Celebrity content seems to know no bounds. Each day seems to bring another Hollywood misfit or fashionista ripping through the headlines. Is Celebrity the new mass medium? It seems America’s appetite for gossip, the candid and manufactured images that grace tabloid covers, and now an endless array of celebrity blogs just can’t be satisfied. Celebrity is a booming marketplace and all of this just adds up to good business for an array of old media and new media entrepreneurs. What drives the economics of celebrity content, supply or demand? What are the challenges of monetizing it? Who is creating, producing, and distributing the content? Where are investors seeing opportunities in this new mass and who is capturing the most buzzworthy M&A opportunities to be the biggest and best in the space. Join us on July 23 at the Hollywood Roosevelt for EconCeleb, our half-day seminar that will cover these topics and more. Keep checking back here as we finalize our program details but, in the meantime, you can expect…
Who Is Shooting Who?: The Paparazzi Marketplace
There is no celebrity media without the paparazzi, their actions and interactions with Hollywood’s elite manufacture the images that keep all of our adrenaline flowing. What drives this marketplace and how is it changing? Who are the characters that bring us closer to the people we love to hate, and what are their techniques for reaching them? How are the aparazzi building competitive advantage and protect their copy write? What new technologies help them differentiate? And how are these traditional business to business suppliers taking advantage of the internet in going direct to consumers, by publishing their own blogs.
Is Celebrity The New Mass Medium?: The Portal Play and the New Aggregators
The homepages of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN look more like portals into the world of celebrity and gossip than gateways to the breadth of content and services that also lie below. What’s under the hood of the large portal celebrity operations, who are they aggregating, doing deals with, and acquiring? Since business is good, who else is getting into the game and what will make or break their attempts to roll up audience, diversify and compete?
They’re Buying It, But Can We Sell It?: Advertising And Celebrity Content
The racier the headline, the more salacious the photo, the more the audience. It’s a great media equation but it’s not always that appealing for the advertisers that pay the high CPM freight that can power the celebrity economy. Ad networks provide one answer and are successfully fueling a fringe economy that has launched successful blogs like PerezHilton.com, Defamer and Celebslam, capturing narrower and narrower slices of audience with their clever writing and up-to-the-minute gossip monitoring. It’s a perfect storm, but many brand advertisers are hesitant to work with these outrageous publishers, how are the big brands testing the waters, how are the portals rolling up the traffic and do the fringe bloggers need to clean up their act so they can all share in the bounty of the celebrity content gold rush?
Who Has The Purse Strings?: Celebrities Invest In Online Media, Media Invests In Celebs
The internet lets everyone have their own media company, and it seems like every day celebrities are investing in social media sites. Will Ferrell is behind FunnyorDie, Ashton Kutcher in SaysMe and Lance Armstrong is working with Demand Media. How are celebrities putting their money and their brand names behind new media? What does will this impact the traditional media value chain, who is doing the producing, who gets paid and where will traditional studies live in the mix?
Another Celebrity Site?: Blogs and Social Media Get in the Game
There are now thousands of celebrity sites on the internet, some well known, others fan communities where start struck celebrity watchers pour over every piece of news and gossip about their idols. Who are the pros, semi pros and fans and how are they mixing together online, creating a network of content that chronicles every detail of celebrity life? Meet the new publishers from bloggers to fans and understand where the opportunities are to aggregate, acquire and incent these passionate pro and semi-pro publishers to narrowcast their passions and crowd source the new mass audience.
Who is in Control?: The Real Producers—Meet Hollywood’s Publicists
Publicists speak softly in celebrity media but may carry the biggest stick. Their job is to manage and control the celebrity image and to protect that image like a brand so that its fit to produce the greatest ROI. How has the onslaught of paparazzi and the glut of celebrity bloggers changed this equation and how are publicists pushing back and embracing the changing economics of celebrity image management and creations?
