Ed Sheeran Arrives in Ipswich, MA to Promote and Film a New Video
A few weeks ago, musician Ed Sheeran came to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to promote and film a video for his new song “Old Phone.” Why he chose, Ipswich, an unassuming coastal town in Massachusetts, in April, was and is a mystery, but it allegedly had something to do with its parallels to his hometown near Ipswich in Suffolk, England. Specifically, the parallel that it shared the name Ipswich, which did not make things much clearer. The pop-up bar that was created for the event was in a parking lot only a few hundred feet from our headquarters.
Sheeran explained on The Tonight Show that he wrote “Old Phone” after a 2022 lawsuit in which he defended his authorship of “Thinking Out Loud” against allegations from Marvin Gaye’s family that it infringed on their late father’s song “Let’s Get It On” (Sheeran prevailed with the jury – and after seeing the mass of adults and children basically scream and chase his car around our town as he intermittently did cool and understated things to make people feel seen, I’m not sure what kind of case he could lose). During discovery in that matter, Sheeran was compelled to look through old devices for responsive material, which led him to rediscover messages from friends who had died, and former lovers, and to reflect on the moments and relationships they memorialized, and in a way only he can, to turn the experience of being a civil defendant into a sentimental yet commercially viable song.
As I listened to Sheeran perform an impromptu acoustic rendition of “Old Phone “in the street in front of our office, I was thinking of a way to get a picture of him next to our office (I did, sort of) and convince my nieces and nephews that presence was somehow connected to North Point. To my knowledge, Sheeran has no interest in or at least has not publicly shared his thoughts on non-market diligence services, but the connection between our work and a song that serves as a reminder of the permanence of digital memories was eerily appropriate.
There is no question social media has democratized speech and that smart phones have made a lot of things easier, but we all now live and try to work amidst a never-ending supply of time-sucking distractions, and ample opportunities to say and do things in the blink of an eye that will last forever. We have officially left the world in which the reach or permanence of an idea or commentary has any relationship to the demand for its dissemination.
From our experience at North Point, we understand that people and companies view online behavior as a proxy for a person’s character or judgment. Very often, we identify online content from years or decades past that reflects poorly on an individual. In most cases, the downsides could have been easily avoided through a better understanding of the platforms that fuel engagement and profit from personal memories. Use of security and privacy settings, a general awareness of where one appears in the accounts of friends and family, removal of old posts, and deletion of unused accounts are simple elements of good on-line hygiene by a strikingly small number of people.
We recently highlighted these lessons as part of a program offered to college students who are soon to enter the workforce. While the audience was entirely social media natives and have a better understanding of emoji significance and current on-line parlance than I do, they, like many of the subjects of our research, had a limited understanding of the ways in which their thoughts were being preserved or how easily they could be accessed by people with a reason to go looking. We urged them to consider the permanence of their online presence because unless you’re Ed Sheeran, a digital footprint is mostly downside.
