High School Musical2: Proving Wholesome CAN Sell (& Sell, & Sell…)

By now you’ve all heard the news about Disney’s record-breaking eyeballs racking up 17.2 million viewers for the premiere of the official HSM2, (hit sequel to last year’s High School Musical phenom which hit #1 on album charts, broke the Guinness World Record for the most successful songs from a single soundtrack, received six Emmy nominations, and spread to 40 million viewers in 100 countries) And if you have tweens…you’ve no doubt lived it!

I promise this won’t be another sequel critique, of fun video clips and reviews in ‘omg, it’s so off the hook’ tween-speak, nor a power pout of dashed expectations due to the rehashed “talent show” plot point, “McMusic,” or over-blown dance fest numbers sans magic of the first film.

Instead, I’d like to talk about the marketing machine, kids’ behavioral zeitgeist and what’s coming, then in part two, we’ll share our interview with some KIDS about both the media and marketing messages in ‘exit poll’ style.

It doesn’t matter a whit that I enjoyed the original HSM with its refreshingly kitsch “be true to yourself” message, ‘bop til you drop’ soundtrack and butterfly-in-the-tummy palpitations of young love and was not as wild about the second one.

What matters is whether KIDS love it, proving “lightening can strike twice” and “wholesome” CAN sell. This is the integral (ultimate!) formula to turn the tide of the industry toward sustainable change. HSM 1 & 2 (& yep, soon to be 3, headed for the big screen) takes the “sex sells” advermantra, turns it on its ear, and shows that harsh, crass, über-sexual commercialism and violence is NOT the only ‘e-ticket’ as a cash cow. Disney has done us ALL a great service by proving that myth to be…um…Mickey Mouse.

Hold your e-mail rants, cynical hipsters, I’m not implying a steady diet of candy-coated creative is the spoon fed solution for youth media, I’m simply suggesting that perhaps this wildly successful franchise may be fueled by kids’ own desire to be kids.

HSM2 extended well beyond Disney’s coveted ‘tween scene’ to high schoolers who were gonzo with anticipation, many with Zac Efron crushes. (blogosphere youth pundits and HairSpray fans have been ga-ga for ages, but it seems he hit official “heartthrob” status when he made the cover of The Rolling Stone and just signed to start shooting Seventeen in November, fast-tracked as leading man in New Line Cinema’s love story to leverage his HSM draw no doubt!)

Anyway, all this hoopla reinforces my academic/psychological research hunch that the ‘girls gone wild’ bit is overblown, as many teen girls long for romance over raunch, gentle innuendo over in-your-face overtures, and caring, clean-cut cuties over studly, swaggering notch-on-the-belt antics of shallow bad-boy rogues.

Interestingly enough, when I interviewed some of the HSM2 California crowd, the all too familiar personality shift transpired when surrounded by peers who might ‘judge’ them. When asked for a HSM reaction alone, they were candid…yet in a group, they checked into their safety zone eyeing who would say what, often hiding their enthusiasm behind younger sibs to buffer the Disney brand and take on a ‘too cool for school’ MTV-ish persona.

Again, this hints at a complicated backstory of teen behavioral mythology which researchers and NCHS stats have often shined the spotlight on, noting that teens are actually delaying sexual activity more, but the media is positioning an “everyone’s doing it” peer pressure dynamic that has become a force field of angst and depression among teens’ psychological health in both boys AND girls.

If everyone would just ‘come clean’ and admit they like what they like, and quit stressing about what media and marketing are defining as ‘cool’ then we might have a shot at authenticity and a genuine exhale. ‘Twas ever thus, I s’pose…

Then there’s the kids/tweens thin-slicing of Disney’s HSM piece of the pie, (ages 6-11 & 9-14) again, a fascinating phenom ranging from rabid to random. We polled our own Shaping Youth advisory board and found the ‘fever-pitch’ was an uneven bellwether at best…For example:

I happened to be in Los Angeles for the mega-media HSM2 premiere, staying with not just any tween, but a Disney-manic diehard ten-year old who lives, eats and breathes mouseland right down to the Belgian waffle iron with mouse ears and Tink fairy fixation on every household item.

This child is a Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK) card-trading, code-swapping, pin-collecting park-hopper-annual pass kinda gal, who almost broke her leg on the wet tile scurrying out of the shower from a day at the beach, just to tune in on time. (she made it, but her mom nearly had apoplexy convinced she’d be headed to the ER from the frenzied falls she’d taken en route!)

Meanwhile, my daughter who is newly 12, was definitely interested in seeing HSM2, but it was not a ‘make it or break it’ deal for her, literally or figuratively. In fact, she would’ve preferred to stay at the beach longer to boogie board more waves.

So here’s the thing…Will Disney blow the ‘wholesome’ advantage by over-saturation and greed to snag the diehards and stuff them with ‘gear’ while alienating enthusiasts that LIKE the HSM film but don’t LIVE for it?

Disney’s projecting $650 million in retail sales for fiscal year 2008, which sure sounds like saturation coming down the pike to me…guess I’ll put them on MouseWatch tracking this site of all things Disney…

I sure hope the HSM success can yield some traction for more squeaky clean choices, but tweens and teens are SO savvy about marketing now, I’m already seeing ‘rolls of the eyeballs’ among kids that feel Disney is just out to make a buck off their backs.

In addition to the usual garb, they’ve already got cute locker housings for everything from ipods and alarm clocks to flat screen TVs gearing up for back to school fall fanfare.

So, even though the reviewers crow about a nod to cable’s clout and kid power and all that jazz…Now that the ‘big day’ is over and out, and the movie was ‘ok’ but more Fosse and floof than character and creative, will the franchise fizzle from over-marketing tackiness?

Parents may drive sales even further with the “hey, it’s wholesome, I’ll support that” routine, whereas kids are already five steps ahead saying, “hmn, why would I want that locker with a HSM logo, that’s tacky, now if it came in different colors, unbranded, we might talk”…

Mind you, I’m in the camp of ‘why do you need ANY of this stuff’ but AM anxious to see HSM ‘do well’ in order to shift the dollar driven motivators toward healthier fare. (not sure HSM2’s rich mean blonde country clubber consumptionist stereotype is healthy but I’ll save that ‘fabulous’ analysis for part two of this piece)

Makes me wonder if anyone’s really listening and watching kids’ behavioral cues, or just marketing TO them…

Disney of course is masterful at this ‘surround sound’ game of infiltration. From the hefty spike of HSM product placement embedded references in other Disney shows and countless Access Hollywood style behind-the-scenes video clips and promo peeks which kids love, the mouse house created one big commercial. (ah, but remember, “Disney Channel doesn’t air commercials” wink-wink, nudge!)

This round is particularly noteworthy, for they tried for the fully integrated ‘experiential’ UGC (user-generated content) style, where viewers were invited to vote on Disney.com to determine details of the sequel’s plot in poll style, sayings on a character’s t-shirts, what type of dessert Zeke would bake for Sharpay, that kind of gimmickry.

Did kids feel ‘engaged’? Moreover, did they REALLY have much say? C’mon. Of course not, otherwise they’d have a VIABLE script. It was all Web 2.0 illusion and perception for an ‘immersive’ marketing experience.

In Part Two of this piece, you’ll see that kids would’ve written this script much differently and had an entirely different agenda in terms of plot twists and dramatic arch with cast members we haven’t yet even heard of…(Disney, are you listening? You could learn from the kids here…)

Disney was more concerned that they be ‘ready’ for the merchandising boom, with enough product to “feed the need” since they got caught with their pants down in the first hit and couldn’t leverage the popularity of the film fast enough.

Of course being the quintessential marketing machine, where teens just couldn’t get enough, Disney provided a snapshot of how much marketing has enveloped kids’ media far beyond the film or ‘event’ itself…100 licensed products will be in stores by year’s end, and $100 million has already poured into Disney’s operating income, impacting every division from theme parks and home entertainment…So far we’ve seen:

An “on demand” early preview opportunity, an online HSM2 supersite, with music and video previews, podcast and poster downloads, photos, games, a “party planning kit” for those en-masse viewing events, separate Disney XD site with constant soundtrack and trailer streaming, mobile access, interactive cell phone apps, ringtones, Sprint Power Vision for short-form footage, both versions of the film streaming on Disney’s mobile channel, a sing-along with follow the bouncing ball lyrics, a 40-city national tour, and coming soon, for a whole new level of ‘cool,’ an ice show launches next month, where you can tap in your zipcode and find the ‘happening’ near you…

OH!…Wait! Let’s not forget the cast BBQ, live chat, and such at “Kenny’s house” which my daughter kept voicing with Affluenza awe-struck incredulousness, “Is that REALLY his house? Whoa!” Ahem…(Again, more on that dynamic in part two of this lengthy article)

As the New York Times reported, there were many shifts between the first low key film and the second entry,

“This time the channel subdivided its audience into the narrowest of niches and sought out each razor-thin slice wherever it could be found: cross-promotions were created with Major League Baseball, Wal-Mart, Sprint and Dannon yogurt, among others. Gossip and updates on the making of the sequel were doled out to magazines like CosmoGirl and People, and every star of the film had an official presence on YouTube, MySpace or elsewhere on the Internet – a strategy that was largely absent from the promotion of the first film.

Even the gradual unveiling of the sequel’s poster on the Disney.com Web site was turned into its own event. “The poster was released in pieces,” said Danielle Chiara, the deputy editor of J-14, a tween-oriented entertainment magazine. “Every week you would see a piece from it, and then kids could print it out once it was entirely revealed.”

Sorry for the long-winded marketing diatribe, but unlike the more artsy, angst-ridden realism of other coming of age teenage flick picks (great Washington Post article on some classics here) HSM is worthy of some hefty analysis based on the sophistication and saturation of the marketing machine phenom.

It’s particularly noteworthy for a fact check when parents say, “how does this advertising differ from when WE grew up, it’s just more of the same, right?”

Next up…our ‘kids’ piece on THEIR reaction to all of this hype and hoopla, stay tuned for Part Two as we talk to tweens and teens on their HSM2 vs. HSM1 “experience”…