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
6 responses so far ↓
1 Brian Cavoli // Apr 30, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Tom, I want to respond to a statement in your post. In your reference to TNS Cymfony you indicated that the tool doesn’t analyze posts on discussion boards. The TNS Cymfony engine does analyze a wide range of social media formats including discussion boards. We partner with specialists like BoardReader.com to acquire the content.
We agree that discussion boards are one of the richest and most valuable sources for consumer opinions.
Thanks,
Brian Cavoli
TNS Cymfony
2 Tom H C Anderson // May 1, 2008 at 9:29 am
Thanks for your post and clarification Brian. I will Check out BoardReader.com, Anderson Analytics has been using a different tool.
Tom
3 dadshouse // May 2, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I say shame on Miley Cyrus and her family. She’s in bed looking sexy. She’s only 15. What do I tell my 16 year old daughter - that Miley’s doing it right, and my daughter is taking things too slowly with boys? As a dad, I’m disappointed. Plus - Miley has made $1 billion off kids, and now she’s thumbing her nose at them, saying “I’m not a kid like you anymore.” She and her parents should think a bit.
http://dadshouseblog.com/2008/05/02/miley-cyrus-sexy-vanity-fair-pics-shes-younger-than-my-daughter/
4 Tom H C Anderson // May 2, 2008 at 4:45 pm
David,
Can we really expect others to be the role models we want for our children? Everyone has different ‘standards’. I might agree that the first picture in the post above may be a little too much for my taste, but I don’t think I would call it top-less or nude. And honeslty, the picture isn’t any less risqué than what most girls that age wear to school these days.
RE the argument about her age. There are many other examples like superbowl/Ms Jackson or the Dove 50 year old Real models. They were certainly old enough, and it wasn’t real nudity. Yet there was a lot of talk about people being upset about it in the media.
I don’t buy it. If we need to control anything more it would probably be violence in the media. But for some strange reason, even the hint of nudity seems to make bigger headlines than gross violence like in the movie Seven, or the many horror movies that teens go see, or even shows like the A-Team which had a very young audience.
Just my guess here, but I don’t think this will hurt her career. Also vanity fair will sell more issues than they would have without the picture.
5 Tom H. C. Anderson // May 5, 2008 at 4:16 pm
By the way Laura Ries alsp posted an interesting analysis on this here: http://ries.typepad.com/ries_blog/2008/04/an-achy-breaky.html
6 dadshouse // May 10, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I don’t think it will hurt her career. And it’s not the backless image - it’s the satin sheets, and just-had-sex look. I’m worried about the message it sends to my daughter about how a teen girl should behave. Miley’s image went from sweet and innocent to slut in the blink of an eye. Is my daughter supposed to make that jump, too?
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