Jason Murphy

Ashton Kutcher is Hot

Sep 9, 2008 Blog General

I couldn’t help but write the title. It’s not what you think. Sure the chicks like him, but as a commodity and as a brand, he’s a hot product.

I have to give my friend James credit for pointing me towards a presentation Ashton did recently where he promoted his latest project at the TechCrunch50 Conference. I heard about Ashton’s project, but I had already dismissed it simply because I felt Ashton was out of touch with Internet audiences. (Had James not given it a mention, I would have missed it completely.) Turns out I was wrong and that Ashton and his partner “get it”. They nailed the conference presentation with their product launch of BlahGirls. If you are an advertiser, publisher, or fan of celeb gossip: you’ve got to see this.

By no means am I a Kutcher fan boy. I feel his reality TV projects are hot to market, but then get stale pretty fast. His movie projects are a more decent offering IMO. And while I really wanted to see Ooma take off, he doesn’t really seem to have much personal interest vested into the project anymore. On the other hand, taking his production company Katalyst Media online and making wholly-owned web properties has turned out to be a very natural fit for the team. He said it best in his presentation when he said “We know our markets, we know how to target them” citing Punk’d and Beauty and the Geek as examples. I’m going to watch Katalyst the same way I watched Gawker Media when I first heard about their network (at the launch of Gizmodo). BlahGirls is just an initial offering. I’m more excited to see what they come up with next (and hope they don’t enter my verticals).

I saw one comment online that said something along the lines of “BlahGirls are just South Park bitches. Ashton never comes up with anything original”. To which I have to say “who cares?!” Originality is such a 1999 pitch. This day and age, there is nothing original. There is always someone who had some piece of some idea before every success. The reason the successes are such is simply that they took the BEST ideas, and executed on them BETTER. If we take Kutcher for example, he hasn’t produced a single “original” formula since day one. Punk’d = Jamie Kennedy Experiment = Totally Hidden Video = Candid Camera. Beauty and the Geek = The Bachelor = The Dating Show. It’s not about being original. It’s about taking a formula, updating it, and proving it to market all over again.

There isn’t a single tech company doing something “original”. Try me.

I also heard one of the panelist, an Angel VC, comment about the fact that BlahGirls doesn’t bring its target audience out of their comfort zones of existing social networks. Ashton’s reply was that his content moves with the audience. It’s a video, it has advertising placed in it already, and they want their users to copy, share, distribute it however they can. This is what kills me and why I feel some angels are out of touch sometimes. The issue isn’t whether Katalyst can get users away from their existing habits or not. The issue is whether Katalyst can create a product, gain traction, and become profitable to an exit. The fact that they have advertisers and content distributors already lined up before the demo and official launch of the product is a huge early indicator of guaranteed success. If I were an angel investor, I’d be lined up at the Katalyst Office doors with a check in hand.

But I’m not. I’m a publisher and advertiser. My product doesn’t match their audience, at least on this offering, so I’m just going to sit back and watch and enjoy the show. If I were MTV, Nintendo, Hot Topic, Limited, OK Magazine, or any other advertiser trying to reach teenage girls, I’d be all over this.

On a related note: since I am a publisher and an advertiser, the Adgregate Markets presentation at Techcrunch50 was completely awesome to me. There’s another example of someone taking the best ideas and making them better.

Tags: Adgregate Markets, ashton kutcher, blahgirls, Katalyst Media, Ooma, techcrunch 50, techcrunch50