Michael Eisner, former head of Disney and ABC, has a new business — selling baby products:
Eisner says he will partner with Scheinman to maximize the national presence and entertainment appeal of the Team Baby brand.
Team Baby began operations in January 2005 with a single 35-minute “Baby Longhorn” DVD. Seven months later, the company had 13 collegiate products under its belt.
Whoa! I’m impressed.
Eisner is sticking to his guns with his personal fixation about youth….. He was the one who pushed ABC news into canning as many experienced people in front and behind the camera as possible so that the news could be packaged for “young” viewers.
Young viewers, you see, are the ones that marketers believe have yet to develop brand loyalty for consumer goods. That creates an opportunity for advertisers to sell products!
ABC News president, David Westin, himself a highly inexperienced news person before landing his job, bought into Eisner’s fixation. The perspective makes it all the odder that Westin found his back to the wall when he hired 63-year-old Charlie Gibson to take over World News Tonight.
ABC isn’t the only news organization to think young, inexperienced journalists (usually young adults with affluent families and impressive “potential”) are the key to new advertising markets. It’s a virus spreading like the plague in news rooms around the US. The First Amendment may protect a free press but advertising rules — not the news product, which is packaged increasingly for the advertiser’s target market.
Here’s Ed Wasserman’s take in the Miami Herald:
When you consider who is being discarded in the various waves of right-sizing that the news business has indulged in to keep its owners, if not its customers, satisfied, you stumble on the unsettling truth that the advance guard of an entire newsroom generation is being shown the door, 10 or 15 years before they would, in the normal course of things, have finished their working lives….
So the overall picture is one of a profession that, for reasons of financial calculation and market repositioning, is deliberately being made prematurely young.
When is experience a liability? When you have an insecure boss who has none.