The consumer goods giant is part of a wave of companies getting into the music business to promote their own products, essentially becoming record labels themselves.

Procter & Gamble, for example, is joining Island Def Jam in a joint venture called Tag Records, a label that will sign and release albums by new hip-hop acts. It is named after a brand of body spray that P.& G. acquired when it bought Gillette.

American Brandstand’s Hit Parade

American Brandstand’s Hit Parade

Lucian James, founder of brand consultancy Agenda, explains how his tracking of product mentions in hip hop lyrics can pay off for marketers

Agenda: American Brandstand, 310 Motoring, Toyota Auto/Music Player, Acoustic NWA?The recent release of the American Brandstand report from Agenda Inc. received widespread attention in such venues as CNNMoney.com for its annual analysis of which brands got name checked the most in the top 20. Mercedes-Benz took top “honors”.

Ankling Alliance, a New York-based branded entertainment shop that he co-founded in 1997 and is owned by ad agency WPP.

United Talent Agency

branded entertainment

The Gotham-based shingle will operate independently from UTA and focus on developing and producing entertainment properties for consumer brands seeking to court customers in nontraditional ways.

That means original Web series, TV shows, movies, music, live events, vidgames and publishing rather than pure product placement.

UTA already serves as the Hollywood rep for such companies as Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters and will continue to do so.

But as a separate entity, UEG will enable the ten percentery to go beyond advising clients on what stars, projects and events to target. UEG will be in a position to produce programming for a range of corporate clients, not just those repped by UTA. UEG intends to work with other talent agencies, advertising agencies and brands.

Despite some major client wins, UTA has been looking for some time for a way to make its corporate advisory practice stand out from the strong departments at rivals like CAA, William Morris Agency, ICM and Endeavor.

“The thrust of this business is to take consumer brands and create content with them, for them and on their behalf,” said UTA co-founder and partner Peter Benedek. “It’s not meant to be a pure consulting business, which is what we do now. We didn’t have the ability to do the kinds of things (Moses) does given what we’re doing the rest of our day.”

UEG will have an incentive to make its projects stand out as it will own a piece of everything it produces, though the client will own the majority of those properties.

“We will participate as partners,” Moses said. “We’re building these programs from scratch but also being vested with them. It’s really about having a seat at the table and putting our money where our mouth is.”

While CEO of Alliance, Moses worked with such clients as Procter & Gamble, the Coca-Cola Co., NBC Universal, Panasonic, Reebok, Mercedes Benz, MTV Networks, Hasbro, Motorola and Wal-Mart, brokering strategic partnerships, concert tours, endorsement deals and product placements.

 corporate clients entertainment projects.

UTA, Moses taking brand stand - Entertainment News, Tenpercenteries, Media - Variety

Felicity Huffman

http://www.vivendi.com/vivendi/-accueil-en-

Businesses and nonprofit organizations are joining together in alliances to create value for themselves and society that far surpass the sum of their parts.

*This program does a good job of backing up all the information on your hard drive. After a quick installation, CopyRite offers you a choice between opening the software and associating ZIP-archived files with its ZIP Explorer. You can switch between the backup utility and the ZIP Explorer with a shortcut button. Although the button design is sloppy, the interface is otherwise well-organized. The rest of the program works well, and backup takes little time. You can configure the software to schedule a time to synchronize and check your backed-up files. The feature set makes this utility a good fit for home users.

Coca-Cola, move over. Many of the world’s best-known brands belong to nonprofits, but the brand management issues these organizations face can be quite different.

The board
The A&R department
The marketing department
The creative services department
The production department
The sales and distribution department
The international department

the agent will deal with live work enquiries.

The researchers believe that most downloading is done over peer-to-peer networks by teens and college kids, groups that are “money-poor but time-rich,” meaning they wouldn’t have bought the songs they downloaded. In that sense, the music industry can’t claim those downloads as lost record sales.

Apple makes little money from the sale of songs. It is estimated that record companies pocket about $.65 per song sold on iTunes and Apple keeps $.34 to cover the costs of running the service, infrastructure, encoding, dealing with credit card companies, et cetera. Apple’s profit comes from the sale of iPods and related products. It is no secret that a large percentage of music files on iPods have not been purchased on iTunes. Most come from users’ CD collections, other online stores (such as allofmp3.com), p2p file sharing networks, and other forms of piracy (like sharing between friends). A thriving p2p community acts as an engine for iPod sales.

ITunes’s 99 cents per song is ultimately a compromise between Apple and the owners of content, in this case the record companies. We believe that from the point of view of Apple, 99 cents is too expensive. Because profit comes mainly from the sale of hardware, Apple is likely to prefer lower download prices. From the point of view of intellectual property owners, 99 cents is probably too low. Record companies have attempted to renegotiate with Apple to set higher prices for new, more popular content. Our analysis suggests that this may be a bad idea because it is precisely for popular content that p2p is a better substitute for iTunes. Rare content, on the other hand, is where p2p does not seem to work well as there are fewer peers offering it. With this initiative, record companies seem to be applying traditional “brick-and-mortar thinking” in their competition against p2p. But this is surely the wrong mindset to deal with p2p.

Delivering the Digital Goods: iTunes vs. Peer-to-Peer — HBS Working Knowledge

The process of obtaining content, an important part of the experience, also differs. ITunes provides a unified interface that seamlessly integrates the location, purchase, and consumption of content. Users of p2p networks, on the other hand, must navigate a complex environment and endure varying levels of congestion that hinder the quality of the process. ITunes certainly has the upper hand in this area.

there is a relationship between consumer expectations (i.e., buzz) before a movie’s release and its subsequent market performance.

What makes a movie click with an audience? How important is buzz in the success or failure of an entertainment product? Should worldwide releases of movies be done over time, or all at once?

The Hollywood Stock Exchange is an online market simulation that revolves around movies and movie stars. It is a game—no real money is involved—with over half a million players. Anyone who is interested in playing can join the simulation. New HSX traders receive “Hollywood dollars” and can increase the value of their portfolio by, among other things, strategically trading “MovieStocks.” The prices of those MovieStocks reflect expectations of box office revenues.

Just how much do movie stars contribute to box office success? HBS professor Anita Elberse researched the notion of “star power” to better understand how A-list players contribute to Hollywood’s bottom line.

This paper reviews research and trends in three key areas of movie making: production, distribution, and exhibition.

• Star participation positively impacts movie revenue.

• Do not just bet on an A-list star: Combine the right star with the right cast. These interdependencies complicate talent recruitment and compensation decisions.
• Star participation may not add to firm studios’ valuation. If profitability or shareholder value is a key objective, studio executives could alter their talent compensation schemes.

Elberse sees great potential in studying these phenomena in other industries, such as music and books. Given the more private nature of music consumption, she expects the shift toward the tail may well be more pronounced in that industry.

“There’s a value in my having seen the same movie as you because they are often the topic of conversation,” she explains. “It’s frustrating if we’re trying to have a chat about movies and neither of us has seen the same film. But that may be less of a problem in music.”