The Di$ney Formula

I just saw this video by The Onion posted on Facebook. It’s a satire, of course, but there is an underlying truth to Disney’s magical marketing. Disney seems to have developed a formula for child star success. The conglomerate uses multiple channels (television, radio, the Internet) to promote its stars.

If you watch for a progression in Disney Channel shows over the past six or seven years…you won’t see one. The shows are variations of each other with similar sitcom-like situations played out in various environments. The characters in each show follow archetypal Disney formulas. Can you blame the writers, directors and producers? Kids and young teens love the Disney stars. They scream for Miley Cyrus concert tickets, wish to wave a wand on Waverly Place, and dream of being adopted as the fourth Jonas sibling. The formula works.

My question is, “For how long?” We saw record companies perfect a formula for selling CDs with the rise of the late-nineties boy band craze. That formula peaked when *NSYNC’s album No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million records in the first week. Internet-based peer-to-peer file sharing programs brought that industry to a screeching halt. Never again will so many CDs be sold so quickly.

The Long Tale author Chris Anderson says the marketing formula that sold the *NSYNC albums was extremely similar to the one that made Elvis so popular in the fifties: sell sexed-up young men to eager young women. So a change in demographic-tastes had nothing to do with the downfall of the CD industry; rather, technology made more variety and versatility available to music lovers.

So will the Disney formula last forever? If not, when will technology (or something else) force the Disney “Imagineers” to imagine something new?