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John Tantillo's Brand Winner... And Loser: The Academy Awards and Book Publishing
Posted by The Marketing Doctor at 3/11/2010 7:44 AM 
Categories: Marketing,Branding
Tags: Pulitzer target market publishers book publishing Hollywood awards ceremony Oscars marketing Academy Awards branding Tantillo Nickelodeon The Last Train From Hiroshima Henry Holt
Categories: Marketing,Branding
Tags: Pulitzer target market publishers book publishing Hollywood awards ceremony Oscars marketing Academy Awards branding Tantillo Nickelodeon The Last Train From Hiroshima Henry Holt
| Brand Winner... | And Loser... |
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John Tantillo’s Winner and Loser of The Week:
Winner: The Academy Awards
Loser: Book Publishing
This past week saw two distinguished industry brands that are in very different positions. One critical reason: marketing (both fundamental and promotional).
The Winner
The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929 as a brunch for 250 plus people and as a way of gaining visibility for the artistic and cultural significance of the movie industry.
As promotion and publicity tactic, it worked wonders. Not only are the Oscars now the oldest media awards ceremony, they are easily the most famous. The latest, this past Sunday’s 82nd Academy Awards, was one of the most watched, with a full 41 million viewers, easily beating out any other programs in competing time slots.
But my focus isn’t on the viewer numbers; it is on the intelligence of the marketing that builds such a complementary promotional brand for an entire industry.
Go back to movies in the early 1900s. We’re talking about a largely commercial activity popularized by Nickelodeons (theaters that employed the new cinematic technology as a novelty for five cents a pop). Over the course of the twentieth century, this business not only prospered but became a major —maybe the major— cultural force in the world. The awards ceremony was a powerful tool that differentiated the developing film industry from its strictly commercial, Nickelodeon roots.
Let’s face it: the Oscars started as a trade show with a twist, and that twist —highlighting the cultural importance of the product and all the associated glamour— has made Hollywood a pre-eminent cultural brand (and kept the cash registers ringing at the box office). The Oscars have reinforced stardom, underscored artistic achievement and awarded excellence. By doing so, they have strengthened the industry, attracting the best and the brightest and maintaining Hollywood’s status as centerpiece of our culture.
This brand strength matters now more than ever since the product they are selling is being pressed on all sides by increasing distribution costs, competing media and even the drop in bar to entry by aspiring film makers who might be able to get around the studio system.
But if the 41 million viewers and the massive interest in everything Oscar on the Internet tells us anything, Hollywood has real marketing so wrapped up in its DNA that it will survive whatever challenges lie ahead, and it will continue to prosper.
Bottom line: long ago, the movie industry recognized its brand and the need to promote it in an effective way that appeared (and was) culturally selfless (many of the ten entries for Best Picture had very limited release). Hurrah for Hollywood!
The Loser
Another media industry facing incredible pressures from the Internet and new technology is book publishing.
Book publishing could learn a lot from Hollywood, but so far the players are just fumbling.
Not only are publishers showing uncertainty with respect to the central question of correct pricing of product (i.e., the recent dispute between publishers and Amazon over how to price e-books), but more importantly, they’re making big errors when it comes to the heart of their business: being gatekeepers of literary quality.
After all, why buy a commercially published book if you can’t be sure that the content is professional quality?
Last week, Henry Holt & Company recalled all copies of The Last Train From Hiroshima because of what’s thought to be major factual inaccuracies and fraudulent sourcing. Wow! You’d think that a publisher would have fact-checked and made sure that the product carrying its imprint was unassailable. Unfortunately, the dirty little secret of commercial publishing is that publishers simply don’t do this kind of fact-checking or quality control anymore. This quality control might be easy to eliminate for the bean counters, but it provides critical value for the product and the strength of the brand.
The recent Toyota debacle tells us where cutting corners on quality will lead.
But a more fundamental marketing question is this one: How can it be that an industry (publishing) that has existed for hundreds of years as opposed to Hollywood’s one hundred, and that has been so central to culture, doesn’t have the oldest awards ceremony?
The short answer: they never created one.
Sure, there are the Pulitzers and others, but what Hollywood did was create an award show that appealed to both the industry insiders and their customers. Publishing awards and ceremonies are strictly inside baseball.
I don’t want to go into the reasons why publishing never did this (i.e., industry arrogance, belief in its own importance, etc.), but the fact is, not having done this means that today the industry has no recognizable center, no annual rite that reminds America that it’s important. Of course, someone could argue that Hollywood had glamour and mass appeal that books didn’t, but first think Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, then remember that in many ways Hollywood and publishing have a symbiotic relationship (so many movies were originally books); and, finally, some smart promotion could have borrowed Hollywood glamour and perhaps Hollywood celebrities to create a talked-about awards ceremony.
Maybe it’s in the DNA of publishers to speak the right marketing words but fundamentally reject the promotional necessities and genuine attempts at connecting with their Target Markets. Maybe the glowing book review is what they ultimately care about, and they will reject any attempts to follow Hollywood’s marketing example. But maybe they should try to fight against this culture and opt for a marketing bypass.
That’s where publishing is right now, trying to figure out just what the next step is, because the fundamentals of marketing their industry were ignored long ago.
And remember, things are always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.
TODAY'S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY -
Industries, like companies, need to promote themselves even when the times are good and build marketable brands for the long-term.
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