Chapter 678

The Victoria's Secret show has adopted a strategy of binding marketing to Yahoo from the beginning, and during this live TV broadcast with more than 40 million viewers, Yahoo's name will be mentioned between each theme of the Victoria's Secret show, Yahoo's logo will also appear in the footage, and there is even a plot of Victoria's Secret Angel canvassing for himself on the Yahoo voting page in the tidbits. Under this kind of unremitting joint promotion, with the strong ratings and topicality of the Victoria's Secret show, viewers who want to know more about this beautiful Neiyi fashion show during the broadcast of the show have flocked to the Yahoo website as long as they have an Internet at home.

In the editorial department of Yahoo Portal in Boston, Jeff Locke, the head of Yahoo website operations on duty tonight, and Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo, were excited to see the real-time summary of user visits in the background of the website, and after the Victoria's Secret show began to broadcast live, the number of instant access users of Yahoo Portal increased by 50% in just half an hour Halfway through the live broadcast, Tina Brown pulled the head of Yahoo's editorial department into the conference room and began to discuss how to further use the hot topics of the Victoria's Secret show to expand the influence of Yahoo Portal.

However, less than ten minutes into the meeting, Jeff Locke barged in and said in an eager tone, "Tina, no, the Yahoo Forum servers are down." ”

Although she has been focusing on media content, since joining the industry, Tina Brown has been working hard to improve her computer knowledge for the past six months, and after hearing Jeff Locke's words, Tina Brown realized the seriousness of the matter and immediately stood up.

Yahoo's last outage was just a few months ago when YCR was launched and the YCR server crashed due to a lack of sufficient estimation of how fast users would expand, due to the debate in Breaking Bad about the world's largest data center. The downtime of the YCR server has also become the focus of ridicule of competitors, but I didn't expect that half a year has passed, and Yahoo has a similar situation again.

Tina Brown got up and followed Jeff Locke out of the conference room and asked, "Did you inform Ian and Steve?"

Jeff Locke pulled out his phone and dialed the number, explaining, "I'll just call, but the technical department says it's not a big problem." All you need to do is restart the server. ”

Tina Brown knew that things would not be as simple as Jeff Locke thought, and shook her head: "Even if the technical problem is not big, we will definitely be in the headlines again tomorrow." ”

Jeff Locke was stunned for a moment, but also smiled bitterly, the last YCR server crash incident made Yahoo lose face, tonight's high-profile moment has a problem with the website again, and then there will definitely be another wave of ridicule, the phone in his hand is connected, Jeff Locke told Ian Gnier in a few words. Soon hung up and dialed Steve Mitnick's number again.

Because of the rapid expansion of the company, Yahoo's editorial department and headquarters are scattered in two office buildings, Tina Brown and Jeff Rock have just left the Yahoo editorial office building and are about to walk to the nearby headquarters building, when Tina Brown's assistant hurriedly chased after him with a mobile phone: "Ms. Brown, Mr. Williams's phone." ”

More than ten minutes later, the Victoria's Secret discussion area of the Yahoo Forum has returned to normal after the server restarts, and the cause of the incident has been identified. The Victoria's Secret discussion forum is a sub-community of the fashion section of the Yahoo Forum. The maximum number of users that the server can withstand is about 1 million, which is for the current Internet environment. This user capacity was originally very abundant, but because of another misestimation and the strong diversion effect of the Yahoo Portal homepage through train link, the number of user visits to the discussion area during the live broadcast of the Victoria's Secret show skyrocketed, and finally exceeded the server's capacity by more than twice the user's access requests, forming a data stream like a flood that burst the embankment, and instantly collapsed the server.

After the Victoria's Secret discussion board returns to normal, before addressing the server capacity. In order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, Yahoo had to remove the direct link to the Victoria's Secret discussion forum from the homepage, but fortunately, the server downtime lasted for a short time, and after everything was restored, although it was inevitable that some users would be dissatisfied with the scolding. But it was quickly occupied by normal discussion threads.

At ABC headquarters, the live broadcast of the Victoria's Secret show has entered the final stage, Eric hung up the phone, and curiously opened the Victoria's Secret discussion forum, which has returned to normal.

There are a variety of topics on the page, and people seem to be able to feel the noise.

“…… Can someone tell me the name of the second countdown Victoria's Secret Angel who looks like Audrey Hepburn in Game 2?"

“…… Call to vote for my family Cindy, the YCR fan tribe has been opened, welcome to join. ”

“…… I like the second and third songs so much, let's come in and play lyrics solitaire together, I only remember a few words, it's a shame. ”

“…… Didn't anyone notice the Leningrad Symphony, and did Eric Williams use this Soviet war song as the soundtrack, does it mean something?"

“…… Why are there so many stinky men here, Baltimore friends, if you want to discuss the inner style, come to my YCR tribe, the tribe number 9527149. ”

“…… Where is the Victoria's Secret store here in Philadelphia, please inform. ”

“…… Woo, that baroque music is so sad, I cried when I heard it, but I want to listen to it a hundred more times, what should I do?"

“…… Watch TV, the 'Cinderella Affair' is coming, the 'Cinderella Affair' is coming, and Diane Kruger is about to drop her shoes. ”

“…… I want to lick it!"

“……”

“……”

Although only twenty posts can be displayed on a page, Eric couldn't help but smile as he looked at some familiar topics on the page. Although the commercial operation prospects of online forums have been poor, they are a powerful tool for rallying the popularity of Internet users, and can even become an important base for guiding online public opinion.

Eric was thinking about sorting out some memories of the online forum and discussing it with Yahoo's management, and the Victoria's Secret show on the TV screen finally came to the curtain call, and soon, Nielsen also passed on the final ratings data, and the average viewership of the Victoria's Secret show reached 41.5 million, because of the unsparing hype of the "Cinderella incident". The moment Diane Kruger dropped her shoes, the ratings data rushed to the highest point of the audience, reaching 46 million.

"The Super Bowl event of fashion!"

Early the next morning, the front page of the New York Post ran such a blacked-out headline, and the cover image also used the opening image of Diane Kruger in a bright red British military-style angel suit.

Since its first live television broadcast, the Super Bowl has been watched by more than 100 million people every year, firmly dominating the federal annual ratings leader. There are hardly any shows that can shake the Super Bowl. In the past, whenever a TV show tried to associate itself with the live broadcast of the Super Bowl, it was often only met with disdain and ridicule from the audience, but this time, the New York Post named the Victoria's Secret show the title of "Super Bowl event in the fashion industry", but there were few objections.

Although the final viewership of "Survivor" reached 56 million, which was 10 million higher than the peak ratings of the Victoria's Secret show, the ratings of the Victoria's Secret show in the audience group aged 18 to 49 exploded to 26.8, surpassing "Survivor" by 6 percentage points. Moreover, the audience age group of the Victoria's Secret show is more concentrated in the core audience group of 18 to 34 years old, and in the eyes of advertisers, the commercial value of the Victoria's Secret show is definitely far greater than that of "Survivor".

When the ratings data came out, hundreds of domestic and foreign TV stations contacted Firefly on the same day in an attempt to buy the TV broadcast rights of the Victoria's Secret show, and Warner's HBO even offered a sky-high price of $5 million in an attempt to buy out the cable TV broadcast rights of the Victoria's Secret show in the United States.

While paying attention to the ratings of the Victoria's Secret show, the media did not let Yahoo go, and the Yahoo forum was down again that night. It is inevitable that it will once again become the focus of ridicule of several major IT companies. But these ridicules did not harm Yahoo in the slightest, but once again raised Yahoo's public profile.

Many media outlets have also reflected the potential connection between Yahoo and Victoria's Secret in this branding process that lasted for half a year. The commentators of USA Weekly devoted a great deal of space to a detailed analysis of this 'brilliant syndication'. While Yahoo's traffic has been steadily rising, analysts at several major investment banks have raised their assessments of Yahoo's market capitalization.

After the Victoria's Secret show was held in Manhattan a month ago, the sales of LTD's products and the company's stock price began to rise, and after the TV broadcast, the national influence caused a sharp increase in sales of Victoria's Secret stores nationwide, and LTD's stock price also soared by 22% in the following week. As a result, LTD's market capitalization once rushed to $4.5 billion.

However, while the Victoria's Secret show was a huge commercial success, it also drew numerous criticisms, and the day after the TV broadcast, a large number of media and conservatives, led by New York Times commentator Thomas Peck, criticized the Victoria's Secret show, which was full of sexual revelations, and should not be broadcast on a national public television network like ABC. The public criticism was accompanied by hundreds of letters and phone calls from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the FCC ban ABC from another Victoria's Secret show and impose penalties on ABC.

Conservative personnel and media accusations and complaints about the Victoria's Secret show have caused a chorus, but there are also many opponents, especially in the online community dominated by young people, the conservatives' attempt to block the Victoria's Secret show has been almost one-sidedly scolded, and some feminist groups have also raised objections to the conservatives' accusations, the dispute lasted for more than a week, and even set off several public opinion wars.

Although there was no obvious violation of the Victoria's Secret show, under pressure from all parties, the FCC had to meet with the heads of ABC and LTD to discuss ways to solve the problem.

In a mature capitalist society, capitalists with 100 percent profits can commit all the evils in the world, which is actually an alternative manifestation of the power represented by capital. Therefore, it is impossible to block a TV program with more than 40 million viewers, so the noise continued until before Christmas, the FCC and the producers of the Victoria's Secret show finally reached a compromise agreement, this year and the follow-up Victoria's Secret show, if it is broadcast on public television, must be placed after 10 o'clock, and at the same time, it needs to be marked to remind minors that it is not suitable to watch the TV-14 logo.

While these things happened, another unexpected thing also surprised and surprised many people.

A week after the broadcast of the Victoria's Secret show, 1 million boxes of the Victoria's Secret show videotapes officially went on sale. Emily and others were worried that no one would spend $30 to buy such a box of only more than 40 minutes of videotapes, and Eric had even made plans to treat the unsalable videotapes as giveaways in advance, but on the day of the release, 1 million videotapes were sold out, and Firefly's distribution department had to urgently allocate resources to quickly produce another 1 million boxes and put them on the market, which were also sold out.

Perhaps it is the repeated out-of-stock that has created a potential hunger marketing effect. Some media have also followed suit, and several times, in less than a month, the sales of videotapes of the Victoria's Secret show have approached the 7 million mark. The Firefly distribution department, which finally responded, took the time to do a questionnaire survey and found that 75% of the buyers bought the videotape for six of the songs, that is, these people basically regarded the Victoria's Secret show videotape as a music album.

After a detailed evaluation, Firefly's distribution department predicts that the sales of the videotapes of the Victoria's Secret show are likely to exceed 20 million boxes eventually. What kind of concept is this, the price of the videotape of the Victoria's Secret show is $29.9 per box, which is actually $30, and the sales of 20 million videotapes will bring $600 million in sales. Because the Victoria's Secret show is only more than 40 minutes, the production cost of a box of videotapes is only half of that of ordinary movies, and each box of videotapes will bring about $15 in gross profits to the distributor after excluding the distribution cost and the profit reserved by the distributor. That's half of the sales of videotapes, $300 million!

The media, which had been struggling with Eric's abandonment of making a film and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, was dumbfounded. Before he knew it, Eric had earned back this 'loss'.

The 'Victoria's Secret Show Music Album' also embarrassed music magazines such as "Billboard" and "Rolling Stone" for a while, these well-known music magazines have their own weekly music charts, but in recent weeks, the weekly singles list and other charts released by these magazines have received a lot of boos, because none of the songs on these lists are from the Victoria's Secret Show BGM, and in the hearts of music fans. Any song in the Victoria's Secret show has enough strength to squeeze into the top spot of these charts. Amid this one-sided boo, well-known musicians who had hoped to release new singles at the end of the year have postponed their single release plans.

In fact, music media such as "Billboard" are also bitter, because the Fireflies don't follow the usual path at all, and ordinary singers release singles. Which one is not very hard to hit the charts through radio and television, but Firefly has no charting behavior at all, and even so far, although the names of the six songs have been circulated, people still don't know which band and which singer sang these songs, and Firefly Records has never revealed the specific information of these people at the invitation of Eric.

As a result, although the six songs of the Victoria's Secret show have been passed on by music fans in private, and the tapes of the Victoria's Secret show have been sold out one after another, except for a few public broadcasts by ABC TV and some subsequent cable TV stations that bought the replay rights, neither TV nor radio stations have any shadow of these six songs. You don't make a list, you don't do public relations, you don't publicize, you don't have the intention of showing your presence at all, how can I rank you on the list, is it just based on the sales of the videotapes of the Victoria's Secret show?

After the Victoria's Secret show, Eric hid in Southampton to accompany the women and children, while a pre-Christmas party was taking place at the estate.

In the living room, Emily held little Kevin in her hand and kneaded it affectionately, but she excitedly told Eric and others about the recent events: "Rolling Stone" Jane Wenner can't contact you, so he can only keep calling me, you don't know, his tone on the phone two days ago was a little pitiful, hehe, he said that if we don't make a list of those songs on our side, these music magazines will lose credibility, Eric, you might as well let Firefly Records release those singers in advance, now is a good time, anyway, Victoria's Secret has got everything it should get, even if those singers steal some limelight, it's nothing. ”

Eric leaned back on the sofa casually, closed a magazine in his hand, and shook his head at Emily: "In addition to Victoria's Secret's considerations, in fact, this situation is actually good for those newcomers, now to start publicity, the media is easy to disperse the topics gathered on these newcomers to other places, and delay until after Easter next year to start letting them gradually release singles, at that time Victoria's Secret topic should have fallen, and the media will focus more attention on these newcomers." ”

Emily said: "I think you must be worried about affecting the sales of Victoria's Secret videotapes, but this result is really surprising, the sales of 20 million boxes may eventually bring a net profit of 300 million US dollars, 300 million US dollars, tsk, although the annual sales of LTD have risen a lot, but this year's annual profit is about 400 million US dollars." ”

Eric smiled and said, "Wipe your mouth, saliva is about to flow out, it's useless to be envious, it was you here who willingly sold me the copyright of the Victoria's Secret show, so this money is mine." ”

In the laughter of Chris, Virginia and others, Emily just pouted and said: "This is not my decision in the first place, the most regrettable thing should be those on the board of directors, at the last regular meeting, those guys still wanted me to take back the copyright of the Victoria's Secret show." ”

Although Emily's tone was very casual, after saying this, she still looked at Eric with a little hope in her eyes. (To be continued.) )