Disney Goes Full Orwell
Parsing the Mouse's corporate newspeak in our new dystopia. Plus: Todd Boehly's very bad week in the U.K.
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade:
Disneyspeak, Part 1: The True Meaning of ‘No Ads’
Disney+ sent an email to its subscribers this week with the following anodyne “nothing to see here” subject line: “We’re updating our Subscriber Agreement.”
The email opened with a plea to subscribers: “We encourage you to review the updated Subscriber Agreement in full and save a copy for your files. Once effective, it will govern your use and enjoyment of your Disney+, ESPN+, or Hulu subscription.” Yes, let me put this in my dedicated filing cabinet for all the boilerplate legalese companies send me merely for deigning to pay for their services. But I guess I should read it first, despite my attorney not being present.
It continued to “highlight” some of the changes therein, including new additional information on payment policies.
Then it got around more or less to the point with this little passage:
Got that? Disney’s still offering the “no ads” or “ad free” tiers — Disney+ Basic (With Ads) is $9.99 a month and Disney+ Premium (No Ads) is $15.99, so a 60 percent premium — but hey, just letting you know that the “no ads” tier will, when circumstances require, contain ads. No, Disney, thank you for the clarification on what “No Ads” — two words that sure seem unambiguous — actually means.
Really, it’s your own fault if you took the ad-free thing literally. It’s Ad Free, like Born Free! That doesn’t mean you can run naked down Wilshire Blvd to marry the family’s St. Bernard. No, it means you embrace a spirit of freedom. Just like Disney+’s Ad Free tier embraces a spirit of life that’s not all about advertising. But you can’t expect Disney alone to bring advertising on Planet Earth to an end . . . so how can you expect it to offer a service that is somehow, magically, free of advertising?
So as we enter the transition from Peak Content to Peak Squeeze Money Out of Our Customers By Any Means Necessary, we’ll also make the transition from the moment when these services wowed and amazed audiences to when they became despised and hated rapacious utilities.
Iger, man of the people that he is with his multiple yachts, told investors last week, “As you know, we took prices up significantly fairly recently and expected the churn would be significantly greater. And it turned out we delivered numbers that were better than we had expected.” Disney+ lost 700,000 subscribers, but hey, they thought it would be worse!
So the next test of how much customers will put up with is ads in their “No Ads” subscription?
I mean, when people who have paid extra for an ad-free service find that that service does in fact — due to circumstances — contain ads, how do you think they will take that? And how are they supposed to respond when a chirpy customer service rep says, “Well, you were advised that we’ve updated our terms of service . . .”?
Disneyspeak, Part 2: An HR Update
Upon close examination, this week’s memo from Disney HR Chief Sonia Coleman on changes in various policies is really nothing. It’s less than nothing. The memo is a labyrinth of the legal corpo speak which seems to be driving the bus at Disney, almost incomprehensible to digest, and then when you drill down, the sand disappears between your fingers.
On the face of it, what she is advising team members is that one set of corporate policy guidelines and oversight is being swapped out for another, including one that stands to impact compensation . . .