"Hard Candy" landed on CD shelves this week and the attendant product launch is an instructive lesson in modern media blitzing. The day after releasing her new CD, the 49-year-old mother of two got gussied up in leather pants, held a shiny black electric guitar across her chest, and rocked out to a 32-minute sampling of her music. The show—touted as a departure from her costly stadium extravaganzas—attracted throngs of notoriously impatient New Yorkers, some lining up for as many as 60 hours outside the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan for free admission to the quasi-intimate set. For those fans unable to line up on west 52nd Wednesday night, there were other options: MSN broadcasted the concert live on the Internet, Verizon and Vodafone let you watch it on cell phones worldwide, 1,000 tickets were given as freebes to radio and online winners, and 200 tickets were reserved for lucky members of Madonna’s social-networking fan club.
She "worked" the video in the 80s, cashed in on the concert-documentary-book package in the 90s, and in the new millennium she's reaching the audience who drives music industry sales--young people--by partnering with youthful figures like Spears and Timberlake, and following kids to the one place they are sure to be found: cyberspace. It's this kind of media savvy that has allowed Madonna to prolong a career that others said would start to sag like an old woman’s bum by now.
If no longer on the cutting edge of cool, the entrepreneur hasn’t lost her sexiness when it comes to business smarts, making full use of modern technologies to hock her brand of watery pop. The marketing machine behind Madonna still uses the star’s once-racy image as leverage for sales, but where once the force of her success was sexual controversy, now it is pure marketing and PR savvy.
She "worked" the video in the 80s, cashed in on the concert-documentary-book package in the 90s, and in the new millennium she's reaching the audience who drives music industry sales--young people--by partnering with youthful figures like Spears and Timberlake, and following kids to the one place they are sure to be found: cyberspace. It's this kind of media savvy that has allowed Madonna to prolong a career that others said would start to sag like an old woman’s bum by now.
If no longer on the cutting edge of cool, the entrepreneur hasn’t lost her sexiness when it comes to business smarts, making full use of modern technologies to hock her brand of watery pop. The marketing machine behind Madonna still uses the star’s once-racy image as leverage for sales, but where once the force of her success was sexual controversy, now it is pure marketing and PR savvy.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment