Chapter 459: Brand Selection

Chapter 459: Chapter 459: Brand Selection

Had Violet not reminded them in time, this crucial industry loophole could easily have become a shortcoming in the show’s later commercial monetization.

After successfully securing her position and taking full charge of the variety show’s coordination work, Violet relied on her years of industry sensitivity in television production to spot the gap in sponsorships right away, actively reporting and reminding Irene.

In her view, it was a fact that the production team was currently well-funded and did not need to rely on sponsorships to survive, but the significance of brand sponsorships had never been limited to merely acquiring funds.

High-quality brand sponsorships were the core pathway for the show to break out of its circle, expand its national recognition, elevate public influence, and solidify its commercial endorsements.

The backing of well-known brands could quickly build public trust for a brand-new variety show, leveraging offline stores, channel promotion, and user circles of the brands to feed back into the show’s popularity, achieving two-way traffic and mutual benefit; this step was an essential path for a top-tier variety show to mature and expand its scale, and it absolutely could not be omitted.

After listening to the reminder, Irene deeply agreed and immediately finalized the launch of the sponsorship plan.

Although the show was only in its first season and had not yet officially aired, its potential popularity and commercial value had long far surpassed a crowd of new variety shows in the same period.

On one hand, with Britney, Steve Winwood, Bonnie Raitt, and Kanye West sitting as cross-circle top-tier mentors, they brought their own massive fan bases and topical traffic, covering the pop, rock, blues, and hip-hop tracks entirely, with an extremely wide audience span.

On the other hand, although Irene herself had no deep cultivation or layout in the music industry and no signature works to back her up, relying on her identity of successively creating blockbuster movies, controlling top-tier film and television companies, and being a young top-tier Producer, she dominated the entertainment headlines year-round, enjoyed extremely high nationwide popularity in the United States, and naturally carried huge industry attention and topic popularity.

Therefore, when the production team officially released the sponsorship message and opened brand cooperation channels, it quickly attracted a large number of brand parties with sharp senses and valued long-term traffic to proactively come knocking to negotiate cooperation; various industry-leading brands came in an endless stream, eyeing the innovative potential and nationwide popularity of this brand-new variety show.

Among them, the most active and the first to proactively connect for deep negotiations was the national beverage giant Pepsi.

Britney and Kanye West were currently both signed endorsers of Pepsi.

One possessed the influence of a national pop diva, and the other was a newly popular Grammy hip-hop benchmark of the younger generation.

For Pepsi, having two top-tier mentors simultaneously belong to the same brand endorsement system was an exceptional top-tier marketing opportunity that could not be asked for.

In the past, if a brand wanted to link up two top stars, it needed to spend high costs to separately plan dual-line marketing activities.

Now, however, a single show directly gathered both endorsers, naturally forming an exclusive marketing scenario.

Without needing to invest extra artist linkage costs, it could leverage the show’s nationwide popularity to achieve large-scale exposure for brand rejuvenation and diversification, covering the two major young audience circles of pop and hip-hop.

Therefore, as soon as the sponsorship news came out, Pepsi’s brand team rushed to New York at the first opportunity, proactively connecting with the production team to negotiate deep title sponsorship and content integration cooperation.

Following closely behind was the retail industry giant Walmart across the United States.

As a retail leader deeply cultivating the American mass market, Walmart had long been deeply engaged in the penetration of popular culture, and was keen on binding national-level variety shows, competitions, and entertainment IPs, using entertainment popularity to close the distance with ordinary consumers and consolidate its national brand image.

The Voice indiscriminately covered audiences of all ages and circles, encompassing everything from teenagers to middle-aged groups.

With a massive audience base and extremely strong user stickiness, it perfectly matched Walmart’s mass market positioning.

Walmart officially stated clearly that it hoped to become the show’s official exclusive retail partner, entering the show with a top sponsorship identity in exchange for a series of rights and interests such as offline store displays of the show’s LOGO, offline audition linkage activities, brand screen exposure, and contestant merchandise linkage, using the show’s popularity to penetrate offline retail scenarios in thousands of households across the United States.

In addition, Candie’s, a mid-range fashion clothing brand deeply cultivating the young women’s market, was also one of the core intended brands.

Founded in 1981, after more than twenty years of development, the brand’s product system covered more than thirty full-category product lines including ready-to-wear, footwear, handbags, and accessories.

Its style focused on sweet, sexy, youthful, and lively designs, precisely targeting teenagers and young women as its core consumer groups, with a pro-people brand positioning and a huge audience base.

For a long time, Candie’s had always yearned to reach a deep brand cooperation with Britney, who had extremely high national recognition, using the pop diva’s influence to establish a reputation in the youth market.

However, hindered by Britney holding exclusive endorsements for multiple high-end clothing brands year-round, there had never been a suitable opportunity for cooperation.

Taking advantage of the sponsorship opportunity of The Voice this time, Candie’s actively threw out generous cooperation conditions, willing to exclusively sponsor the clothing, accessories, and styling outfits of all participating contestants throughout the process, comprehensively contracting the show’s screen styling resources, all to bind an indirect linkage with Britney and seize the traffic of the young women’s market.

Aside from the top brands that had already actively negotiated with clear intentions, Irene had a batch of higher-specification target partners in her mind, which were also top industry brands she wanted to strive for with all her might, including Fender Musical Instruments and L’Oréal.

As a top global musical instrument brand, Fender Musical Instruments was the most professional and fitting official musical instrument partner for the music track, capable of providing full-process professional musical instrument equipment support to enhance the show’s professional texture; meanwhile, as a global makeup giant, L’Oréal focused on the young fashionable beauty track, perfectly adapting to the show’s young audience and able to provide official makeup and styling support throughout the entire process to perfect the show’s makeup and styling system.

However, currently, these two major brands had limited interest in the brand-new The Voice and maintained a wait-and-see attitude.

After all, the show had not yet aired and lacked real ratings and word-of-mouth data support; old-brand giant brands acted cautiously and were unwilling to rashly bet on a brand-new variety show.

To completely secure the exclusive cooperation of these two top brands, they still needed to wait for the show’s popularity to erupt.

However, Irene felt no anxiety about this; she was now very clear about the industry rules of American variety show sponsorships, which were completely different from the exclusive title sponsorship model of a single market.

The commercial system of the North American entertainment market was more mature and inclusive, and there was no rigid rule of a single brand exclusively monopolizing sponsorships.

As long as the show’s content was of sufficient quality, popularity high enough, and audience wide enough, it could completely achieve parallel cooperation among multiple categories and multiple top brands.

Major categories like beverages, retail, apparel, musical instruments, and cosmetics did not conflict with each other and could all be swept up in one net to maximize commercial value.

Therefore, Irene quickly finalized the rhythm of her subsequent commercial layout.

At present, they did not need to be overhasty or reluctantly negotiate with all brands, nor did they need to compromise the show’s rights and interests for the sake of sponsorships.

The core focus at the current stage remained sparing no effort to guarantee the recording quality of the show, steadily completing the shooting of the first-stage blind audition schedule, and presenting the highest-quality and purest musical stage to the audience.

As long as word of mouth exploded, popularity reached the top, and the show broke out of its circle nationwide after the broadcast of the blind audition stage, holding solid ratings and national popularity, these top brands holding a wait-and-see attitude would naturally lower their postures on their own initiative and come knocking to seek cooperation.

High-quality content was forever the strongest and hardest backing for variety show commercial monetization.