Thursday, June 30, 2005
Hits and Misses
For the sequel, how about $12.5 Million Baby? Anyone who's anyone in Hollywood knows the rule: Always sign your next deal before the buzz from your last hit dies down. Now you can count boxing equipment maker Everlast Worldwide among the anyones, as the company followed its starring role in Million Dollar Baby with a five-year women's apparel licensing deal with Jacques Moret International that guarantees it $2.5 million in annual royalties. Everlast's fancy footwork has been a knockout on Wall Street too: In the four months after the movie's debut, its stock tripled to more than $13 a share.
I like big bucks and I cannot lie. When it comes to picking music, wireless carriers are a lot like radio stations: The ringtones they promote come straight from the top of the charts. Great for flavors of the month; not so great for anyone else trying to cash in on the ringtone craze. So what's an old-school hip-hop artist like Sir Mix-a-Lot -- pushing a ringtone remix of “Baby Got Back" called “Pick Up the Phone" -- to do? Mix-a-Lot turned to “mobile brand management" firm Versaly Entertainment, which picked up the phone and worked its relationships with direct-to-consumer marketers. The top source of sales: those obnoxious late-night Jamster commercials on MTV and BET. The ringtone went gold in seven weeks, selling 500,000 units at $2 a pop.
To boldly promote what no marketer has promoted before. ad agencies often promise clients the moon -- but rarely do they mean it literally. Nonetheless, Euro RSCG helped Volvo achieve liftoff with a clever promotion for the automaker's XC90 SUV: a contest that awarded the winner a seat on the first commercial launch of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Not surprisingly, 135,000 would-be astronauts entered the giveaway after it was launched with an ad aired during the Super Bowl. More surprisingly, 60,000 of them also requested information on Volvo cars, and more than 1,000 placed preorders. Volvo says the sales leads and publicity it received as a result of the contest were worth $5 million -- more than twice what it spent on the 30-second Super Bowl spot.
I like big bucks and I cannot lie. When it comes to picking music, wireless carriers are a lot like radio stations: The ringtones they promote come straight from the top of the charts. Great for flavors of the month; not so great for anyone else trying to cash in on the ringtone craze. So what's an old-school hip-hop artist like Sir Mix-a-Lot -- pushing a ringtone remix of “Baby Got Back" called “Pick Up the Phone" -- to do? Mix-a-Lot turned to “mobile brand management" firm Versaly Entertainment, which picked up the phone and worked its relationships with direct-to-consumer marketers. The top source of sales: those obnoxious late-night Jamster commercials on MTV and BET. The ringtone went gold in seven weeks, selling 500,000 units at $2 a pop.
To boldly promote what no marketer has promoted before. ad agencies often promise clients the moon -- but rarely do they mean it literally. Nonetheless, Euro RSCG helped Volvo achieve liftoff with a clever promotion for the automaker's XC90 SUV: a contest that awarded the winner a seat on the first commercial launch of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Not surprisingly, 135,000 would-be astronauts entered the giveaway after it was launched with an ad aired during the Super Bowl. More surprisingly, 60,000 of them also requested information on Volvo cars, and more than 1,000 placed preorders. Volvo says the sales leads and publicity it received as a result of the contest were worth $5 million -- more than twice what it spent on the 30-second Super Bowl spot.
