Oh, so that's synergy! Lessons from the Teen Choice Awards.

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Once again, the student of business in me is going "wow", the student of life in me is going "really?"

For reasons too personally confusing to get into, I started watching the Teen Choice Awards.
Don't worry, I tore myself away after about an hour after convincing myself this was not age-appropriate behavior, and after all the teenage screaming started to get jarring.
Also, I was multi-tasking at that time, so it wasn't thaat bad!:)

Anyway, the genius of Murdoch's minions was to come up with an award for the best celebrity MySpace page ("Choice MySpacer"....really)

The business gurus may sneer, but there _were_ thousands of teenagers screaming. Think about it; the Teen Choice Awards (and by implication teens and all the celebrities nominated) were endorsing one particular social networking site on a national broadcast. Now that's good marketing. I don't know how effective it'll be, but it certainly can't hurt.

In general, the opportunities for good cross-promotion in media are supposedly slim, and the rationale for the media conglomerate is mostly realize these synergies on the back-end (e.g. cost-cutting, branches merging, getting rid of duplication in G&A etc.)

But Murdoch seems to believe in them, and keeps trying. Fox often pushes the limits on promoting other owned properties. I thought the one above was a pretty sharp one, especially given the target demographic which tends to be less cynical about what they see (btw, that's in general a good thing! :))

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