The Incredible Reach of Star Wars

Okay, where am I? 

Seems to me, I am in a galaxy far, far away…

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” an iconic series was born that would shape the course of film for decades to come. Just the opening quote — a phrase we all know — is so ingrained in popular culture that even people who haven’t seen a single Star Wars movie have heard the line.

As we gear up for the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the first film in the series to be helmed by someone other than George Lucas, we decided to look back at the impact that this franchise has had, not only the science fiction landscape, but on pop culture as a whole.

Using photos, vectors, and illustrations from the Shutterstock collection, they worked with the talented team at Pop Chart Lab to explore Star Wars’ influence on the entertainment industry. Take a look at the full chart below (click to expand), then keep scrolling to go in-depth and see all the images used to create this infographic.

Infographic: The Influence of Star Wars on Film and TV

Star Wars created beloved characters and gave us vast, over-arching storylines that would support an entire franchise. Movies are rarely released these days without a nod or a wink to the fact that there will be more films in the series.

Although it wasn’t the first big film trilogy (lest we forget The Godfather), Star Wars made the trilogy format so successful that it’s helped change how films are now written, produced, and released.

The Star Wars universe is one of the most alive and lived-in places to ever come on screen. The houses feel occupied, the ships appear used, and the worlds seem like they’ve been there for millions of years.

The imperfect, unpolished universe never feels like a set — it’s a realistic world that makes you think you really are visiting a galaxy far, far away.

The characters of Star Wars had just as much impact as the franchise’s style — leading the way for many film and TV personas to come.

Turning the “damsel in distress” trope on its head, badass female lead Leia had her own agenda and plans, actively pursuing her goals throughout the series and breaking ground for iconic heroines like Sarah Connor, Buffy Summers, and Katniss Everdeen.

One of the best parts of Star Wars was the way a robot like C-3PO could develop such a distinctive personality that you would forget he’s supposed to be just a protocol droid.

Add in R2-D2, who was able to make audiences fall in love with only beeps and clicks, and it’s no wonder Pixar felt confident enough to have no actual dialogue in the first half of Wall-E.

And then there’s Chewbacca, one of the most beloved characters in the entire Star Wars universe. His inaudible grunts and growls have been instantly recognizable for more than 30 years — long before “I AM GROOT” was ever uttered.

Star Wars’ impact expanded beyond even the film’s aesthetics and characters, with George Lucas’ early adoption of tech and innovation paving the way for some of the most breakthrough technologies used in film.

So… was anything missed?

Straight Outta Encino

Okay, so where am I?

I'm definitely NOT in Compton getting ready for the premiere of the N.W.A. bio pic Straight Outta Compton. (Although I did some of my early years living there with my dad in our Trek of Diversity that lasted until my mid-teens. But that is, of course, a story for another day.) I'm hoping to do another #TBT this coming week and catch the movie with my main bro Josh who has a strange fascination with the flick.

The dog days of summer marked the time where the ad world crawls to a much slower turtle pace. We cash in our favors using those promises of corporate timeshares and free airline miles to get our tourism on and plan the next campaign in some Croatian villa. spend It's midsummer, when much of the media and marketing world slows way down. But, then something special happens every now and again.

Take the marketing machine that is Beats by Dre. I've worked for a headphone company who was deathy afraid of taking chances on marketing and advertising. The result? No net gain in the last five years worth of sales. This is a product far superior when compared to Beats. But a mediocre product hasn't stopped Beats from dominating the market and making a billionaire out of Dr. Dre (he, being the co-founder Beats Electronics and a key member of N.W.A).

The company saw a rare opportunity with opening of Straight Outta Compton and created an incredible social buzz with the brilliant a meme generator that's turned social media on its ear. The generator takes a picture you supply, turns it to black and white and lets you adorn it with huge copy across it: "Straight Outta [insert hometown]." Nearly 200,000 Instagram pictures—some sincere and many comedic—have been posted prior to the release the hashtag #straightoutta.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY FUTURE EX-WIFE

Before I forget...happy birthday to the woman I have photographed on the red carpet countless times and jokingly (?) told the world will be my future ex-wife: Jennifer Lawrence.

Time Magazine summed up my faux obsession perfectly, "Oh, Jennifer Lawrence. You’re the girl we can all imagine being best friends with, and you also happen to be a wildly famous Oscar-winning actress."

Read their take on The 25 Most Jennifer Lawrence Things Jennifer Lawrence Has Ever Done.


THREE STORIES NOT TO MISS

3. The Inside Story on Why Burger King Sells Red Burgers in Japan
What Better Way to Get Some Brand Attention on a Tight Budget?

2. CBS Is Commanding a Record $5 Million for 30-Second Super Bowl Ads Up 11% from last year's game
The cost of advertising during the Super Bowl continues to rise, setting CBS up for a record haul for next February's big game.

1. Get Ready for the Latest Craft Brew, and Your New Breakfast of Champions: Wheaties Beer
The Breakfast of Champions is getting its buzz on. Wheaties, usually known for its marketing around sports stars, has partnered with a craft brewer to sell a beer called HefeWheaties.

AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER

ARE YOU RIDIN’ WITH BIDEN?

The presidential election doesn't take place until late 2016, but things are already mighty strange. On sale at some of candidates' campaign stores are red Trump party cups for sale, Grillary Clinton aprons and Rand Paul 3-foot birthday cards. My fundraising oddity can be found on the  Draft Biden 2016 website:

"Draft Biden 2016 excited to announce our new bumper stickers, designed by volunteer David Colman. These are 4″ by 6″ oval full color with an EZ peel back and are union printed. Show your support for the VP! $5.00"

The apocalypse is definitely upon us!

Disney Meets Instagram

Instagram is now a media monster with well over 300 million members who share upwards of 70 million videos and photos every day.

Brands are flocking to it because it seems that no one pays attention to branded interactions on Facebook and Twitter anymore. Take this little nugget found on Sprout Social:

At 4.21%, Brand Engagement Rates Highest on Instagram

Last spring...analyzed more than 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts on seven social networks. Unfortunately those brands achieved less than a 0.1 percent engagement rate on six out of the seven platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. 

Instagram posts, however, generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21 percent. That means the app delivered brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter. Let’s look at a real life example of this difference. 

This week, Red Bull posted a photo of Lindsey Vonn on both Facebook and Instagram. Currently, the brand’s 45 million Facebook fans had liked the photo just about 20,000 times, while its 2.2 million Instagram followers had liked the photo nearly 70,000 times.

Now the fun part.

Artist Simona Bonafini reimagined Disney Instagram accounts for our favorite princesses and characters if they grew up in our world saturated by social media. Selfies, hookups, lunches and more. Here's her take (click to enlarge any image)...

Eight Ways to Toast Globally

I've shown you how to make it at a media party, how to drink like a Mad Man, and even how to get your client to push away from the hosted bar after walking the red carpet. 

But, have you ever wondered how people drink beer across the globe? 

I can be your tour guide.

Today is is International Beer Day, a "holiday" celebrated in 50 countries across six continents that has three declared purposes:

1. To gather with friends and enjoy the taste of beer.
2. To celebrate those responsible for brewing and serving beer.
3. To unite the world under the banner of beer, by celebrating the beers of all nations together on a single day.

In honor of International Beer Day, here are eight global toasts to help you become a jet-setting beer ambassador. 

Cheers!

A Tobacco #TBT

I've never done a #TBT, aka Throwback Thursday. Gosh, I feel so old.

Tobacco has long been a fascination of mine. When I was growing up in the mid-70s, every magazine seemed to have a super cool cigarette ad with gorgeous, dynamic women and manly men. I learned that since the late 1700s, when the first tobacco advertisement appeared, tobacco manufacturers have been pioneers of advertising and marketing, revolutionizing the American way of doing business in the process.

It was hard to do any real research without the Internet and reference materials as a kid in the seventies, but I was obsessed to find out out the geniuses behind these campaigns. They were magic. Familiar. Aspiring. I mean, even Santa smoked for a while (and apparently they were easy on his throat). They gave me a taste of diversity and gender balance. They even introduced a certain sexiness usually reserved for the forbidden pages of Playboy.

I remember the buzz when President Nixon signed the measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television around 1971 (yes, it was still buzzing a couple of years later, and yes, I am old...). My brothers in the broadcast industry lost $220 Million in ad revenue. The last commercial on US television was a Virginia Slims ad which aired January 1, 1971 at 11:59 PM on The Tonight Show. The ad featured model Veronica Hamel who was later seen on Hill St. Blues.

The Marlboro Man was in full glory by the middle of the decade and the magazine was the king of alcohol and tobacco ads. He was in every major magazine, in seemingly every Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, along with dozens of other magazines.

Originally he was the Marlboro Cowboy who was created for Philip Morris by Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett. At the time, Marlboro held one quarter of 1% of the American market. Today, they own over 35% of the same market. I want to be that guy who develops genius like this. I guess there is still time.

Those guys turned out to be Philip Morris brand manager John Landry, along with Leo Burnett Creative Director Hal Weinstein and ad exec Don Tennant. Landry saw the brilliance of the Burnett team and wound up dominating Tobacco Mountain for decades. A New York Times article on Virginia Slim titled "WHY THEY STRETCHED THE SLIMS" is an amazing look inside the world of cigarette advertising.

Yet, I digress...

As I alluded above, the biggest-selling cigarettes of all time, Marlboros, were once were a minor brand, marketed toward women. Marlboro's motto actually was "Mild as May" and their filters were red, to not show lipstick stains. Camels were king. But changes were happening that would make America Marlboro Country.

In the early 1950s, when the first reports linking smoking to lung cancer came out, some smokers felt betrayed by the established brands. Unable to quit altogether, some retaliated by switching brands. The Philip Morris Co. saw an opportunity to improve Marlboro's pathetic market share. It didn't take Tennant long to figure out that Marlboro's previous ad campaigns ignored at least half the potential market. And what would make this woman's cigarette more manly? Well, in a word: men. And the rest is advertising history.

After the TV ban you would have thought that the smoking would have gone down. It was quite the opposite. Gideon Doron's 1979 article, How Smoking Increased When TV Advertising of Cigarettes
Was Banned, took us behind the curtain and showed us how such a thing could happen. Quite intriguing.

Regardless of how much the world has tried to stop the tobacco industry, they continue to thrive. So, without further ado, here's a #TBT with a gallery of ads from days past.