Tony Bennett: In Tune with the Times

The singer has a new hit record thanks, in part, to both a traditional media blitz and Internet offers. Therein, a lesson for movie studios

by Ronald Grover

It was not the side of the 20th Century Fox (NWS) studio that they show to tourists. It was cold, really cold, inside Stage 17. But as extras sat shivering on stools at cocktail-style tables in a faux nightclub, 80-year-old crooner Tony Bennett was just warming up. With eight cameras rolling and a bank of computers churning away in the dark back areas, he opened up with The Best Is Yet to Come and rolled right into a Hank Williams country song, Cold, Cold Heart (now there was an irony).

I don't usually warm to songs that were first sung before I was born, but Tony Bennett and a team of marketers were playing to a wider audience—the Internet. Bennett's mini-concert, complete with staged questions ("What's your idea of cool?" asked one breathless woman) was being recorded to be shown on Dec. 15 as part of Yahoo!'s (YHOO) just-launched series of Internet concerts sponsored by Nissan.

You have to hand it to old Tony, a still trim, full-haired dynamo who performed while decked out in his trademark natty silk suit and even managed a few well-choreographed twirls. The guy who shortened his given name from Antonio Dominick Benedetto knows something about marketing. Bennett's Yahoo show, which will feature his music and concert for download on Yahoo Music Unlimited, is the third in a series that launched with 26-year-old Christina Aguilera and 1990s alternative rockers Incubus. What's an 80-year-old codger doing there?

Finding the Audience

What he's doing—and listen up Hollywood—is what entertainers are supposed to do. He's giving people what they want, and just as important, he's putting it where they want to find it. It's been a constant refrain in the singer's life. He came back from near oblivion in 1994 with a performance on MTV Unplugged that brought his schmaltzy ballads to the teens. Now he hopes to have the Internet do the same thing. "My idea of music is to create something that everyone in the family enjoys," Bennett said after the concert. "And that means young folks, too. It's what I do."

You betcha, Tony. And it's what the folks in Hollywood, despite all the flurry of recent press releases, seem to forget. If you want the antidote to falling DVD sales, try going out and finding an audience. Sure, studios say that's what they're doing. Studios are experimenting with all kinds of things. You can download a six-month-old Spielberg flick, for instance. And, Fox just announced that, like Warner Bros. (TWX), it will slash the price of DVDs to compete against pirates in China. But studios clearly are holding back. Try to download and burn a first-run blockbuster flick onto a DVD. Nope. And try to get that flick earlier than, say, three or five months after it's been in theaters. Uh-uh.

I'm not here to say that downloads will make up for sluggish DVD sales, or drive folks back into the theaters in droves. Better movies would help. But making sure flicks are where folks want them, and when, might just turn on a few folks—and make studios some bucks while they're at it. (Yes, yes, Wal-Mart (WMT) would be mad if the movies showed up earlier online than on their shelves, so put a higher price on the newer stuff and let iTunes or Movielink have them now…)

Old-School Marketing

Look, it hasn't hurt Tony's sales. He's hustled his newest album, Duets, out to Starbucks (SBUX), which sold the CD in its stores, and made a deal with Target to sell the album on its Web site (along with some extra tracks thrown in as a special for Target (TGT) customers). Heck, Tony even sang to a national sales meeting of the big-box retailer, which is sponsoring a TV special that NBC (GE) will air on Nov. 21.

It's a full-fledged blitz the old-fashioned way, the way that stars of Tony's era used to do them. "We can do things that record companies can't and won't do," says Danny Bennett, Tony's 53-year-old son and manager, who has masterminded a brilliant campaign. What's that mean? For starters, Danny, who has been managing his father's resurgent career since the early '90s, can make deals with the likes of Target and Yahoo without regard for agreements a record company might have with other retailers or distribution outlets.

Numbers Tell the Story

Not that Columbia Records, the Sony BMG unit that produced the record, wouldn't have. Tony and Danny just thought of it first. "The talent's management always has the ability to create and pursue a great deal of the opportunities that a record label can't," says Jay Krugman, Columbia Records' senior vice-president of adult marketing. "But the label was intimately involved, supportive, and proactive when the ideas came to it." (In the interests of fair disclosure, Krugman mentions that he was hired by Columbia after working on Tony Bennett's marketing campaign.)

So, with all the deals and you-can-have-me-anywhere-you-want-me marketing, how has Tony Bennett's new album Duets done? The album, which features joint singing with the likes of Sting, Bono, and The Dixie Chicks, has sailed over 1 million copies in its first month and was still ranked in the top 25 by Billboard after seven weeks on the list. Hey, the guy has a hit. Marketing helps. So does getting out there where your fans are. It's a tune the guys in Hollywood ought to start humming.

Grover is Los Angeles bureau chief for BusinessWeek.