Archive for the 'People' Category

TV networks used to carefully build and cultivate shows and they branded the shows as important products; this ensured deep viewer engagement and therefore, ka-$$. We call that long-term viability. But today’s fascination with celebrity reality is a get rich quick pyramid scheme leaving the nets with no shows, no identity, and a hell of a lot of problems. (VH1, we’re talking about you and Flava; listen up).

I was flipping through the cable-waves and couldn’t help but notice a pattern: Dancing With The Stars, Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Rehab, Celebrity Apprentice, and I think one on celebrity dieting! Yet the writer’s strike was over! Did the writers stay on vacation?

Out of some weird curiously, I watched the first episode of “Celebrity Rehab” – the term train wreck is a generous review. Seeing Jeff Conaway barely mobile or coherent isn’t entertaining in the least but crept into my soul in a dark way. What happened to privacy for someone’s horrible downfall? To a shred of dignity? Celebrities used to represent some kind of intangible ideal. From Bonaduce to Britney it’s clear that the Hollywood landscape has changed, maybe inalterably.

Flimsy reality TV is in its heyday. Gosh, Hilton’s celeb reality show lasted five seasons! (Gees, yet straight-to-DVD “One Night in Paris” lasted but one horrible night!) And just when we thought it was safe to turn on the tube without her, now we hear she’s coming back with a guest spot on “Earl” and a new show hilariously called “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF”!

Wasn’t realty TV a “Real World” concept born from the desire to watch normal people go through their days with human drama the star? Remember our ole friend Puck! He was never a celebrated guy, didn’t pose for mag covers, but we watched him because he was consistently Puck. And Pedro? He inspired us with his transparency.

So the nets are giving us what we want, yeah. Just look at the ratings over these past years. While the broadcast/cable homes rely on more and more reality, and more and more celebrity crap, viewership for everyone (even Bravo) slides fast into let’s-remake-this-channel territory. They can blame the Internet or games or even, like they did last year, Daylight Savings Time!

But it used to be you watched to “go where everyone knows your name” and where friends were “there for you.” Now we have Hugh Hefner chasing – let’s face it – ho’s. Other than Eliot Spitzer, does anyone REALLY want to know who he’s with when the guy is that gross?

Could be that ratings built on lame reality and tawdry fame isn’t what the public wants and they’re merely watching between laundry runs. Maybe instead of slapping the word celeb on every hair-brained concept, networks should invest in content with a shelf life longer than the latest Us Weekly cover story.

Everything on TV seems to be what works now–this second. Look at Fox. If something doesn’t click with us with super-hype before it airs, it’s history. That is not historically how it’s been with huge hits. So why, then, would it work today?

Building a business with a brand band-aid isn’t a Punk strategy. Being Punk is about listening to your consumer/user/viewer, taking that knowledge to heart so it intelligently works today and keeps people into you tomorrow.

To those short attention span thinkers at E!: maybe Paris doesn’t want us to be our BFF. And you know what? I think the folks at home are happy enough with Miley.

We all know the saying “Do as I say, not as I do.” But what happens when instead you preach “Do as I say, because if not I’ll climb down my insanely high horse and nail you to the courthouse door”? Well, you get the Elliot Spitzer story. Scratch that, the Spitzer Catastrophe.

While some are using this as an excuse to reargue the Clinton impeachment – “See? Slick Willy deserved to hang!” (which a lot of us know as “a vast rightwing conspiracy turned a BJ into a national catastrophe, yet it’s OK to lie about WMDs?”) – all that does is miss the evident point.

Facing a blood-seeking Republican Congress, Clinton lived to see the end of his presidency; Spitzie on the other hand was forced to resign within days of being found otu. Is it because one committed adultery while the other spent an estimated 80 Gs on prostitutes? Maybe. Or the real difference is, we think, Branding.

Sidebar: $80,000, wow, what were those women doing that made it worth $4500 a pop? I really can’t figure it out! If they haven’t started a how-to book, they’re need an agent. “Thousand Dollar Sex for Dummies,” there’s the title.

I’m back…. Politicians, like all public figures, consumer products, or corporations, are brands. They each use publicity and marketing to craft an image in the public consciousness. Clinton felt our pain cause he was one of us. He scarfed Big Macs, took an occasional toke, chased a little skirt. Was a dude!

But Spitzer, he was so much better than all of us, or at least that’s what he portended. The man used a shield of incorruptibility and a sword of integrity to smote those too morally weak to obey the law. He went after pillars or conmen of Wall Street (not to mention a few prostitution rings…I tell you undercover research must be mad fun) while glaring with open contempt down at those who failed to meet his standards. If your image is holier-than-thou Mr. Clean, you better make sure there’s truth in advertising.

When building a brand, you’ve got to leave room for human error, which is always inevitable as the absolute law of the universe. People make mistakes. PR and marketing strategies need to be flexible enough to allow for gaffes, lapses, peccadilloes, and, what the hay, even the occasional scandal.

It’s not what he did, right, but the hypocrisy that was immediately associated with the actions he pulled. Those nighttime activities conflicted with his brand and messaging. Were his actions that horrible? I don’t think so. But he was so buried in his own rhetoric that he had no choice but to step down before he was laughed down!

Want proof? Take Louisiana Senator and prostitute-lover David Vitter. After his recreational habits were outed by Larry Flynt, Vitter plum apologized. The verdict is not in on Vitter’s Hoegate, but it’s worth noting how, yep, he’s still there. While Vitter might have disappointed his constituents, nothing close to outrage followed.

So the lesson: Don’t let the messaging outstrip reality. And if you see a copy of “Thousand Dollar Sex for Dummies,” get it before the prurients protest it off the shelves. Cause according to a former high-ranking public official it’s worth the price.

You probably saw today that Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, is to become CEO once more after 7 years away from the post, a job he’d held for 13 years up until 2000. The reason for his return is to revive the performance of the flagging brand, which has seen its share price fall 48% in the last 12 months. This follows a leaked memo last year that Schultz had sent to Jim Donald, the dude he’s replacing as CEO, warning of “the commoditization of the Starbucks experience.”

Schultz is right about the need for Starbucks to be seen as something special if it hopes to carry on charging $3 or more for a cup of frothy coffee with so much competition from McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, and he recognized how important it was in the book he wrote 10 years ago, “Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built A Company One Cup At A Time.”

One problem is that there are so many Starbucks cafes (1,065 were opened last year to give a grand total of 6,700), making it difficult to support a position of specialness or distinctiveness. Schultz is convinced, however, that there’s still a lot of room for growth in the US - although it’s not yet clear whether he’ll stick to target of 20,000 cafes in the US (40,000 worldwide) that Jim Donald announced last October - and says that the drive for efficiency is to blame for depleted romance and theater of a visit to the stores.

I think that he needs to do a more serious overhaul than simply getting the barristas to put on a show when frothing the lattes. To stop the chain seeming like a chain, he needs to break the uniformity between stores, so that each one provides a unique and distinctive experience that reflects the neighborhood it’s in, the customers and the people who work there. Individual stores need to introduce special blends that you won’t find in the others (at least, not at the same time), chalkboards, community noticeboards and initiatives to help the local environment.

Customers used to talk about “my Starbucks,” but that sense of owneship has since gone. It’s become another faceless corporation selling undiferentiated products and, what with recession just around the corner, it’s going to become much more difficult to justify the price premium. The values people will seek in their purchases will be about discernment and frugality and Starbucks doesn’t not easily with either of those.

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe must be pretty upset today. The two founders of monster social networking site MySpace had sold it lock stock and barrel to NewsCorp for $580million in 2005. Just a few months later all of that investment and more ($900million to be precise) was recouped through a deal with Google in which it would became search engine partner for MySpace. And now Rupert Murdoch is considering swapping it for a 25% stake in Yahoo!

At the time, the deal seemed sweet: so sweet, in fact, that many observers thought Murdoch must have lost his wrinkled mind to pay that sum of money for MySpace. But then, in early 2006, Google (yes, THEM again) snapped up upstart online video site, YouTube, for $1.6billion, and its two founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, found themselves a few hundred million dollars richer.

The MySpace duo fumed.

No wonder they took umbrage and started to think they’d been ripped off by wily old Aussie, Murdoch. MySpace had far higher numbers of subscribers than that Johnny-come-lately YouTube and a business model that was bringing in real cash, not just column inches. So, in June this year, Anderson and DeWolfe decided to ask Rupert for more cash in compensation - to the (name that) tune of $12.5million a year each - to stay on after their contracts expired! Murdoch has counter-offered with $7.5million each for two years and, as far as I know, the discussions are still going on.

But, hot off the press (and long awaited) news about a deal between Microsoft Corp and Facebook must be making the two MySpace founders more bitter still. Today Microsoft said it was paying $240million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook - a site a mere four years old that again has way fewer users than MySpace - valuing it at around $15billion (or 25 times the amount MySpace was sold for). Grrr! And Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old founder of Facebook, frees up some cash for a bit of money for pocket money (to buy a Lear Jet, for instance) while staying firmly in control. GRRRRRRR!!!!

The moral of the tale? There is none. Murdoch is a shrewd dude who saw the potential of MySpace and snapped it up as the, what now looks to be, bargain of the century. Mark Zuckerberg is half a century (53 years!) younger and is every bit as savvy. And DeWolfe and Anderson made it big, but perhaps sold out too early (easy to say in hindsight). So, sorry Tom and Chris. Buy me some Cristal and I’ll help you commiserate.

The CEO of Sprint Nextel , Gary Forsee, resigned today because of the mobile carrier’s appalling loss of subscribers and financial performance.

Why is this significant? Because in an industry that is probably the very worst at customer service, Sprint Nextel is the real pits, and the man who let this happen has finally paid the price. As we explain in the chapter in Punk Marketing called ‘The Captive Consumer,’ companies that spend all of their efforts enticing customers in with slick marketing and empty promises and then treat them like burping pigs when they’ve signed a contract with them, will suffer in the long term. The threat of early termination fees (the money a customer has to spend to be released from their contract when they realized they’ve been duped) doesn’t create customer loyalty, it just adds to the bad taste in the mouth that poor aftersales support leaves.

According to Sprint Nextel they expect to report a net loss of 337,000 monthly postpaid subscribers in the recently completed 3rd quarter. That is indeed ‘major fleeing.’ Sprint, like most of the other carriers, just havent learned the lessons of other industries who also thought that the power lay with the corporation not the consumer. Think the airlines, for instance, many of whom have suffered as customers said “pah!” to the accumulated and unused frequent flier miles in their accounts and went to JetBlue or Southwest for their friendlier service.

So, Gary, we wish you farewell. And to Sprint we say, wake up and hear the ring tone. Finally get your act together and recognize that you are in the service industry. In other words treat your customers as people you don’t want to lose. Oh, and try and find a way to reduce your staff turnover in your stores. Hmm, wonder if those things are connected?