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The most successful TV shows are no longer just TV shows, they are brands to be exploited across platforms.
Peter Leeb, vice president of global brand management and strategy for Fox Consumer Products, works behind the scenes to open Simpsons retail stores around the globe, to negotiate with designers to place Empire-based fashions in high-end department stores and to partner with Australian airline Qantas to bring Modern Family down under.
“What we are offering is a new way to partner with entertainment brands around the world,” says Leeb. “It’s our job to find and create branding and merchandising opportunities. There are so many great brands out there that are really franchises and they have to be looked at that way.”
Taking a look at just one show — Fox’s Sunday night animated comedy Bob’s Burgers — demonstrates how many ways Fox Consumer Products has found to promote the show and exploit the brand, creating plenty of new fans along the way.
Bob’s Burgers, recently renewed on Fox for seasons 7 and 8 and the 2014 Emmy winner for best animated comedy, is more of a cult hit than a popular one. The show airs at 7:30 pm ET/PT on Fox, and averages some two-million-plus viewers. That said, the show (and Fox’s entire Sunday night animation block) has fewer overall viewers to boast about than say, CBS, but almost all of those viewers fall into the key adults 18-49 demographic, making the shows competitive for advertisers targeting that demo.
All the more reason to support it at a grass-roots level, says Leeb: “That show’s had such a loyal fanbase for the past few years. We have a lot of brands [like Bob’s Burgers] who have millions of fans that we need to fuel and support.”
In April, Fox Consumer Products — with Greg Lombardo, senior vice president of global live and location-based entertainment for the division heading up the effort — is partnering with Loren Bouchard’s Wilo Productions on the production of Bob’s Burgers Live. The show is returning to Los Angeles after a sold-out eight-city tour in Minneapolis; Chicago; Madison, Wis.; Detroit; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; New York City and Boston.
The production — which features the cast doing a live table read and Q&A as well as stand-up comedy performances, sneak peeks of clips from upcoming episodes, musical performances and more — will happen at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater on April 29 and 30. Tickets cost $49.50 to $69.50 (plus fees). It was so popular that the powers that be behind the production decided to add another night in LA.
That’s just one way Fox Consumer Products is working to promote the program. There’s also a cook/joke book (probably one of the few such combos in existence) coming out next month: The Bob’s Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers. The book costs $19.95 and is written by series creator Loren Bouchard and the show’s writers, with recipes contributed by blogger Cole Bowden, an engineer by day and burger blogger by night.
The blog and the book came from a running joke on the show, in which Bob writes his burger of the day on a chalkboard behind the cash register. The names are usually a burger-fied pun of a movie, TV or song title, such as the Blue is the Warmest Burger or The Six Scallion Dollar Man Burger or the Don’t You Four Cheddar Bout Me Burger.
“The names Bob gives his Burgers of the Day are supposed to feel not just like a free joke glimpsed in the background of an animated show but also - and this is going to sound grandiose and gross, sorry — and expression of the internal life of the charter (there, I said it) and also offer a hint that this greasy little mom-and-pop shop might be more gastronomically adventurous than it would otherwise appear to be,” writes Bouchard in the book’s intro.
Fans who can’t wait for the book to try some burgers can check out Cole Bowden’s popular blog, The Bob’s Burger Experiment, from which the recipes are drawn, although Bouchard points out that the book offers some never-before-seen recipes as well.
Fox Consumer Products also did the logical thing and took four of its animated shows — American Dad, Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy and The Cleveland Show — and partnered with Bare Tree Media’s emojiTap to create — what else? — emojis and mobile stickers. The emojiTap app is free to download on iTunes and Google Play, and it’s also integrated into Facebook Messenger.
Fox’s other animated property that hasn’t been mentioned here yet — The Simpsons — is possibly the world’s most successful TV show when it comes to merchandising. People have been known to decorate their entire houses (or at least their kitchens) solely with Simpsons merchandise.
Leeb and his team also managed to find a way to integrate The Simpsons into the world of high fashion, a partnership that doesn’t necessarily make sense on its face. Working with designer Jeremy Scott — who also did a collection for Moschino based on Barbie — Fox Consumer Products put The Simpsons on New York runways, which resulted in super models wearing the clothes on the street just days later.
It also teamed with cosmetics company Mac for a line of Simpsons-themed make-up.
FCS also has paired two huge brands — The Simpsons and Legos — to create a video game. And soon, a Simpsons standalone retail store will launch in China.
“Everyone’s starting to see all of these very interesting and refreshed partnerships for The Simpsons’ brand around the world,” says Leeb.
Most recently, Leeb and his team have had fun finding opportunities for Empire, broadcast TV’s biggest hit in years. The show already focuses on fashion, dressing Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) in outrageous, fashion-forward attire. It’s enough to make any fashionista feel some envy.
The team capitalized on that by creating several fashion lines around the show, and it actually started doing that before the show even launched.
“We start evaluating the shows before the pilots even come out. We identify the opportunities and the audiences and begin to identify a global strategy,” he says.
“In the case of Empire, most studios would take more of a traditional road, capitalizing on the immediate buzz and the success of episodes. We tried to be out with fan merchandise from the beginning, but also considered that we wanted to keep his brand in the marketplace for years to come. So instead of just creating some traditional product for the fans, we instead looked at it like a longer-term fashion lifestyle brand.”
That turned out not to be as hard as it may seem: “The fashion world typically is very much a step removed from entertainment brands, but with this brand, fashion brands saw an opportunity to do something disruptive,” he says.
Fox Consumers Products worked with Empire costume designer Paolo Nieddu to partner with a few lines for its Empire fashions: Saks Fifth Avenue, Jimmy Choo, MCM and Hood by Air or HBA by Shane Oliver.
“I work very closely with our executive producers and our costume designer to make sure the line has a very authentic feel to the characters,” says Leeb. “And in season one, we started looking ahead as to what the trends in the fashion industry would be like in season two, and started identifying those trends — colors, patterns, etc. — with the brands we were working with.”
Partnerships like this “bring a different audience and exposure to the world of fashion, and that’s a world that this audience looks to aspirationally. That was the halo effect we were going for,” he says, noting that the Empire-inspired fashion lines have been covered in Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Refinery 29 and Fashionista. “None of those publications normally talk about TV shows or films and if they do, it’s on a one-off basis. For months, Empire was a continuing story for them.”
Says Leeb: “I don’t think there’s been another brand since Sex and the City to influence the fashion world like this.”
That’s no accident.
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