What Miley Cyrus can teach us about marketing.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that’s under a rock, that’s under a mountain of rocks, you have probably heard that Miley Cyrus turned some heads on Sunday night with a bizarro, sexually-charged-and-teddy-bear-infused performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards.

It’s been the talk of just about every town since then.  Was it appropriate?  Was it inappropriate?

And was it any good?

Me?  Well, I just thought it was weird and awkward.  I didn’t think she sounded good.  I didn’t think she twerked good (that was grammatically incorrect on purpose, by the way – saying “I didn’t think she twerked well” just sounds ridiculous).

And as a straight (and recently engaged (!)) dude, I didn’t even find it all that sexy.

It was just . . . twerkin’ weird.

But that doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Miley’s career.

She did what so many others have done, and on the same television program, no less.  She hijacked the conversation.  The talk of the entertainment town world isn’t about the VMAs, it’s about Miley, and her debutante ball as an adult woman performer, albeit a weird one.

If her performance on the awards show was a commercial (and, by the way, it was one – in the same way that a Broadway show’s performance on the Tony Awards is a commercial), it would be a perfect example of “interruption marketing.”  It immediately slapped you in the face, woke you up from the drone-like slumber you were in from everything else you were looking at and . . . like a 5th grade joke . . . “made you look!”

I call this type of marketing “Detour Marketing” myself.   Imagine consumers traveling down their same ol’ roads, day in and day out . . . and then up comes a bright orange sign (or a half naked twenty year old and a giant effin’ Teddy Bear) . . . and you’re off in an entirely other direction.

And if that detour is a good one . . . you’ll think and talk about nothing else for awhile.

And was Miley’s detour a good one?  Well, it generated 300k tweets per minute.  To put that in contrast, last year’s Super Bowl blackout only brought in 230k.

Perhaps your show could benefit from a little detour?  Cuz, all press is good press, I guess, right?

No, not exactly.  I wouldn’t take Anthony Weiner’s press.  And I wouldn’t like to be the Syrian Government right about now either.

But controlled and smart detour marketing . . . in an environment that is known for those kind of detours (like the VMAs) . . . might be exactly what makes Miley a star long into her adult years.

Although I predict a Britney/Lindsay/Amanda type burnout along the way.

Which will get her even more press.  Right before her comeback.

(Did you miss the performance?  See it here.  And then tell me what you thought of it.)

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