Empowering Girls: Gossip Girl's Alison Tarrant
One major girl influence I would define as anti-girl is Gossip Girl. An Ad Age article declares Alison Tarrant one of the 2008 Women to Watch.
It is the #1 show for girls 12-17. (Hello, Parents have you WATCHED this show? Make friends with the blocking system on your DVR already.)
The senior VP-integrated sales and marketing at the CW network has been one of the key people behind the scenes implementing innovative new commercials, including minutes-long “content wraps” and a prized integration in the buzzy rich-kids drama “Gossip Girl.”Some people might think Ms. Tarrant is playing with fire as she and the CW experiment with new ad formats. But a client that negotiates a “content wrap,” which often consists of a series of longer ads or content pieces across an entire night of programming, probably stands out more in a consumer’s mind than others who run normal ads in the same night. Likewise, when Verizon Wireless won a season-long integration in “Gossip Girl,” it was poised to make more of an impression than its rivals, at least for the hour the program was on.
I can see what kind of marketing brilliance Ad Age sees in Ms. Tarrant, as I was a non-consenting hostage to one of her trashy porno Gossip Girl e-commercials one day when I innocently tried to open my mail. It is brilliant to essentially force all yahoo users to watch your ad by blocking the check mail buttons. And it is brilliant to encourage girls to post your ad on their websites, my space pages, blogs and email signatures.
Brilliant, but wrong.
I just have one little request: Ms. Tarrant – please use your marketing powers for good and not evil.
Here’s a hypothetical question:
If The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty hired her away from The CW would this trash up the Dove Campaign or would it clean up Gossip Girl’s marketing?
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Image Source: Adage article.
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