The devil's adman

Brandweek,  Feb 21, 2000  by Philip Van Munching

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The slutty makeover--think Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease--is now officially a marketing trend. It was almost cute when Melissa Joan Hart, who plays the teenage witch on ABC, showed up in a risque photo spread

on the pages of Maxim some months back. The network was unhappy the owner of the show's source material apoplectic--and most folks saw right through the hype and skipped her lousy teen movie, Drive Me Crazy. Hart, 23, said she meant for her decidedly tame photos to reveal a sexier side of the young woman with the teen queen image.

Well, say hello to an actual teen queen, 18-year-old Jessica Biel, who plays Mary on the WB's hit family show, Seventh Heaven. And while you're at it, say hello to her nipples. In the March issue of Gear magazine, Biel takes the Hart Personal Repackaging Plan and--to mix cultural references--kicks it up a notch.

See Jesse topless, sitting in a men's room sink. See Jesse topless, in thong panties, with her matching bra bunched up on the mattress in front of her. See Jesse squatting, in panties and pumps, in front of a mirror. See Jesse topless, some more.

Where Hart had a vague ambition to appear more adult, Biel and her handlers are very clear on their twin goals: to broaden her appeal--she's still miffed that Thora Birch got a part in American Beauty and she didn't--and to cheat the producers of Seventh Heaven out of the final two years of her five-year contract. (In case the nearly-naked photos don't achieve the latter, she's peppered the accompanying interview with quotes like "I'd kick Mary's f___ing ass-I'd kick the s__t out of her," and anecdotes about getting a fake I.D.)

All of 17 when the pictures were taken and the story was written, Biel provides a moment of breathtaking irony: No need to worry about the prurient aspect of the shoot, she tells her interviewer, because "my dad's fine with it."

Good to know her father's moral scruples are keeping pace with his business smarts; that is to say he doesn't seem to have any. What Biel's father and business managers clearly fail to see is that Jesse is merely trading one confining image--the clean-cut minister's daughter--for another confining image: the tramp.

But let's separate out the moral and marketing issues, shall we? Tempting as it is to highlight her father's burgeoning career as a pimp, that discussion is better suited to other forums. What's germane for our purposes, instead, is the bottomless ignorance Biel & Co. display of basic marketing concepts. Understood correctly, Jesse Biel is a case study in botched repackaging.

Quite rightly, Biel would like to have broader appeal. But rather than trying to take her current audience (or consumer base) and build on it, she's chosen to trade it in. Jettisoning the show, going out of her way to denigrate the character her audience admires, Biel is trashing the very thing that's built consumer loyalty And to what end? She insists that this will "change" her image with her new target audience, but it won't, because she doesn't yet have an image among the people to whom she now wants to appeal. Put simply most adults are only vaguely aware of her at best, because they don't watch Seventh Heaven, so she won't alter their perception but rather introduce herself to them as yet another tramp. (Yawn.) She will, of course, alter the perception of her current fans. They'll feel confused and abandoned.

Biel has chosen the Shannon Doherty strategy; "I'm too good for 90210, and I'll prove it by doing Playboy!" She might have tried the Bruce Willis approach, which has involved building his acting chops in smaller projects in between Die Hards. Both started in frothy episodic television, like Biel, but only Willis has managed to maintain wider appeal. Only Willis has successfully repackaged himself.

Next time she loses a film role to Thora Birch, Jesse "The Body" Biel might stop to consider just how many times Birch has felt the need to appear topless on the cover of a national magazine.

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