🎧 The Celebrity Press Tour is Upended
'Publicists are scrambling and pulling their hair out to figure out what platform is hot this week,' Nicole LaPorte tells me
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To promote his massively expensive new racing movie F1, Brad Pitt has been making a lot of the traditional press rounds — posing in thigh-high leather boots on the cover of GQ, swinging by the Today show, even making a “rare” joint appearance on the red carpet with his girlfriend Ines de Ramon. But he also spent two and a half hours sitting on a couch opposite Dax Shepard, talking about their shared experience in recovery and a wide range of other topics he’d never get into anywhere else.
That’s the reality of the new media circuit, where shows like Shepard’s Armchair Expert can have far more impact than a traditional magazine cover story or late-night appearance. These new rules of publicity have been in place for a while now, but rarely captured as effectively as in the recent piece by my Ankler colleague Nicole LaPorte, “The 19 Press Tour Stops Ruthless Publicists Care About Now (and Don’t).” Though Armchair Expert didn’t come up in the piece, several other freewheeling podcasts did, and Nicole told me that for talent and their representatives alike, it’s a matter of balancing the risk of doing these shows vs. the reward of all that publicity.
“These publicists are just scrambling and pulling their hair out to figure out what platform is hot this week, because it will probably be different from what was hot last week,” she tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “We're all just a little tired of the packaged interview and the star following the script and peddling the myth of the film. Everyone's just trying to take them off script and get them into an unexpected setting where we might see a glimpse of who they really are.”
So who’s actually pulling off that authenticity and bringing attention to their movie in the process? Nicole points to the poster child for the new media circuit, Timothée Chalamet, whose appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay was as big a sensation as anything else he did to promote A Complete Unknown last fall. But as I point out in our conversation, it didn’t help him win the Oscar — which might be where the very old-school platforms still have an edge over everything else.
Dive into the world of new media and hot-wing eating with us on today’s podcast episode. It will be a quiet time for publicity and awards season between now and the Emmy nominations announcement on July 15, but don’t worry, we’ll have good stuff for you between now and then. Got something in particular you want to hear about? Get in touch: katey@theankler.com
Dax and Monica is just the better podcast. They create a conversation rather than an interview, where I think the interviewee feels safer and therefore come across genuine. It’s devoid of the gotcha element, which is so wise and charming.