Entertainment
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Staggeringly low ratings from the Grammys and Golden Globes prove the traditional mass-audience awards spectacle is over
If an organization started handing out trophies for the most astonishing collapse in cultural relevance, this year’s top prize would have to go to — awards shows. The ratings plunges for recent awards shows are staggering, suggesting a major turning point for a ritual that has been vital to the business of entertainment for decades. At long last, it appears the traditional mass-audience awards spectacle is over.
This week’s CBS broadcast of the Grammys is the freshest example. The ratings fell a stomach-churning 51% from last year to a record low 9.2 million viewers who tuned in or streamed the…
The short-lived billion-dollar backed startup got seduced by the fallacy of the visionary entrepreneur
By raising $1.75 billion and then shutting down just six months after it launched, mobile streaming service Quibi has now guaranteed itself a place on the list of business history’s great cautionary tales. Business-school professors will be teaching Quibi case studies for years to come, trying to explain in detail exactly how a high-profile startup backed by billions of dollars and experienced leaders like founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman went so wrong. …
Long before it got lucky with the timing of Disney+, it was wise enough to buy Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, and Fox
It was only last November that the Walt Disney Company introduced its own streaming service, Disney+. At the time, pulling its intellectual property from other services and building an exclusive destination for all things Disney seemed like a plausible gamble — but by no means a certain one. After all, this was a plunge into a full-on streaming war with Netflix, Apple, and HBO.
But looking back, the bet doesn’t merely seem smart — it also seems like incredibly lucky timing. Seven months into the pandemic — with movie theaters idle, film and TV studios facing mass layoffs, and theme…
Off Brand
The fading sport’s last shot for relevance is in the form of a splashy post-pandemic televised return
Depending on just how sports-starved you are, you may be looking forward to doing something this weekend you haven’t done in a while, if ever: watching a Nascar race.
With the exception of Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts, all major sports have been in hibernation since mid-March, with fans turning to video-gaming as an alternative release. So the May 17 race at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, airing live on Fox, gives Nascar something truly singular — a shot at the undivided attention of America’s vast and voracious sports-consuming community.
With sporting events on hold until 2021, the industry needs a plan B
March came and went without any Madness. UEFA Champions League football declared no champions. Baseball closed the door on opening day. And the NFL had to hold a virtual draft in lieu of a real one. The global coronavirus pandemic halted every major sporting event around the world this year, so I fought boredom by digging my Nintendo Classic console out of storage and switching on Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter II.
My choices may have been decidedly old school, but I wasn’t alone in my detour from sports to video games. Verizon reports that online gaming overall has…
Every company could learn from Netflix’s approach toward personalization and social behavior
Consumer personas—fictional customer character models built by marketers—are like horoscopes: “Nicole is careful with her spending, but under the right circumstances she’s willing to splurge on herself if the mood strikes her.” Read carefully and you’ll notice that psychographic profiling is full of generic, unverifiable, ambiguous, and often contradictory language that supports multiple interpretations.
Psychographics also mask the inherent unpredictability of our tastes and the complex ways they interact. My sister-in-law lives in an affluent suburb of Chicago. She owns a piece of Away luggage (before its fall from grace) and gets newsletters from Everlane. …
An outsider CEO brought some much-needed fresh thinking to the beloved but troubled franchise
Big institutional challenges come in many shapes and sizes. But they all have this in common: conventional approaches through established organizations can’t do enough to address them, and those establishments might themselves be part of the problem. The world is not getting better by itself. Making the world a better place demands more and better leaders.
When leaders see the wider scope of problems, are aware of the multiple dimensions and complexity, and challenge existing structures and constraints, they can propel existing organizations to reach greater heights. …
Music mogul Merck Mercuriadis raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the rights to hits by Taylor Swift, Timbaland, and Bruno Mars. Is he insane?
Inside the office on the second floor of music industry mogul Merck Mercuriadis’ off-white townhouse in the posh London neighborhood of Notting Hill, there is shit everywhere. Hundreds of vinyl records are piled in shelves, while others are stacked 20 deep on the floor. A Michell Engineering turntable worth more than $10,000 is still wrapped in plastic on a card table. There’s a mound of CDs teetering next to two signed copies of English rock singer Ian Hunter’s recent memoir, one of which will go to Morrissey, whom Mecuriadis managed for several years. An original 1969 pressing of the only…
In 2016, New York City’s biggest circus went bankrupt. Here’s how the new owners are bringing it back.
As the lights flashed and the music pulsated, I took a swig of Irish whiskey from my plastic balloon-animal dog tumbler and said to my wife, “There is nooooooooo way Doogie Howser is going to take a run at the Wheel of Death.”
I was wrong. Neil Patrick Harris himself banged out a couple spins before daredevil Jayson Dominguez got inside and performed breathtaking feats like rope-jumping on top of the ever-spinning-while-also-rotating human hamster cage above a packed tent of wide-eyed audience members.
It’s just another day at the Big Apple Circus, now in its 42nd season at Lincoln Center’s…
