HOW MIRACLE WHIP, PLENTY OF FISH TAPPED LADY GAGA'S 'TELEPHONE'

The most-talked about aspect of Lady Gaga's Beyonce co-starring, Jonas Akerlund-directed music video for "Telephone," which premiered Thursday night, was not the singer's flagrant partial nudity, girl-on-girl kissing or mass-murder sequence in a diner featuring Tyrese Gibson.

It was the product placement.

At least nine different brands make appearances in the nine-minute music video, from Gaga's own Heartbeats headphones to a "Beats Limited Edition" laptop, from HP Envy to "telephone" partner Virgin Mobile, and from Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread to Diet Coke.

Almost instantly, the video lighted up the web with reactions from the likes of the Huffington Post, The Guardian, Jezebel, Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine, which gave a helpful rundown of all the brands -- including fashion and accessories -- that make appearances.

But despite the cornucopia of products, only a handful were paid placements, said Gaga's manager, Troy Carter, CEO of Coalition Media Group.

Mr. Carter told Ad Age that several of the brands were Gaga's ideas and did not pay to be included. A scene in which Gaga curls her hair with Diet Coke cans was an homage to her mother, who used the exact same grooming technique in the '70s. Another sequence, in which Gaga poisons a whole diner full of patrons, is interspersed with footage of the singer making sandwiches with Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip. Mr. Carter said Gaga wanted to juxtapose the poison sequence with all-American brands, and suggested Wonder Bread for an unpaid placement. Miracle Whip, meanwhile, made a paid appearance to appear in the clip. A Miracle Whip spokeswoman confirmed the brand's paid integration, but didn't comment further. The product shots feature new Miracle Whip packaging, and seem the latest in a series of Gen-Y outreach maneuvers, including a new campaign promising "we will not tone it down."

Featured throughout "Telephone" are shots of a Virgin Mobile cellphone, a nod given to the mobile sponsor of Gaga's Monster Ball tour, as well as a Polaroid camera and photo booth as part of Gaga's new role as the camera company's creative director. Several characters are also seen listening to music on Heartbeats by Gaga headphones from Interscope Music and surfing the internet on the "Beats" laptop from Hewlett Packard, all of which were unpaid extensions of Gaga's marketing partnerships.
PlentyofFish.com, an online dating site, also makes a surprise appearance, the result of ongoing talks with Gaga's marketing team at Universal Music to find the right project.

Plenty of Fish VP Kimberly Kaplan on Friday said the dating site got into the video through an ongoing partnership with Interscope Records. This just the second music-video integration for Plenty of Fish, which still does the bulk of its advertising online. She admitted the brand was "nervous" without creative input, but very pleased with the outcome. Plenty of Fish had seen a 15% increase in search by close of business Friday, but wasn't yet able to quantify an increase in traffic.
If 'Thriller' were made today"We have a lot of fun with it now," Mr. Carter said of the "Telephone" video's product placement. "If Michael Jackson was making 'Thriller,' he would do this too. These million-dollar music videos have to have partners to be produced."

Dyana Kass, who heads up pop music marketing at Universal Music Group, added, "We were trying to line up brands that were organic. There were natural pieces in there, like being in a kitchen, so those kind of scenes that just made sense for brands. But we always agree creatively, and get sign-off before we walk down the aisle."
Mr. Carter would not comment on the nine-minute, Jonas Akerlund-directed video's budget, other than to say, "Lady Gaga plus Beyonce equals an expensive video."
The video was shot across three days and took a month and a half to edit. Its premiere airing on E! News, after the network's 11 p.m. ET time slot, attracted 833,000 viewers, a 32% increase from the network's average performance in the time slot.

Mr. Carter said E! was selected over MTV and other music networks because "we wanted a network partner that was going to show the video as it was intended to be shown. They gave us 20 minutes of real estate on their network ... and it was pretty much unedited."

Online, music-video site Vevo bought a slot on the YouTube home page that referred users to the "Telephone" page on Vevo.com, which crashed the morning of the clip's premiere. The video broke all Vevo single-day traffic records and had already generated close to 4 million views on YouTube in less than 24 hours.
As for the "To be continued..." message at the video's end? "Stay tuned," Mr. Carter teased.

DIGITAL MEDIA + CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS = BRAND GAGA

As far as breakout musicians go, few artists have had quite the zero-awareness-to-ubiquity time-warp of Lady Gaga. And as far as brands go, few marketers of any kind have leveraged social media the way she has to drive sales of their core product -- in her case, albums and digital singles.

GLAMMING IT UP: Cyndi Lauper (l.) and Lady Gaga's Viva Glam lipsticks have outsold every launch in the line's history. Lady Gaga, with her army of nearly 2.8 million Twitter followers and more than 5.2 million Facebook fans, can move product. Since fall 2008, her digital-single sales have exceeded 20 million and her album sales hit 8 million, all at a time when no one under the age of 60 buys CDs anymore (see Susan Boyle breaking the record for highest first-week album sales last year). Now, she's being courted by marketers to do the same for their products.

Gaga's rapid ascent to the pop-culture stratosphere is often compared to Madonna's, right down to their shared beginnings in the downtown New York club scene before their big record deals. But what makes Gaga's star status, particularly in the marketing community, so uniquely 2010 is that she has achieved as many milestones (if not more) in 18 months than her idol did in nearly a decade. Madonna's notorious endorsement for Pepsi in 1989 -- cut short after her controversial "Like a Prayer" video aired on MTV -- came seven years after the debut of her first single in 1982. Within a year of her out-of-the-box rise to fame in September 2008, Gaga had already lined up Virgin Mobile as a sponsor of her Monster Ball tour; created her own brand of headphones, Hearbeats by Lady Gaga, with record label Interscope; and landed her own (cherry pink) lipstick as a spokeswoman for Mac Cosmetics' Viva Glam, benefiting Mac's AIDS fund. And by January, she was tapped by Polaroid to become the brand's creative director, hired specifically to create new products and inject life into a brand that hasn't been hip for years -- save for maybe a popular reference in Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

Old school meets new media

How did a 23-year-old singer/songwriter achieve so much in so little time? Two words: social media. Sure, Gaga had a fair share of old-school artist development -- radio play -- to become the first artist to score four consecutive No. 1 singles from a debut album. But she's also put a new-media spin on her distribution strategy. The November premiere of her video for "Bad Romance," for example, debuted on LadyGaga.com before MTV or any other outlet could play it -- resulting in a Universal Music server crash, a Twitter trending topic that lasted all week and a cumulative 110 million (and counting) views on YouTube to date, more than any viral music video of yore (OK Go, anyone?) could ever claim. Vevo, a music video site co-founded by Universal Music Group, also recently reported a whopping 20% of its traffic came from just Lady Gaga videos -- as in 1 in 5 videos streamed on the site was likely to be a song such as "Poker Face," "Just Dance" or "LoveGame."

Gaga has already had a similar halo effect on her Mac Viva Glam lipstick. Less than a week into its launch, the lipsticks created by Gaga and her campaign cohort Cyndi Lauper have outsold any launch in Viva Glam's 16-year history, said Estée Lauder Group President John Demsey, thanks to a groundswell of social-media impressions. The launch day of her Viva Glam lipstick ad campaign alone generated nearly 20 million unique views in traditional media, including print and web buys and an appearance on "The Today Show," as well as an additional wellspring of social-media hits per Gaga's tweets to her fans.

"Her fan base and our customer base are very similar in that they are drawn to the outrageous and outspoken, so we could not ask for a better partnership," Mr. Demsey said.

Taking credit for Gaga's sudden assault of the zeitgeist is a relatively easy task, as all parties who work with her on her label, management and marketing teams cite Gaga herself as the ultimate brains behind many of her creative and social-media ideas and tactics.

"When you're dealing with someone as good as Gaga, a lot of it is how to stay the fuck out of the way," said Steve Berman, Universal Music's president of sales and marketing. "Gaga has worked tirelessly in keeping up daily if not hourly communication with her fans and growing fanbase through all the technology that exists now."

Gaga in control

Troy Carter, Gaga's manager since 2007, described their dynamic as "95-5." "The only thing I do is manage the vision," he said. "Ninety-five percent of the time I won't comment on creative, and 95% of the time she lets me run the business. The other 5% is where we debate about things like, 'Do you really want to bleed to death on stage at the [MTV] VMAs?' She wins even when we do have those debates 5% of the time."

Dyana Kass, who heads pop-music marketing for Universal, has teamed with marketing firms like Flylife for Gaga's outreach to the gay community and ThinkTank to supplement her online efforts, but otherwise lets Gaga maintain a hands-on relationship with her fans and marketing empire.

"Lady Gaga has truly turned culture on its head and has done so from the ground up on her terms," she said. "You can't buy that kind of authenticity, and as a result the demand for her involvement in projects is staggering."

Mr. Carter, who manages Gaga's marketing partnerships, added that he doesn't want Gaga to ever look like she's endorsing a brand -- hence why she's created products for Universal's Beats By Dre headphones line, Viva Glam and now Polaroid as its new creative director.

"You won't see her face plastered on any packaging or anything. We're comparing it to when Tom Ford went to Gucci or Steve Jobs went into Apple and brought a different thought process and taste level in. We're looking for her to do the same exact thing at Polaroid," he said. "It's not about her putting her name on something -- it's reinvigorating a brand."