The Hottest Products of the Pandemic Are Zoom, Purell and Netflix (And Booze, Cannabis and ... Spiral Hams?)

In "news more predictable than the plot of a Dane Cook movie" news, branding agency MBLM (pronounced "Emblem") is out with its "Brand Intimacy Study 2020," revealing that the hottest brands of the pandemic in terms of consumers' usage of and emotional attachment to them are, in descending order (drumroll): Zoom, Purell and Netflix. 

The study was based on a survey of 3,000 consumers in the U.S. in late summer who shared their opinions of and experiences with 100 brands across 10 sectors. The full study will be released Oct. 7. 

The popularity of Zoom, Purell and Netflix may be a no-brainer, as are greater sales of stuff like home workout equipment, jigsaw puzzles and, last but certainly not least, booze. Then there are all those products (paper goods, disinfectant spray) that flew off the shelves because of the mass hoarding of all you selfish bastards. But our being largely shut in the last six months has also led to a curious run on a number of other products, as AARP reported — among them, inflatable swimming pools and bidets. And Business Insider noted the surprising rise in demand for things like nail polish remover, Kombucha and spiral hams.

Of surprise to absolutely no one is the massive spike the cannabis industry has enjoyed since Covid hit, as TechCrunch reported. "Some company CEOs see the pandemic driving consumer acceptance and pushing legalization at the national level," the site noted. "With legalization, new consumers enter the market, and companies such as Canopy Growth, PAX and Grenco Science look to benefit as makers of some of the best vaporizers on the market — that is if consumers can find them in stock." Meanwhile, new players are joining the gold rush all the time — including, most recently, Martha Stewart, who launched her own line of CBD gummies. (They are simply delicious. I hear.) 

You know another thing that's been on the upswing during Covid? Debilitating depression. Which might have a tad something to do with the popularity of booze and marijuana. (And I'm pretty sure the sudden demand for spiral hams is related to the latter.)

You Can Watch the Next Octagon-of-Horror Cage Match "Debate" ... or You Can Just Go Ahead and Kill Yourself

According to legend and lore, journalists are the type to rush to the scene of a car crash with the hope of interviewing the man splattered on the road before he draws his next breath (or before his or her competition at the newspaper or TV station arrives on the scene), or to knock on the door of some lady who just lost her baby in a fire, demanding to know how she FEELS. Cliches like "hard-bitten" and "world-weary" are tossed around; personally, I find "ruthless" and "heartless" more accurate. 

I have been a working journalist, I am proud to say, for more than 30 years, but have never been one to enjoy visiting a nursing home that just exploded to count the dead old people scattered on the lawn. (Covering blazing nursing homes was just one of the luxuries of my first job out of j-school, at a local TV station. I left there after a couple of years, realizing it probably wasn't normal or healthy to require an entire bottle of bourbon to get to sleep after a day's work.) It's why I now write about relatively harmless stuff like the businesses of media and marketing — there are plenty of horrible monsters there, and god knows plenty of bad news, but very rarely is actual blood drawn, and living inside that world doesn't promote alcoholism or keep me up nights. 

As a newsperson and a news junkie, I have always immersed myself in the events of the day, but find that as I grow older I prefer to keep a somewhat safe distance from life's blood and gore, while still making the effort to keep up with what's happening in a world in which I can't escape being a part. The way I see it, I have two options: obsessively follow the details of every sickening, deplorable event (not to mention the endless, largely pointless analysis of said events) in some mission to stay thoroughly informed, or jump off the Chrysler Building. That said, sometimes, try as I might, I simply cannot look away from the car fire. 

That was me two nights ago, during the first presidential, um, debate. I knew what I was getting into ahead of time, but I went ahead, steeled myself, popped a big bowl of popcorn — and thought I could take it. 

I was wrong. 

Boy was I wrong. 

Just as I do not enjoy watching nursing home explosions or chatting up the mothers of dead babies, I cannot abide watching an unapologetic bully in action, in large part because I myself have been bullied, as an adolescent and in the work world. (Again, the media business is full of monsters, especially in New York. I hope to write about those, someday.) What a depressing spectacle and a true low point for our politics and discourse, that event — so much so that I couldn't bear to write about it till today, two days on, because it put me in such a hopeless, exhausting funk the entire day after. (I went to bed at 9 o'clock last night.) 

I will not be writing about collapsing bridges, roller coasters full of school children leaving the rails or police shootings anytime soon, nor will I be watching any more of these televised, octagon-of-horror cage matches where millions of bored Americans gather around the warmth of their big-screen TVs to see a gargantuan toad pummel a sad puppy into bloody submission. I will read the "highlights" the following day, thank you. 

What a shame, that this incontestably low point is what we've all come to. The Chrysler Building's not looking like such a bad option.

Now It's the 12 Weeks of Christmas: Holiday Shopping And Advertising to Commence Even Earlier This Year

Walmart plans to hire 20,000 employees to fulfill online orders this holiday season

In a previous life, I visited "CBS This Morning" to chat with Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King about how Christmas commercials are airing earlier and earlier. The reason was simple, I explained: because research showed at the time that 40 percent of Americans do at least some of their holiday shopping before Halloween — which is why, even though everybody always claims to hate it when stores put out their Christmas decorations and marketers run ads featuring Santa during October, they will continue to do so, forever and ever, amen. The beast that is retail must be fed when it is hungry, after all — and never has that been truer than in this awful year, with Covid wreaking havoc on the sector and major retailers from Neiman Marcus to Century21 going bankrupt.

As Ad Age recently reported, the Christmas-before-Halloween trend has only accelerated in 2020, with holiday promotions from retailers such as Crate & Barrel and West Elm rolling out in mid-September. Carter's, the maker of baby clothing, even pushed out an email blast with the subject line: "Last chance to get ready for the holidays." As Joel Bines, managing director and global co-leader of AlixPartners' retail practice, told the publication: "The traditional November-December holiday season definition is meaningless this year. His company projects total retail business from October to December this year to grow from 1 to 2.6 percent versus last year, when sales hit $1.1 trillion. 

And if you're the kind of person who finds it depressing when stores start decorating for Christmas when the pool's still warm? Then don't stop into Walmart, where aisles and aisles of fake Christmas trees, lawn ornaments and gift-wrapping are already fully stocked. But don't be too depressed — an early Christmas might just be what we all need this year. It's certainly happy news to those struggling with unemployment and underemployment right now. As CNBC reported, Walmart aims to hire 20,000 seasonal employees to help pack and ship online purchases, the first time in five years that the big-box retailer has hired a significant number of holiday helpers.

Leave it to good old American consumerism to turn ho, ho, hum into ho, ho, hooray.

Is It Curtains for The Hollywood Reporter? Variety Publisher Penske Media Group to Operate Rival THR, Billboard and Vibe in Joint Venture With MRC

The era of dueling Hollywood trade pubs is over. 

Variety reports that its parent company Penske Media Corp. has inked a deal with MRC to operate The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Vibe under a joint venture. The newly formed company will be called PMRC. The deal puts longtime rivals Variety and THR under the same roof for the first time ever, and also means that leading music pubs Billboard, Vibe and PMC's Rolling Stone will now be family. 

Dick Clark Productions and other assets will be spun off under a second joint venture, charged with developing new content from brands across the company. (So you know what that means: more awards shows.)

Tongues are wagging as to the ultimate fate of THR. Will Jay Penske continue to run the two trade titles as separate, quasi-independent entities (á la the old "joint operating agreement" of daily newspapers, where business operations are merged while the newsrooms continue to compete with one another) or will he fold Variety's longtime rival? 

"Whether Penske decides to shut THR depends on how it is performing financially," Reed Phillips — the chairman of Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, which specializes in M&As for media, marketing and tech businesses — told me this morning. "If it is doing OK, it might be a smart strategy to keep it alive because you are often better off competing with yourself by having two strong brands in the same market rather than leaving an opening for another."

Another media insider told me, referencing Penske's track record of taking over and making over titles like Variety, Rolling Stone and WWD: "Penke's business model has been to acquire established brands with loyal audiences that have been mismanaged in the past. They cut costs, but they don't have a history of folding things. They don't fold businesses — they transform businesses by bringing them into the 21st century."

As for myself, someone who has worked on and off for years for some of these pubs and their corporate siblings, reading about all this is kind of like watching a wedding between Hatfields and McCoys. Let's wait and see whether it turns into a bloodbath.

The Magazine Nobody Cares About Anymore Puts Somebody You Barely Care About on October Cover

It's been awhile since I hated on Vanity Fair, so here I go again, shooting a dead, unimportant, uninteresting fish in a barrel. Remember when this magazine mattered, when we anxiously awaited each issue to see which A-list star had made the cover, at one time the most valuable piece of media real estate in Hollywood? While Fashionista dubs the October cover of VF featuring Elle Fanning a "must-read," others aren't convinced. Noting the well-mannered shot of Fanning posing by the seaside in a Dior gown with a couple of hoity-toity hounds, Roger Friedman of Showbiz 411 writes, "If you didn't know better, you'd swear it was Town & Country." He goes on to call the accompanying story "a nice People kind of cover, with no revelations." Of course it doesn't. Why should VF make news when it hasn't managed to do that in years under editor Radhika Jones? Even when Jones has tried to capture the zeitgeist — most recently, with last month's cover featuring an illustration of the late Breonna Taylor — she doesn't quite pull it off, well-meaning as she may be. (Hearst's O, The Oprah Magazine had already done a Taylor homage, and a better one, months before. Meanwhile, on social media, VF's cover provoked pushback about the media's "commoditization" of Taylor.) And yet one more cover down in this painful gallery of failure, we are left to wonder what this once-great magazine could've been had former Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min been tapped to fill Graydon Carter's shoes instead of a book editor from the Times. Anna, are you listening?

Patagonia's Political Call to Action Masks the Lefty Brand's Cozy Relationship With the U.S. Military

It's the kind of media attention money can't buy. Everybody's talking about Patagonia's hidden political message on the backside of a tag sewn into a pair of shorts, imploring customers to "Vote the Assholes Out." It's even become a trending topic on Twitter — what brand wouldn't want that kind of free advertising? Activism is, of course, nothing new for this popular marketer of outerwear, which has made headlines for giving a $10 million tax cut to environmental programs and for closing up shop on Election Day. Every news outlet from CNN to NBC, Yahoo, Vogue and People magazine carried approving stories on the company's clever clothing-tag stunt, but the conservative publication National Review was the sole news org I could find that put a spotlight on the lefty brand's surprising hypocrisy. 

While it gets loads of press and the praise of devoted fans because of its p.c. bona fides, National Review reports that Patagonia also happens to be a longtime contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, noting that the company has an entire team dedicated to furnishing our fighting men and women with cold-weather and combat uniforms. As the magazine's Jim Geraghty writes, "Most people will have no problem with Patagonia developing and selling [products to] the U.S. military. Then again, some of Patagonia's more stridently liberal customers, who see the U.S. military as an inherently imperialistic or destructive force, might not see the company's military contracts as a sin that they can excuse or forgive." 

Count me among those stridently liberal customers, someone who happens to be a fan of Patagonia who proudly buys and wears its products, in no small part because I so admire its politics. As such, I say let Columbia or Marmot or Carhartt or The North Face supply our soldiers with their apparel. Now, nobody wants our soldiers to get frostbite, of course. And National Review's report makes a pretty broad leap in suggesting that if you're a liberal you're against the troops. (I am a liberal and I am not anti-military.) But strictly regarding brand equity and brand reputation, Patagonia has been far too successful building an image as a socially responsible company to risk pissing off its core customers. You cannot serve two masters, as the commandment goes. Finding out Patagonia is in bed with the Pentagon is like hearing Ben & Jerry's is the official ice cream of Fox News. 

Here's the thing. I believe our armed forces deserve the very best supplies there are — I just don't believe such a famously progressive company with such a devoted following on the left should be doing the supplying. 

Oh, and one more thing: Vote the Assholes Out.

Target Latest Company to Make C-Suite More Diverse

Target is going beyond just paying lip service to diversifying its upper ranks. Today, Maurice Cooper starts at the Minneapolis-based retail chain as senior VP of marketing, where he will lead brand, category and promotional marketing efforts across paid, owned and shared media and oversee key campaigns including those around the all-important holiday shopping season. Previously, Cooper was exec VP, chief growth & experience officer at the fast-casual chain Wingstop and also served in brand marketing positions at The Coca-Cola Co. and Intercontinental Hotels Group. Target is just the latest company to make its C-suite more diverse. Another is Boeing, which last week appointed Ed Dandridge to senior VP, chief communications officer. Dandridge previously was global chief marketing and communications officer at the insurance giant AIG. Target and Boeing follow companies such as Apple, Nike and Netflix making high-profile minority hires in recent weeks, each putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to assigning minorities to C-suite roles. The trend is long overdue, and the recent promotions are but a drop in the bucket when it comes to the leadership of American business. As USA Today recently reported, among 279 senior positions at the top 50 companies in the S&P 100, only 5 are held by Black people — and 2 of those recently retired. While many companies rushed to issue statements of support to the Black community following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, they clearly have a long way to go when it comes to making their boardrooms more accurately reflect their employee ranks and the customers they serve.