Now we know why Michael Eisner wanted to do when he (and a consortium he led) paid $385 million for the Topps trading card company: make Bazooka Joe the center of a new branding effort.
Who's Bazooka Joe you may ask? He's a character that wears an eye-patch that was included as a story on the wrapper of the gum that was sold with cards at the time, called Bazooka bubble gum. He was introduced in 1953.
"Bazooka Joe could be the next big hero," Eisner says. "I'm not saying it's going to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. But that would be the goal. Bazooka Joe is my new Mickey Mouse."
From the perspective of Topps as a stand alone company, this should be a good move. The thing that made Topps famous - it's baseball cards, and eventually a big line of sporting and entertainment cards, came under pressure from rivals as their products increasingly became a commodity.
Another problem was the price of sugar rose and put pressure on their candy profits. Eventually they moved some of the production to Mexico to battle high tariffs.
What Eisner wants to do with Topps and Bazooka Joe is build content around him and the properties they have licenses from, across a number of platforms ... like movies, miniseries, Internet and print publications.
"There's no reason why there can't be Topps movies, Topps Internet, Topps television, Topps miniseries and Topps publications," said Eisner. "It's all about sports and sports stories."
One interesting idea Eisner threw out was how he could change marketing the various franchises the company has deals with to produce cards. Not only does Topps have the deals for the major sports leagues, but they also have deals in place for popular properties like SpongeBob SquarePants, Pokémon and Star Wars.
How he's thinking of doing it is to imprint codes on the cards which could then be used to discover more information about the various sports or entertainment characters on the Internet.
Whatever he does, it sounds like Eisner's going to have a blast doing it. It'll be fun to see what he does with the Topps franchise.
» Michael Eisner's Strategy for Topps Continues to Unfold from BizofShowBiz
The reason for the acquisition of Topps - the trading card company - by former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner and his investment company Tornante, is beginning to unfold, and it's far more ambitious than I originally thought.We've talked in... [Read More]
Tracked on: December 16, 2007 9:12 PM | Permalink to Trackback