Tonight's A-list party offers marketers food for thought...and vodka
It's a provocative concept: Bring together two visionaries for a few hours or a day. Start them talking. Roll camera.
Iconoclasts, a Sundance Channel series finishing its fifth season, has paired Steve Nash and Ron Howard, Desmond Tutu with Richard Branson, Mike Myers with Deepak Chopra, Samuel Jackson with Bill Russell and Madeline Albright with Ashley Judd. But the series also has another innovative wrinkle. The producers include Grey Goose Entertainment, a branded content project created by Bacardi and Grey Goose, its high-end vodka.
Grey Goose celebrates the greenlighting of the sixth season of Iconoclasts, scheduled for launch in summer 2012, at the Sundance Film Festival tonight. The festivities include a panel discussion featuring Season 2 iconoclast Paul Simon, Sundance Channel's Sarah Barnett and filmmaker Joe Berlinger (an Iconoclast producer and the director of documentaries including Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, the Paradise Lost trilogy and the Sundance premiere Under African Skies). Expect a muddy entrance (Park City, the site of the festival, has been hammered with snow), plenty of celebs and gawkers and quick-flowing vodka drinks.
The Iconoclasts project poses interesting questions for adventurous advertisers. Can content without commercials and product placement successfully raise a brand's profile? Can Bacardi really sell vodka just by filming Tony Hawk showing his skate ramp to Jon Favreau? The answer, according to Beauchamp, is a definitive yes.
"This isn't the way brands are traditionally marketed," she told Yahoo!. "Running 30-second spots gives frequency and reach, but it doesn't necessarily connect viewers with their passion points. Iconoclasts is designed to offer viewers content relevant to them, in a way that helps drive what the brand stands for."
Simply by connecting her brand with heroes from the arts, sports, politics and entertainment (all of whom appear without fees), Beauchamp says Iconoclast viewers now associate the vodka with "the best in life." Beauchamp wouldn't quantify the success of the show in terms of bottle sales. She did say her market testing revealed that viewers have a "tremendous affinity for the show" that positively impacts the Grey Goose brand.
With viewership of each show at around six million and growing, Grey Goose plans to expand with additional digital content, and, perhaps, some more deep moments from celebrities and other heroes. Beauchamp's own favorite from seasons 1-5? Charlize Theron and Jane Goodall in the South African bush.
"One of the baby chimps gave Charlize a peck on the cheek," she said. "And I just cried."
---Jason Silverman
