What Really Made Steve Harvey Screw Up The Miss Universe Announcement So Spectacularly?
Was it the bad design of the card or was the whole thing a publicity stunt?
By Sadho Ram — 22 Dec 2015, 05:25 PM
By now you know that Steve Harvey screwed up the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. It had all the ingredients of an epic viral moment:
A beauty pageant. An embarrassing gaffe. The agonising scene when Harvey admitted he made a mistake. The look on Miss Colombia's face when her crown was taken off and given to the real winner, Miss Philippines.
It was perfect. Maybe...a little too perfect? Watch:
Could Harvey's monumental Miss Universe error have been staged?
According to Adweek's David Griner, if not, it should have been. David writes:
"Harvey spectacularly botched the announcement of the winner, accidentally giving Miss Colombia the crown. Then, at the most awkward moment possible (the new Miss Universe's celebratory wave to the crowd), he whipped the audience into a hooting frenzy with the words "I have to apologize," noting that the real winner was Miss Philippines. The whole scenario, frankly, felt like a twist from WWE's WrestleMania rather than from a hyperproduced global pageant."
Questioning if it was a scripted moment of controversy to push Miss Universe to the top of social trending topic lists, David asks, "If so, who would have been in on it?"
There are several reasons why the error might not have been staged, the most prominent being the enduring smear it has likely placed on both the pageant and Harvey's hosting abilities.
But here's something interesting that does point towards why the monumental Miss Universe gaffe could very well have been staged: More people tweeted about the gaffe than those who actually watched it.
There were some 6.3 million tweets over the last 24 hours that mentioned the mishap, which was more than those who actually watched the event; Fox says the telecast averaged 6.2 million viewers and a 1.7 rating among adults 18 to 49, down in both measures from last year when it aired on NBC.
Just how quickly did Harvey's error go viral?
Mentions of "Steve Harvey" exploded in a five-minute window, going from 19 tweets per minute at 9:57 p.m. to 13,000 TPM by 10:02 p.m. Mentions of #MissUniverse2015 rose from 24,000 TPM to 104,000 TPM during that same time period.
Or was it all in the card's "bad design"?
According to Tech Insider's Chris Weller, who consulted design experts to determine whether the layout of Harvey’s card could have tripped him up, they did suggest that the fact that the Miss Universe winner was printed on the right side of the card, while the runners-up appeared on the left, could have created some minor confusion for Harvey. However, one of them suggested that the card's design shouldn't be blamed here.
"In any case, it's not so much the design, which is straightforward enough. You cannot blame the card he was reading."
On the other hand, following his blunder, Harvey emphatically stated that the correct Miss Universe winner and first runner-up were listed on the card he was holding. In the Snapchat session for the event, Harvey appeared to claim that the Teleprompter was the culprit.
But there’s yet another wrinkle in this theory: A veteran stage manager told TheWrap that when a host is reading from cards, there won’t be anything on the teleprompter, and thus no misinformation for Harvey to parrot.
However, Nextshark's Eric Thomas argues that Harvey didn't ruin Miss Universe, bad design did. He took it upon himself to better the card's design, which he thinks could have saved a lot of heartache.
"I took 20 minutes of my time to try and get this right. Our '2015 Miss Universe' is now way more obvious. I’ve even managed to leave places to add the winner labels. Also, everything is easier to read and follow. By using size and color, we’ve made this document a lot more easy to understand. Maybe every elimination card couldn’t be this neat and pretty. But this is the main one. The Finale. This mistake isn’t Steve Harvey’s fault. The culprit here is, once again, bad design."
nextshark.com