Before I tackle the thorny issue of #TooMuchTaylor, I want to make clear (lest I attract the ire of the Swiftie army) that I bear no ill will towards Ms. Swift. In fact, I am full of admiration for her success. The way she has taken charge of her career and dominated pop culture for the last five (ten?) years is obviously very impressive. Her music’s not really my bag, but each to their own, live and let live.

I didn’t even mind when her sphere of influence became so massive that it engulfed my lesser known, critically acclaimed alt-rock-folk favourites like The National and Bon Iver, bringing them to enormous new audiences, even though it robbed me of the opportunity to respond to the question “who’s your favourite band?” with the intro beloved of every pretentious indie kid “welllll you’ve probably never heard of them, they’re called The National…?”.

But it’s too much now. A few weeks ago we learned that the V&A Museum, perhaps the world’s most prestigious institution dedicated to decorative art and design, is hiring a “Taylor Swift Superfan Advisor”. Of course, it’s not actually hiring a Taylor Swift advisor. The “job description” reads more like an ad for a V&A VIP experience, meeting museum curators and learning about the history of relevant objects. They might as well throw in a behind-the-scenes tour. Oh wait, they did, that’s literally part of it.

It’s almost like the V&A used the media’s voracious appetite for any Swift-related news to get itself in front of her army of Gen Z followers. Whether or not you think resorting to such tactics is worthy of such an august institution is another question, but it worked. They got absolutely shedloads of coverage across traditional and social media, wall-to-wall, ear-to-ear, etc. and so on.

And then just a couple of weeks ago we learned, courtesy of genetic data harvesters Ancestry.com, that Swift is a sixth cousin thrice removed of American poet Emily Dickinson. According to the company, they both descend from a 17thcentury English immigrant who settled in Connecticut. So basically, they’re not really related at all. And again, this story has had loads of coverage, so it’s pats on the back all round at Ancestry.com.

Where does it end? Should we expect news from a major hosepipe manufacturer announcing that they are the hosepipe of choice to water the gardens of her many properties? A breakfast TV interview with a guy that knew a guy who drove the bus she took to school? 

Personally, I can’t wait to find out which brand will supply her enormous Eras entourage with fried chicken / hairdryers / laundry detergent / that she’s visited a local spa / butcher / lawn bowls club. And even if I didn’t want to find out all this information, I know that I will, because there’s no escaping the media vortex of Taylor Swift.

At this point, jumping on the bandwagon with a very tenuously connected piece of news still seems to be working, and may not even have peaked; Taylormania will surely reach its zenith when the Eras tour hits Europe in May. But this can’t last forever.

So, a piece of unsolicited advice for any brand hoping to hang their hat on the Swift hook. Get that story out as soon as you can, because there will come a time (and I pray that it’s soon) when we are so utterly saturated with Swift-related “news”, that your story announcing that the lady herself bought a box of your brand of cereal doesn’t lead the BBC News and make the front page of the Financial Times. And then we’ll all have to go back to thinking of creative and surprising ways to engage the media and tell our stories. I wonder if we could float something down the Thames…