Darren Herman

Disney gets it, at least for now.  They’ve incubated Hilary Duff and now Hannah Montana.  Lots of press and commotion around comparing Hannah Montana to other artists and the demand to see her in concert.  In NewsWeek recently, she was compared to Bruce Springsteen as a much tougher ticket to get.

Anyway, a few months back, Disney acquired Club Penguin.  To give you an idea of their traffic, I’ve pasted the attached graph below.   Disney is probably still figuring out what they want to do with Club Penguin and in the midst of integration.  If you have children ages 5-12, I’m sure you’ve come across Club Penguin in one capacity or another.  Over the past year, Compete data shows that Club Penguin has goene from ~700k unique to ~2.7M unique inhabitants.  One year.  Substantial growth.

Not that there isn’t enough demand for Hannah Montana, but think about the cross promotion opportunities?  In-game radio.  In-world penguin shirts.  Club Penguin should have Hannah Montana music playing and allow the kids pick which music they want to hear.  Also, leverage this “virtual world” as a testing ground for new music and allow the kids to rate which songs they like and which they don’t.  With about 3M kids playing Club Penguin, there are tons of opportunities for these tie-ins.

There are obviously a lot of concerns around advertising to children and such; but if you handle this properly, I’m sure you can roll these types of programs out to much success.