The Plum of Your Eye
When we think about how the rich and famous meet, we generally imagine face-to-face gatherings over champagne and crudités at high society balls, country clubs or the Sun Valley Conference hosted by Allen & Company. The reality is now quite different as the bright line between professional, charitable and personal lives for the super-rich is now blurred and with the evolution of their own virtual communities.
Just as MySpace and Facebook have created a parallel universe of communication along the horizontal axis to the mainstream media’s top-down vertical axis, there are other institutions doing the same with the super-wealthy. For example, the World Economic Forum is organizing a global platform for member discussion that is closed zone to outsiders, called WELCOM. CORE: a by-invitation only club in New York City, with 1,400 members of average net worth in excess of $100 million, offers COREaccess.net, a portal which aggregates information for members’ business and lifestyle needs. This too is a closed environment for member discussion of private issues; a Zagat-like guide on favorite restaurants/hotels; and even an exchange for goods and services. So in effect, the wealthy are in gated online communities equivalent to their secure homes. How can those of us in PR reach those elite consumers?
This niche market has long been served by elegant print media, such as Hamptons or the Robb Report; this universe is now expanding across platforms to retain its audience. We’re seeing the emergence of media such as Plum, a television, interactive and social network, solely for this group. Plum has achieved cable distribution in America’s gathering places for the rich and famous, including Aspen, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Telluride, Sun Valley and Vail. According to Plum’s press materials, 60% of those surveyed in Plum markets watch Plum TV, spending an average of 4 hours a week or one third of their total TV viewing time. The viewers are super-affluent, with mean income of $630,000 and mean net worth of $8.7 million. Sixty percent of the viewers “make significant purchase decisions while in a Plum market.”
Plum is taking executives, such as Jennie Saunders of Core, and making them media personalities (note that CNBC has done the same with Michael Eisner and Donny Deutsch). Plum will be launching a half hour show in June called Connections with Jennie Saunders, interviewing “iconic individuals…titans of business…offering unparalleled access to their lives.” In recent months she has organized discussions at her club in New York City on charitable activity with George Soros, pre-release screenings of films with George Clooney, forums on health with Dr. Mehmet Oz, and literary chats with Walter Isaacson, author of EINSTEIN. So Plum gets access to better content, while Jennie Saunders is positioned as a taste-maker in her target markets, a perfect symbiotic relationship.
As we compete for the attention of these high-end consumers, we will need to work with mainstream media and with this new niche media. We must also create opportunities for communications direct to opinion formers. At Edelman, we are now regularly incorporating permission-based emails to 1,000 academics, business leaders, financial analysts, NGOs and community figures, in effect our own version of an RSS feed to those who might have an interest in a specific issue or product. We are creating easily repurposed video content that can be sent along by these influential people to interested parties. I would appreciate your comments as always.