BigShinyThing

The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of Tyra Banks about which there has been much bitchery online. She’s an easy target: utterly lampoonable yet ruthlessly ambitious. We think the interview is a masterclass in how to build a media brand and in how to maintain control. Particularly fascinating are the insights into how Tyra and her formidable mother London plotted her rise. Any fame wannabes should pay particular attention to the following:

Around this time, in the mid-’90s, Banks started gaining weight. Her agency made a list titled, “Designers who will not book Tyra because of hips and breasts.” They had a meeting with London and told her to put her daughter on a diet. “My mother told me the whole thing as we were walking down the street in Milan,” Banks said. “She said, ‘They say you’re too curvy. Let’s go order pizza.’ We walked into a pizzeria, and we discussed a career change.” Her curves dictated a different sort of modeling. “Tyra was always smart,” Veronica Webb said. “Tyra didn’t like clothes, and why should she? She looked great in a bikini. And in a bra and panties. That’s where the real action is in the fashion business: if you have great cleavage, you can make a fortune. When Tyra started to get really curvy, she signed a contract with Victoria’s Secret. For a black girl, that was incredible.

Genius. Instead of bowing to the dictates of the fashion industry, Tyra and her mother dictated back. Rather than moulding her body to the industry, Tyra diversified. Did the gamble pay off? Tyra used the platform of her Victoria’s Secret contract to create her own celebrity brand. We also suspect she maintains a lucrative relationship with the lingerie company: note how many times she refers to the brand when reminiscing about her modelling days. From her two shows — Top Model and the eponymous chat show, Banks now makes an estimated $18 million a year, and her net worth is around $75 million. Both shows are constructed around her highly ‘Bankable’ (the name of Tyra’s production company) persona. She owns 25 percent of “Top Model” and last fall Bankable Productions signed a deal to develop projects for Warner Brothers television. She wins.

(Full disclosure: Top Model is probably my favourite reality tv show format of all time. Those unable to fathom its appeal should probably read this.)

Easy peezy. Visit the Brand Tags site, and be shown a logo. Type in a single word that sums up your instant reaction. Rinse and repeat. The resulting tag clouds offer a nice reality check on spontaneous brand associations aggregated from the (entertainingly skewed) mob of rag-tag respondents: popular tags include ‘useless’ (for Twitter) and ‘bullshit’ (Evian). Draw your own conclusions.

Lawyers for Hasbro and Mattel have asked Facebook to pull the game, saying that Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game. The game was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two software developers based in Kolkata, and has 594,924 daily active users - about a quarter of the total that have so far signed up to play it. Interestingly, the brothers say they hit upon the idea of launching a free online Scrabble game when a site where they used to play decided to charge its users in 2004 (how very Web 1.0).

“Next year, we decided to launch our own free scrabble site. It was to help the gaming community,” says Jayant. Rajat and Jayant claim that they contacted Hasbro about collaborating on the game but received no response. It it worth noting that it has taken the toy giants rather a long time to react to the game, despite its high profile and obvious similarity (it’s exactly the same) to Scrabble.

Brands dream of getting this kind of traction online — and Scrabulous has arguably caused a generation to fall in love with Scrabble all over again. If Hasbro and Mattel succeed in having the game removed — rather than entering into talks with the developers — they will have scored a spectacular own goal. A Save Scrabulous group is already ablaze with Facebookers commenting on their shortsightedness - it currently has 6,000 members and counting. Of course Mattel and Hasbro are going to create their own version. But why not just piggy-back on what’s already there, and reap the benefits? Hasbro and Mattel have an opportunity here to engage properly with social media and look like good guys. Let’s hope they don’t blow it.

Source: BBC.

UPDATE: following widespread reporting in the press, the Save Scrabulous group had ballooned overnight to 28,000+ ….

Last year the name of a Bolivian monkey was bought in an online auction for $650,000 by the online casino Golden Palace. Now Golden Palace’s entire marketing strategy is based on doing quirky things in order to generate publicity — they are the proud owners of William Shatner’s gallstone, for instance. That is not The Economist’s concern however — this article is more interested in the science of taxonomy and the issue of inspiration.

That Bolivian monkey is now the proud owner of the moniker Callicebus Aureipalatii and The Economist thinks that there is a marketing opportunity in branded taxonomies:

Notwithstanding recent discoveries in New Guinea (the ‘lost world’ reported this week) few biologists these days have flashy mammals and birds to hawk around. But a little imagination might find sponsors for lesser creatures. For, while a wealthy airline (if any still exist) might aspire to a Papuan bird of paradise, its low-cost confrere could consider something a bit more within its budget - a butterfly perhaps? And which building society would not be seriously tempted by its own bee? These humble yet hard working animals save in the summer to survive through the winter - and build their own homes, to boot. Neglected molluscs could, meanwhile, be snapped up by Shell, while moth taxonomy would certainly be boosted by the interest of the construction firm, Caterpillar.

The article has a nice sign off, too:

Detractors of such horrid commercialisation there will no doubt be. But they might consider that taxonomists have been amusing themselves quietly for years, as names as Colon rectum (a beetle), Ba humbugi (a snail), Oedipus complex (a salamander) and Ytu brutus (a beetle) attest. Besides, how much disrepute could commerce really bring to the discipline what brought the world Trombicula fujigmo, a mite whose name is an acronym for ‘fuck you Jack, I got my orders’.

Pictured is our own BST-sponsored creature, Monstrum mirabile visu — a new type of echidna. More about the state of taxonomy and a proposed ‘ZooBank’ of names is available on the The Economist site.