Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Corporate Reaction to Generation Y Star Miley Cyrus’ (Hannah Montana) “Nude” Vanity Fair Picture Shoot

Today one of the most searched terms on Google Trends is for Hannah Montana star “Miley Cyrus”. There’s a lot of talk about her recent shoot in Vanity Fair magazine being to risqué. She has apologized to Disney and her fans. Analysts are considering whether this will wreck her career and suitability as a star for Disney.

Several thoughts of similar PR/Ad issues ran through my mind as I was reading this story.

First, the story reminded me a bit of a webscraping project we did for Unilever on their Dove pro-age campaign. Dove commercials featuring real women over the age of 50, tastefully shot in the nude, had been banned on network TV. Dove later showed their ads on their own website and women responded on their discussion board. Anderson Analytics found that only about 4% of posts expressed concern about the nudity. The majority of posts were in support of the ads.

Another example that came to mind was my post last week. The ‘Absolut World’ advertisement showing an older version of a map of the US with several states still belonging to Mexico which also got too much media attention. Angry US bloggers posting comments — Absolut PR spokesperson apologizing repeatedly.

I know Hanna Montana is a program targeted towards Generation Y girls age 6-14, but these images don’t seem so risqué to me:

I think there will always be a loud minority expressing their views on the web. Companies need to not overreact and instead think about how a normal person would view the situation. The interesting thing about the Dove Pro-Age Screen-scraping project I mentioned earlier was the fact that we measured the opinions of thousands of regular women in regard to the appropriateness of the nudity in the ads (not just a few hundred bloggers hoping to generate traffic to their sites).

Britney Spares escapades (until more recently at least) certainly haven’t done much to curb popularity for her among this demographic.

Perhaps part of the problem is due to Text Mining applications such as Nielsen Buzzmetrics/TNS Cymfony and other blog only metrics software which are available to PR and marketing departments currently? These applications focus solely on blogs rather than also including discussion boards etc. and therefore tend to put far too much weight on the words of individual bloggers rather than measure true “consumer generated media”.

What do you think? Do you feel Marketing/PR departments react too strongly to individual bloggers?

-Tom