Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue - sex still sells

The cover of Vanity Fair’s March 2006 Hollywood issue shows actresses Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson posing nude together with the fully dressed fashion designer and guest editor Tom Ford.
Even before publication, the cover raises many eyebrows.

Why is a magazine cover in general so important?

“Vanity Fair” is one of the many magazines that need to attract readers.
If an issue in this cutthroat magazine industry sells more than 30 percent of its copies it’s considered to be a success. Every copy sold above that is money in the bank.
The trick is to grab first-time buyers at the newsstand within their 2 1/2 seconds attention span.
The best way to ensure this is a hot cover.
“The cover is your calling card; people are making a split-second decision, do it’s got to be compelling,” confirms Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.
(“Rolling Stone” has produced memorable covers over the years, including the one showing a nude John Lennon wrapped around a clothed Yoko Ono)

But even before the “Vanity Fair” Hollywood issue hit the newsstands, it already created media frenzy and rekindled the age-old debate “female vs. male nudity”.
Apart from the racy cover, famed (female) photographer Annie Leibovitz shot a 46-page photo spread for the issue in which actresses Sienna Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, and Joy Bryant also appear in various states of nudity.
The photographed male actors are all dressed, including George Clooney amid a bevy of women in flesh-toned underwear.

This leads to the question: is this arty and fun, or does it say something about sexual politics in Hollywood?
And does a serious actress still need to take her clothes off to get attention?

According to Janice Min, editor of the much-read celebrity magazine US Weekly, female stars disrobe since they have to be sexy to be a successful and bankable. Men on the other hand are
not viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are.

Journalism professor Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi claims that Americans have been trained to look at pictures of naked women, but not of naked men.
The American public has therefore an inherent fear of pictures of naked men.
He goes on calling the Vanity Fair issue a "Playboy" issue, since it sports naked women.
He agrees that the magazine has scored huge buzz, though.

He is not alone in that observation – famed society columnist Liz Smith wrote about a dinner party where people were passing the issue around, declaring it “ridiculous ... egotistical ... absurd”.

Vanity Fair spokeswoman Beth Kseniak said it’s too early to say how the magazine will sell, but that it has scored about 3,000 new subscriptions and almost 5 million web site page views before the end of February 2006 alone.
Some of that buzz has been negative, of course.
Vitriolic Rebecca Traister calls the cover an “over-the-top orgy of self-love, misogyny and idiocy” by Ford (who came up with the concept) in salon.com.

Since the cover is so buzz-worthy, US Weekly conducted a poll and asked its readers about their opinion.
The result: most thought the actresses looked better with clothes on.
(It would be interesting to know the age and gender of the interviewees).

No matter what you viewpoint on naked females (or males) on magazine covers is, “Vanity Fair” created wonderful PR with its cover thus increasing its sales figures.
So you see, sex still sells and that’s the naked truth!

Marketing Milk

One of the most successful marketing campaigns ever is the American “Got Milk?” one.

Since the 1960s, the consumption of milk had dramatically dropped, having its impact on national health.
The number of osteoporosis cases, bone density loss, broken bones and hips were increasing.
In 1994, the nation's milk processors, Congress and the Secretary of Agriculture decided that it was time to educate the public about the importance of milk in their diets.

The goal was clear: the thirty-year milk consumption decline had to be reversed.
The mindset and attitude of consumers had to be changed – milk had to become “cool”.
Competition had to be overcome – soda manufacturers spend hundreds of millions a year to promote soft drinks.

The first step was to educate the public about facts.
Apart that milk is good for the body, the information campaign stressed to little known facts:
1) fat-free and low-fat milk have the same calcium, vitamins and minerals as whole milk;
2) women need the calcium in milk for constant bone mass replacement to prevent bone density loss, fractured bones, or osteoporosis later in life.

The “got milk?” campaign was first launched in October 1993 by the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB). The ad was developed by longtime CMPB advertising partner Goodby Silverstein & Partners and directed by Oscar-nominated Hollywood director, Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor and The Rock).

The spot opened on an American history buff stuffing a huge peanut butter sandwich into his mouth and listening to a classical music radio channel.
The DJ announces a $10,000 trivia question, “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” The camera pans an apartment filled with memorabilia from the famous duel, including a portrait of Burr and the actual bullet preserved in a glass curio.
Mouth crammed and unable to respond, the pitiful history buff reaches for the milk only to find it empty. Desperate, he can only mutter “Aaaawon Buuuuhh.”
The spot ends with the now familiar “got milk?”

“Aaron Burr” was the first in a series of remarkable ads that introduced “got milk?” to audiences nationally and helped resuscitate milk sales.
“Aaron Burr” also turned the ad world upside down and earned the advertising industry’s most prestigious accolades, including three Gold CLIOs and a Gold EFFIE.
In 2002, “Aaron Burr” was named 1 of 10 best ads of all time by a USATODAY poll.
It has been featured in numerous books on advertising and is being used in case studies at top-flight MBA programs around the country.

The public also quickly took to the “Milk Mustache” – the printed ads that show celebrities sporting milk on their upper lip.

The impact of the campaign is a marketing and PR dream: over 90% awareness nationally.
The tagline has been licensed to dairy boards around the country as well as to wide range of consumer goods including Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels, baby and teen apparel and kitchenware.

Marketing Neo-Victorian Kitsch Fashion

Fifteen years ago, Michal Negrin and her husband left Kibbutz Na’an in Israel to pursue the city lifestyle in Tel Aviv.
Michal had a personal passion for kitsch and designed her own jewelry.
She opened a small stall in the Nahalat Binyamin pedestrian mall where she sold her own jewelry creations.
She positioned her jewelry as Israeli Victorian romance.
Her first designs were pieces embroidered with lace and small colorful glass stones, that quickly became a hit.
As her designs became more popular, demand grew, and she decided to expand her business.
She positioned her designs as Neo-Victorian glittering and colorful pieces of jewelry.
Her branding message to her customers is that they buy into "a world of beautiful colors, dreams and the imagination, not bound to any formal or classical forms, thus combining and mingling colors - all based on Negrin’s tender, romantic style."
She moved from her home into a workshop, with a small store attached.
In 1993, her first flagship store opened in the heart of Tel Aviv's trendy Sheinkin Street.
Since then, her empire has expanded by leaps and bounds, with twelve Michal Negrin stores at major shopping malls and centers in Israel, and 39 stores from Japan and Hong Kong to France and the United States.
Negrin's creations can also be found at the counters of the most prestigious U.S. department stores such as Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's, Henri Bendel and Marshall Fields.

The stores are not just shops, but Negrin "meccas".
Each shop is designed as veritable Victorian oasis encompassing everything in the Michal Negrin lifestyle, from jewelry to clothing to home accessories, such as decorative pillows and printed fabrics sold by the yard – not unlike the Laura Ashley shops in the ‘70s and ‘80s.Production is done in her Israeli factory in Bat Yom, where 150 immigrants from the CIS are employed.

The Negrin designs have been embraced by high-profile customers such as Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, Kim Bassinger, Uma Thurman, Dustin Hoffman, Joni Mitchell, Celine Dion and Jane Seymour.
Negrin jewelry has also featured in Britney's music videos and in the latest movie of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Michal Negrin Designs Ltd. is still growing and expending.

What are its success factors?

• Stong and unique product positioning - shameless kitsch adorned with floral designs, images of angels and drawings of elaborately made-up ladies, radiating Victorian boudoir romance.
  
• Riding the current fashion wave for elaborate necklaces, chandelier earrings and baroque jewelry.
  
• Marketing a lifestyle and not just a piece of jewelry
  
• Consistant branding in all designs as well as outlets
  
• Subtle PR - tasteful ads, word-of mouth, celebrity promotion
  

Marketing Desperate Housewives – a tale of focus, strategy and luck

The show "Desperate Housewives" presented a complex marketing challenge to ABC.
Launching a new show is always a high-wire act - at least 50% of new shows typically fail within a year.
The show was facing stiff competition NBC's "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and WB network’s "Jack & Bobby."

As with all new products, correct positioning was the first step to take.
Initially ABC started to sell the show as being dark and mysterious, since a suicide happens in the first five minutes.
However, they quickly realized that this positioning would not appeal to the target audience (housewives). It would not connect with the target audience.
Instead, ABC decided to focus on the name of the show and go from there.
After a market research, they decided to sell the show as a fun, sexy soap.

As a marketing strategy, it was decided not to spoon feed the audience, but keep details of the show secret.
If too many details were already shown, viewers might decide not to tune it at all.
The challenge was to put together clips that embodied the spirit of the show without spoiling the surprise.
For PR, ABC used the media planning agency OMD (part of the Omnicom Group) that created a promotion mix of the usual on-air and online mechanisms.
They also capitalized on the show’s tagline "Everybody has a little dirty laundry".

As a marketing gimmick, they put this tagline on the sides of laundry bags at various laundry mats and got greater buzz than the on-air and online ads.
About a million such bags were distributed (by Ambient Planet) in Los Angeles and New York.
Next to the slogan, the bags also bore photographs of four principal cast members of the series.
The marketing campaign also included (apart from the normal promotional spots) ads on billboards and buses and "screening parties" at health clubs.

The TV viewers embraced the show as a popular, twisted soap-comedy-drama-mystery.
Once it became a hit, merchandizing took off as well.
Apart from the ABC online store, entrepreneurs big and small are capitalizing on the new show's strong following.
TV-inspired garb was being snapped up such as T-shirts flaunting "I love Susan" to cherry red aprons saying "Honey, the marriage counseling might not work. You need to get used to bad cooking."
While sales numbers were not provided by ABC representatives, tvtee.com sold about 500 "Desperate Housewives"-inspired shirts in less than two months.
ABC did confirm that T-shirts were among the hottest-selling products during the show’s first Christmas season on the ABC.com store.

The show does some clever in-house marketing as well.
In one episode, one of the desperate housewives (Lynnette Scavo, played by Felicity Huffman) is trying to help her husband Tom (played by Doug Savant) by suggesting to improve his sales campaign for his client’s product "Spotless Scrub" aimed at women.
Her idea: advertise on dry-cleaning bags.

For the second season, the show boasted the slogan "New season, new dirty laundry."
ABC entertainment President Steven McPherson is a strong believer in marketing and wanted to optimize on the success of the multi-award-winning show that finished its first run as the fourth most watched program on television.
With their show ranking at the top of the Nielsens and up for a whopping 15 Emmy Awards, the stars of ABC's Desperate Housewives are also riding the merchansize wave - everything from soda pop to satellite radio.
Nicollette Sheridan and Marcia Cross hawk 7-Up Plus in a spot called "Shopping Showdown." Sheridan also endorses Di Modolo jewelry.
Eva Longoria, who appeared with Diddy in the "Truck" Super Bowl ad for Diet Pepsi, has new deals with L'Oréal and Sirius Satellite Radio.
Teri Hatcher, a veteran of Radio Shack spots, has recently appeared in ads for Variety, wearing nothing but a copy of the Hollywood trade paper.
The Desperate Men are equally in demand.
Ricardo Antonio Chavira and James Denton have been cast in a print campaign for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation sponsored by Lee Jeans.

Due to the show’s racy image, there are advertisers that steer away from it.
Mary Kay, Lowe's, Tyson Foods and Kellogg's pulled their ad dollars from "Desperate Housewives" after receiving negative reactions from their customer groups.
This didn’t greatly impact the show - Advertising Age reports that the asking price for a 30-second spot on Desperate Housewives jumped from an initial $150,000 to $300,000 once the show became a runaway hit.

What made "Desperate Housewives" a success in a market were half of the new shows fail within a year?

• Market research – ABC did its homework and identified its target audience
  Positioning – the show was correctly positioned and received as a fun, sexy, soap-comedy-drama-mystery
  
• Promotion – ABC created a perfect promotion mix
  
• Branding – ABC build a strong show brand, using catching taglines
  
• Marketing - ABC, the cast and the marketing company are marketing the show and themselves, including merchandizing