Disney Brands Fruit – Hard to Hate Healthy Move

For most of my youth, any food that was branded with a cartoon character was almost guaranteed to be bad for you – Count Chocula anyone?

The point of using cartoon characters on food items is to make kids beg and plead for the product until mom and dad simply cannot take it anymore and buy their kid this horribly unhealthy snack that the kid will soon realize doesn’t taste all that good in the first place.

So, the idea of Disney branding fruit is, well, kind of great.  Instead of using their nearly freakish powers of pursuasion for evil (as demonstrated in the season premiere of South Park – watch it, trust me) they are just selling pure, whole, unadulterated fruit.  And it’s working:

The savvy marketing move appears to be working too, as sales of the Disney Garden line were up 70 percent in 2008…At the end of the day, a kid clamoring for an apple emblazoned with the cherubic faces of characters from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, is still asking for an apple and as a result, parents have a harder time saying no.

Other brands can learn a lot from this example.  Instead of lending your name to crap that nobody truly wants or needs, try supporting something that can be both popular and positive.  Not only do sales increase but your general “halo” brightens.

LINK

Eisner Still Bullish on Web Video

Michael Eisner might have ended up in the world of web video by default after being (i think) pretty much driven out of Hollywood-proper but he’s certainly sticking to it.

Eisner’s company, Vuguru, was behind the ambitious Prom Queen web series and the currently running All-For-Knots.

He was speaking at Microsoft’s advance08 digital advertising conference in Redmond and had this to say about the big boys:

“I believe if the major distributors ignore this piece of the business, and make it hard for content producers to break even, make a little bit of money … they will find somebody like me — or somebody better-funded or somebody younger — (who) is going to create basically a portal … and they will be creating their own worst nightmare, which is another competitor.”

I certainly think he is right that the current budgets being proffered by the larger media companies are very small but they are in line with the sorts of revenue they’ve generated so far.  In short time, there will be a few genuine web success stories and the major distributors will either buy out the succesful little fish or push them out by force.

(via NewTeeVee)

Bizzaro Land

I thought I’d dozed off and awoken in Bizzaro Land when I read this lede from Broadcasting and Cable:

“Disney president and CEO Bob Iger expressed a very bullish take on new media at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit Wednesday morning in New York, chastising media executives for their skittish view of the multiple-platform approach to delivering content. “Brand managers look at technology with a deep-rooted aversion,” he said. “People take a protectionist view of it, but we’re projecting the brand versus protecting the brand.”

Wasn’t it just a couple hours ago all these people could talk about was how important it was to protect the brand?!

“Squeegees” Bad, Broadly Speaking

ReelPop has taken a longer look than I could stand at the ABC/Disney webisodic “Squeegees”.  He has a full review in THR but I thought this comment on his blog was more important:

“Why treat online video like TV? Why create something meant to appeal to a broad spectrum, when what the Web does best is coddle small(ish) groups of devoted viewers. If ABC wants to push boundaries — and don’t tell me that hookup in the office scene was a boundary pusher, ’cause it was laughable — then they should identify specific parts of their larger demo and appeal directly to them.”

I fear ReelPop is screaming into the wind but it’s nice to hear others taking up the call for first-rate programming on the internet.

BitTorrent – The Other Web Video

There is a very interesting post over on TorrentFreak about the incredibly high number of TV shows illegally (though I have yet to hear of any prosecution for this in the vein of what RIAA has been doing in the music industry) being downloaded and viewed via BitTorrent.

“It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over hundreds of sites. This number is getting awfully close to the average number of viewers on TV in the US. However, the major difference is that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.”

While Neilsen’s numbers I posted yesterday are interesting, they simply don’t account for the massive amount of TV that is being watched in this manner.  Aside from confirming that far more people are watching extensive amounts of content from the web than is being generally reported, it is also serving as a wake-up call to some of the more established players:

“Anne Sweeney -the president of the Disney-ABC television group- admitted that she was “inspired” after seeing a pirated copy of the hit-show “Desperate Housewives”. The pirated copy of this popular TV show was the main reason (besides the money) for Disney to sell their shows online. “Coming ‘face to face’ with the high-quality, commercial-free pirated version (of Desperate Housewives) told Disney that it was not just competing with other broadcasters, but with digital pirates and as such was an experience that prompted us to do the iTunes deal with Apple.” Sweeney said at the time.”

This is something Mason talks about in The Pirate’s Dilemma – the fact that legitimate players MUST find a way to compete with Pirates if they want to remain in business.  The only way to do that is to change their practices to better serve the consumer.  All the Pirates are doing is giving people what they want – a completely open copy of the show they can watch on any device.