is that there’s so many different genres and people trying different things, a lot of people think that it’s mostly just cheese, which it is it’s very cheesy. But as an example this woman, she was doing opera and it was just having something a bit different. I think if there’s something different happening, I like that because it just sort of activates my brain a bit, which is where my vote’s usually go.

Kittie:
It’s quite funny because I voted for what was the what was the talent competition that had those operatic, the two women in it? Oh my gosh. They were amazing. And I voted for them. They were incredible. And I locked that. I just didn’t connect with this one at all.

Robyn:
What Kittie is saying is she could not connect herself because she couldn’t see herself on a poker stick Like she wants to be, she wants to be drawn into the experience.

Kittie:
And I do get motion sickness. So that problem.

Gem:
I think we were a few Mojitos deep as well by that point where everything having sips of this and that. So, yeah, I don’t, I don’t think that helped either.

Kittie:
I certainly don’t don’t vote along political lines by country.

Gem:
No, I don’t. Although I do usually send in a call for Spain, if the song’s good.

Kittie:
Are you in solidarity with Auntie Lisa or? What’s causing that one?

Gem:
I don’t know. I just… It’s something about Spain, every year, it just gets me Portugal sometimes as well while I’m like, may as well. I think I just like the sound of Spanish/Portugese. So if someone’s singing in Spanish, it’s an automatic like for me. So it’s probably not the fact that it’s Spain.

Kittie:
You know what it is? When you were young, when you were little, we used to listen to Christina Aguilera singing in Spanish, Ricky Martin. What’s his name? The younger Inglesias (Enrique) and yeah, we used to listen to all of those singing in Spanish. So that’s probably where that come from.

Gem:
I think it’s the vibe. There’s a love song (Tu Canción) that they did in 2019 that I still have one more playlist. It’s on my Spotify top playlist every year. Well, for the last two years…

Robyn:
Country doesnt come into our choice.

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Wrap Up

Gem:
I wouldn’t say so. No, not so much. I wonder how much it does for other people. Sometimes you see that with the country voting well with the public votes. The jury, they vote based on the rehearsal performances. Yes. and I often don’t really understand the jury choice, but I still think that they do it in the same way that the award shows do when they’re trying to make a point with it with whoever they’re choosing which I guess is political in that way. They’re trying to, trying to push forward a point or something with that. I assume that’s what they do, but the country, when I, when I’m thinking about who I talk to about Eurovision, I don’t ever think of anyone from the UK saying, Oh, I’m going to vote for Ireland or Spain. It just depends on the song. So, that’s the end of our Eurovision extravagana. You have to say it right extravaganza!

You didn’t get to have a call to action rant, right?

Kittie:
No, I didn’t. I think my only rant potentially is that you have to stand behind what you believe in… which is a call to action.

Gem:
I think what we need to do for the next one is make sure that we don’t say the words, call to action, authentic at all and see how far we get actually. Ooh, we could make it drinking and game. Rightm the next ones just going to be about calls to action and avoiding the word.

Robyn:
You know, we filmed these at three o’clock in the afternoon, right.

Gem:
We could have got away with that.

Robyn:
I mean, I’m not being funny, Gem, but the light behind you kind of dictates that it’s earlier in the day…

Gem:
In the summer, it could be eight o’clock. You don’t know.

Well, I hope everyone has a wonderful Eurovision. It’s on BBC1 on Saturday. If you are interested in watching it, I love being there for her so long today. So if you’re not the whole souls, it’ll be semifinals second semifinals, Tuesday, Thursday, and then the final on Saturday.

Kittie:
C’mon, Iceland and Finland and Sweden and Ukraine. This will be funny – we can review how it went.

Robyn:
We’re doing the scorecards!

Gem:
And we’ll put our scorecards cards up.

Robyn:
We’re going to, we’re going to see who we think is gonna win in general, who we think people will vote for as well as our own decision of who we personally each think is our fave.

Gem:
It will be interesting because every single year we all sit there and watch it and we will have such different opinions on the different songs that are coming up. So it will be really interesting to write it down. Cause I feel like we’ve never done that before. So I’m looking forward to that.

Kittie:
I’d love to hear what other people think about bringing politics into their offices and what they think about Eurovision in terms of politics and whether it should be more political, less political? I think that would be really interesting.

Gem:
It would be. I like that. Let’s do that.

So put your, put your messages in the comments on Facebook or wherever, let us know whether you’re watching and what your thoughts are on politics and your vision and all of those good things. And we’ll see you next week in the next blog post!