How to Make a Small Brand Look Big

From left: Jessica Robertson, Jep Robertson, Korie Robertson and Willie Robertson of A&E TV's Duck Dynasty with Tim McGraw

Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com (AMZN), now owns the Washington Post. Many observers are pontificating about whether Bezos intends to influence the paper’s editorial positions. Much more relevant to those of us in business is his apparent interest in bringing Amazon’s highly sophisticated targeting and CRM techniques to the delivery of news content. His convergence of marketing with journalism could change the news business forever.

Bezos’s acquisition is the latest example of how much more difficult it is to draw lines clearly between entertainment, advertising, and journalism. When Tom Cruise or Jennifer Garner make an appearance on the Tonight Show, for example, most of us tend to think of it as entertainment. The truth is, it’s a clever form of advertising (the guests always seem to have a new movie coming out—oh, and they happen to have brought a clip with them).

Similarly, when ABC broadcasts its news from a ground-floor studio on Times Square, most people would call that journalism. But the glass walls through which passersby can gawk (not to mention the gargantuan video board on the side of the building featuring its celebrity journalists) betray that it’s just as much a branding strategy for ABC.