Find several name and face-recognizable celebrities, gather them at a live event, make it available to consumers via a broad and web-cast, and voila! You have the making for a story. In this case, it is the 10th anniversary of Amazon (sponsored by Chase).
Most anniversaries go unnoticed by the media. They are mostly non-events that happen every day for some enterprise or another. So how does one embellish an anniversary so that it generates news coverage?
I remember working on the 75th anniversary of the Miss America Organization. We gathered Miss Americas for each of the last seven decades and posed them before a multi-tiered anniversary cake. Great pic! Inexpensive too. On top of that, the MAO folks decided that they would put the very un-PC swimsuit competition up for a viewer vote in the first hour of the ABC telecast, dangling the possibility that it wouldn’t take place in the broadcast. It did.
The news today that Amazon would celebrate its 10th anniversary with a live concert featuring the ubiquitous Bob Dylan, Norah Jones and Bill Maher — now there’s a triple non-sequitor for you — struck me as odd. What do these three celebs have to to with Amazon? Hmmm. Let me think. Dylan’s book was an Amazon best-seller. Nora’s CD, the same. But Bill Maher? He has a new book about to be released — also available on Amazon. Works for me.