Archive for the 'Branded Entertainment' Category

Misguided teen queen Jamie Lynn Spears appeared last night on ABC’s new show, Miss Guided. In dictionaries all across America, the entries for irony just exploded.

The “second” Spears (gee, we need a spare) played a troubled teen debating between going to college or sticking around for a boyfriend. For those of you shacking up in Saddam’s old spiderhole, Jamie Lynn just made the decision to have a baby and take some time off from her acting career.

Is this life imitating art or the other way around?

Her sabbatical is treating her well - things have never been better for SpearsSpare! By taking time off, she meant taking time to get even more famous. Though her pregnancy goes against Nickelodeon’s wholesome image, ratings for her show, Zoey 101 have soared. And the hype around her appearance on Miss Guided… well, I’m even talking about it. (Shame on me, I know.)

Who’s to blame! Let’s go with Juno. Jamie Lynn’s publicists are not idiots, and we know the Spears clan has a knack for drawing attention (self-promotion is too generous). They saw the amniotic fluid on the wall after Juno went big and so they said “Here’s a way to make JLS super known.” Quietly dealing with the situation back home on the Bayou wouldn’t work for this management. Instead they SOLD the story to OK! magazine for seven figures. A nation of kids now considers her the real life Juno McGuff. Except, instead of being the cheese to someone’s macaroni, Jamie Lynn is the Easy Mac for the college kid on a budget (no offense meant to Easy Mac).

In my last post on celebrity babies, I intentionally barely touched on this. There’s just something unsettling about babies having babies. I’m old school, but there’s a way to handle very public scandals that, while acknowledging mistakes, deals with the repercussions soberly. It reflects strong character and just happens to be the healthy way to live a life. It’s a personal opinion, and the public, at least in the long term, appreciates it more than a naked parade around the town square.

That respect/goodwill counts when trying to make a career in the public sphere.

A wise man named Jack Handy once said, “To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.” These wise words remind me of the Spears clan. Their lives are primetime dramas, except there are no ratings, nothing but shame gained, and at the end of the third trimester, Jamie Lynn really will have a baby, G-d love her. Sometimes bad publicity is just bad publicity.

We threw Blockbuster into the collective wind years ago, along with The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Contempo Casuals. The glory days of Blockbuster are long gone…long, long, long gone. Once upon a time it was actually cool to have a Blockbuster card. That Cookie Monster Blue and Big Bird Yellow…oh, the good old days. Nobody bought movies back then, we rented them. And most of the time we rented them from Blockbuster. (Unless we wanted one of those movies..then we forked it over.) Want a relaxing night at home? You went to Blockbuster. It was a Blockbuster night, ahh.

Now RETURNING the video, that was the hard part. Who could do it on time? And the late fees! More people were in collections over those fees in the 90s than for missed car payments. (Or maybe not, but doesn’t it feel true?)

Of course that was a different time. Today, orphaned by its corporate parent Viacom, those fat late fees a distant dream, Blockbuster has become passé. Want a relaxing night at home? Now you pick up the latest DVD at Target. Or on demand from the cable company. Or if you’re cool (and you know we are), you get it from Netflix.

On one hand, the company caught up. They’ve worked hard, and invested millions, in staying relevant. Their online rental business is arguably better than Netflix’s. They’ve dabbled in digital downloads and streams. But on the other hand… Blockbuster is boring. Over. U-N-C-O-O-L. A Van Damme in a Gyllenhaal world. (Awww, poor Jake. What? Too soon)

While Netflix is on its way to becoming a verb (the holy grail of branding!), Blockbuster is fading away. How many consumers know the significant strides the company has made? And worse, do they care?

Then it happened. This week during Bravo’s Project Runway the little engine that could, did. Mr. Tim Gunn took the designers on one of his wildly entertaining and slightly over the top field trips to SPANDEX WORLD. During the field trip, the designers were introduced to the Divas of the WWE. (By “Divas” they mean incredibly terrifying women who could easily take all of Britney’s bodyguards.) Gunn informed the designers that their challenge was to create outfits for the wonderful women of the WWE – every designers dream.

In order to get a feel for the Diva’s “style” the designers ordered old WWE clips from Blockbuster! Not only was the Blockbuster envelope on the table (glorious blue and yellow ablaze), but the designers even dropped verbal Blockbuster plugs. Go Blockbuster! Blockbuster has a real chance to shed its stagnant image, to move beyond tired commercials (“Rent Over the Hedge on DVD!” Woohoo?), and make an honest connection with their present and past customers.

Blockbuster isn’t a dinosaur struggling to stay alive! Blockbuster gets it now, and gets it better than anyone they’re competing with. Let’s keep it going, buddy! Product placement is all the rage these days, but it is only one step in the giant and winding staircase Blockbuster needs to walk up.

To misquote The Graduate: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. INTERNET.” Digital distribution is the future, and right now no one, not the Yahoos nor the Studios nor the Bit Torrents of the world have a lock on that business. So why not Blockbuster? They could even could even partner up with Time Warner and put their content on demand. (We totally need to be Blockbuster execs.) This is Blockbuster’s chance to leapfrog NetFlix in the next generation of media.

And what about social networking communities? Lets get (channel Olivia Newton-John here vi-i-i-ral! Currently there is a Blockbuster application on Facebook that has less than 300 subscribers. I know people with more friends on Facebook! (And some of them kind of suck.) This is an easy, efficient, and effective way to reach a huge, relevant, impressionable population. Build an application that allows users to compare movie tastes with friends, order rentals online, and (when possible) download/stream content. This is doable! You’re Blockbuster, you still have the money, the relationships with content creators (Studios, Networks, etc.), to make it happen.

Blockbuster needs to articulate a forward-looking and innovative message that puts the company in the future of entertainment. It just takes some smart PR, a little bit of Punk attitude and stop talking about late fees already, dudes.

As viewers continue to tune out or fast forward through the TV commercials, network excecutives, desperate to keep the advertising dollars in house, are trying all manner of “creative” - by that we mean desperate - means to disguise the ads as something else. Ed Swindler (no seriously, that’s his name!), exec VP of ad sales at Universal NBC puts a friend-of-the-consumer spin on it: “No one on the creative side or the business side wants to make commercials intrusive, but we do need to commercialize efficiently so viewers can afford to get free television.”

A common ploy is to put original content into the breaks (the implication being that commercials cannot be described as such). For instance, next fall NBC Universal will be pepping up ad breaks with Jerry Seinfeld to keep the viewers watching (and to promote his new movie). And the kind folks at ABC are considering clever ways to hoodwink viewers into thinking they’re still watching their favorite show when the commercials have already started. For instance a TV set that Ugly Betty is watching might dissolve into the commercial break. (Maybe Betty will fast-forward through the real ads on the pretend show… No, probably not.)

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, understands that what we really need to do is to make commercials that don’t suck as much: “A commercial has to be like a DVD extra. It has to be an added value, not an inconvenience.” Then Mr. Swindler and his friends wouldn’t need to find sneaky ways to trick the consumers into staying tuned.