Edward Jay Epstein
The Stealthy World of Brands
Brand Marketing
Not unlike other forms of social manipulation, product placement traces back to the golden era of Hollywood. In the late 1930s, the De Beers diamond cartel, desperate to sell diamonds [...]
The Facebook Anthill
Performance Marketing
The brilliance of Facebook is its ability to beguile its 700 million-odd users into building digital heaps, some of which are called “fan pages” and are for celebrities, TV programs, [...]
Hollywood’s Reality: TV
Convergent TV
Hollywood’s dirty secret? Television. Without the flow of revenue from TV, or without the sale of ads on cable, networks, and foreign TV, every major U.S. studio would go bankrupt.
Numbers Game
Brand Marketing
Prime-time ratings often blur the reality of the television business. Even though they are the only numbers readily available to the news media, they tell only part of the story. [...]
The Real Hollywood Genius
Brand Marketing
The genius of modern Hollywood lies not just in its ability to make movies, but to create weekly audiences for them. Back in the pre-TV days, when two-thirds of Americans [...]
Video Wars
Convergent TV
Why is Christopher Dodd, the retired Senator from Connecticut, receiving over $1.5 million a year to head the Motion Picture Association of America?