The connection here is music, but the story has a complex layering of collaborations ranging from coffee to surfing to the Alaskan wilderness. To start, from October 2- November 7th, Starbucks—all 10,000 of them in the U.S.—will be providing customers with a Song of the Day cards to be redeemed on iTunes. This is part of a cross-promotion with the coffee giant and their Hear Music record label with iTunes new wireless service and Apple. (If you have an iPhone or iTouch and are in range of a Starbucks’ WiFi signal, a Starbucks icon will light up.)
With the cards, you can get a free song once you register on iTunes, ranging from selections of 37 different artists from Paul McCartney to Band of Horses, plus are eligible for additional bonus tracks including the soundtrack created by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder to Sean Penn’s new movie “Into the Wild” based on Jon Krakauer’s best-selling novel about a young man who ultimately starves to death in Alaska. Cost for the soundtrack is $11.99. As if that’s not enough, the next time you go into Starbucks, you can buy a re-loadable purchase or gift card that includes 2 free downloads with online registration.
Clearly, there’s more to getting a grande mocha decaf latte these days.
However what this also does is not only promote Starbucks in the new business of “music” as re-defined by download capabilities and iTunes and Apple among others, but it also promotes movie entertainment soundtracks which like the Spiderman 3 soundtrack with new songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Arcade Fire, and others, made it a cult hit especially among a crowd not at all interested in the sequel. So too does this cross-marketing also promote a director, film, and author, to be sure, but also musical artists…and surfing.
See, Sean Penn, the director of “Into the Wild,” who was recently featured as a cover story in the LA Weekly by Joe Donnelly, talks about his love of surfing, which is a passion shared by Mr. Vedder, who was recently a part of the Sundance Green Channel in a short documentary about paddle surfing with legendary big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton. In addition, Eddie Vedder, who is known to be a very private person, recently gave an incredibly moving speech at the Waterman’s Ball non-profit surf gala last month in Southern California to the top surf manufacturers, industry players, and surfers. His speech, which is now streamed on SurfExpo.com, is getting downloaded constantly.
So while iTunes and Starbucks are changing the music industry and business of music (and coffee), Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder are also connected and promoting the industry of surfing, entertainment, and of course gaining credibility across a larger audience. The levels of cross-promotion basically, are so vast, that it’s hard to know if iTunes, for example, even knew that they were promoting surfing in a peripheral way by tying in with Starbucks. Either way, the 7-degrees of separation this cross-promotion has started, is an excellent case in point of where today’s complex world of crossover marketing can lead to.
