Kimon Keramidas
Mapping the Mouse: Intellectual Property as a Tool for Marking
Physical Space and Performing Corporate Identity
By Kimon Keramidas
Introduction: Investing in a Corporate Vision of Scope
Disney is almost necessarily the central figure for any work done on corporate theatre since
the early 1990s. As legislation limiting concentration of media ownership dissolved in the 1990s,
and cultural production increasingly became one of the most important sectors in the American
economy, Disney–already a cultural powerhouse–saw an ascendancy across a wide spectrum of
media that for the first time included Broadway musicals. This ascendancy was in large part due
to then CEO Michael Eisner’s programmatic expansion of the horizontal and vertical integration
of Disney’s interests throughout American culture. This included not only the expansion into
theatrical production (Beauty and the Beast in 1993) and real estate development in the Times
Square area (with the renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre),1 but also investment in two
sports franchises in the Anaheim area close to Disneyland (the Mighty Ducks of the NHL in
19922 and the Anaheim Angels of Major League Baseball in 1995)3 and the acquisition of
Capital Cities/ ABC Inc. (which included the ESPN and Lifetime networks) in 1995.4
The investments from this era in Disney's development are notable in that they represented
significant developments away from Disney's historic comfort zone of children's entertainment
and theme parks and instead were high-cost attempts to horizontally integrate across often
unfamiliar territories. Many of these investments required the development or maintenance of
expensive infrastructure, and in this period Disney built a stadium, renovated a historic theatre,
and took on a huge television network. The combination of huge initial investment and/or high
1
Kimon Keramidas
maintenance costs made the success of each investment more risky. In the end the net gain of the
investments did not bear out. While the expansion into theatre has been a resounding success and
one where Disney's brand enable a strong platform from which to work, it could not carry the
unlikely expansion into sports and the company no longer owns the Ducks5 or Angels6. And
while ESPN has matured into a commercial powerhouse, ABC struggled early on and has faced
stiff competition from CBS, NBC and Fox.
In the end, the lack of solid successes in these major investments and an increasingly
contentious relationship with the board of directors cost Eisner his job.7 Coinciding with this
change in leadership there has been a noticeable shift in the manner in which Disney horizontally
integrates its operations. Since Robert Iger took over in early 2005,8 Disney has acquired Pixar
Animation Studios(2006)9, Marvel Entertainment(2010)10 and Lucasfilm(2012)11 for a combined
cost of over $15 billion. What is noticeable about these investments is that while they require
some costs for infrastructure, their true value in the long run will lay in the valuable library of
intellectual property each company brings with it. From Woody the Cowboy to Spider-Man to
Darth Vader, the Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm stories and characters are some of the most
recognizable in all of entertainment. Combined with Disney's already immensely valuable library
of properties, the company now has a remarkably diverse collection of historically successful
properties to deploy. And, since the properties have preexisting audiences and for the most part
are analogously transferrable to platforms that Disney is already highly successful in–film,
television, video games, theme parks and even stage plays–the cost of connecting them into their
horizontally and vertically integrated entertainment empire is much lower than branching out
into the radically different venues into which Eisner led the company.
Encompassing the Sense of Corporate Identity
2
Kimon Keramidas
So, if their are seemingly no large-scale infrastructure concerns in investing in these
companies and deploying such a diverse range of properties, how does Disney go about
maintaining exposure for all of these entertainment brands simultaneously? This question brings
us to the level of the consumer experience, which is always varied and difficult to predict. The
life of the individual consumer is difficult to track and often cultural studies must rely on broad
suppositions. What this project aims to do is to in a sense embrace the fact of that ambiguity and
consider what tactics Disney employs to garner attention and represent them in a way that may
allow us to make some conclusions about specific and general targeting of consumers. It will do
so by considering Times Square as a unique space for commercial impulses in American culture
where the infrastructural and marketing challenges of the corporate entertainment industry come
together in a charged conduit that allows for a heightened exposure to and consumption of
American cultural production.
To consider how Disney performs its new broadly constituted corporate identity, I went to
Times Square with the intention of mapping instances of Disney’s intellectual property and
armed with my iPhone which would allow me to take geotagged photos and videos. Over the
course of one day I took pictures of approximately 200 instances of Disney property from a
Marvel Captain America wallet in a souvenir store to the renovated New Amsterdam theatre,
which is currently home to Disney Theatrical Production’s Newsies. The goal was to capture
what a visitor to Times Square could possible experience in a single day’s visit, and to consider
that visit representative of the breadth of intellectual property deployments that Disney relies on
to perform the company’s brand both within the postmodern culturally-charged environment of
Times Square and without. In fact, Times Square was chosen because its role as a space of
heightened cultural experience often reveals the most risky, creative, fringe, experimental or
3
Kimon Keramidas
expensive deployment endeavors that Disney would be willing to attempt–take the massive oneof-a-king three paneled advertisement for Thor: The Dark World adorning the entire front of the
Times Square Toys ‘R Us at the time of my visit as an example.
The goal is to consider the Disneyfication/Disneyization of Times Square from an
alternative perspective. Whereas scholars such as Zukin, Bryman and Wollman12 have often
considered Disney’s intentions of altering spaces in the interests of the corporation, this study
considers Times Square as a three-dimensional physical media display space that includes
conduits for intellectual properties as large as buildings and as small as a plush toy. The reason
for this approach is to try and come to a better understanding of how the fluidity of intellectual
property as a non-physically defined item of cultural value allows it to be utilized both at scale
and en masse as a tool to continually reassert and/or reshape the fluctuating identity of a
corporation as it expands during growths, particularly when those expansion are as radical and
notable as the absorption of the Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm libraries were.
Visualizing the Sense of Corporate Identity
With Times Square experienced on Thursday, October 24, 2013 and the photographs and
videos collected, the images and videos were imported first into iPhoto. This allowed for
organization and annotation, as well as verification of GPS information. With the photos
annotated with descriptions and GPS information confirmed, the photos were brought into
Google Earth where they were plotted on existing satellite maps of the Times Square region. The
photos were then categorized in two schema. The first schema was based on the type of display
in which the intellectual property was presented. The types of display were as follows:
4
Kimon Keramidas
⁃
Building - any very large scale instance of a property where the physical space was
crucial to understanding the property’s deployment (white pins)
⁃
Media Venue - any venue where the presentation of the property is contingent on
selection and is likely to be variable (red pins)
⁃
⁃
Advertisements - advertisements for Disney properties (blue pins)
⁃
Billboards
⁃
Street-level Advertisements
⁃
Other
Licensed Properties - any instance of a property clearly licensed from Disney to sell
another product such as clothing or souvenirs (yellow pins)
⁃
Unlicensed Properties - any instance of a property which is like to not be sanctioned
by Disney and is therefore not likely to profit the company in any way. (green pins)
⁃
Costumed People
⁃
Street Vendors
Having organized the materials by types, the photos were then reorganized based on their
affiliation to a subset of Disney properties/brands. Those subsets were as follows(locations
pinned with logos of corresponding brand):
⁃
Disney
⁃
Disney as brand
⁃
Mickey, Minnie, Winnie, etc.
⁃
Mixed
⁃
Marvel
⁃
Pixar
5
Kimon Keramidas
⁃
Disney Princess
⁃
Disney Theatrical
⁃
Disney Pictures
⁃
ABC
⁃
ESPN
⁃
Star Wars
In addition to the photos, links to two videos were added to the Google Earth map. The
first was a recording of video loop that plays above the Disney Store and over the course of
approximately 4 minutes advertises for the entire spectrum of Disney properties. The second was
a recording of a video billboard at the ABC-TV studios that showed advertisements for ABC and
ESPN television shows as well as paid advertisements from other sponsors such as Motorola.
One final set of materials was added, historic fire insurance maps from 1857 and 1920.
These maps open up possible explorations of how Times Square acted as a stage for commercial
identities in the past and portend to a future experiment where historic images show companies,
brands, movies and production from other eras could be mapped on a history of buildings. This
would allow for a visual investigation into how this relatively small patch of geography has acted
historically as a hub for charged and excited presentations of intellectual property.
Moving Forward: Visual Conclusions on Corporate Performance of Identity
Up to this point, gathering the data, generating the map, refining the image pins and
organizing the materials has taken up a significant amount of time. Now that those materials are
in place, patterns of dispersal are already becoming apparent, with concentrations of certain
types of property deployments correlating to certain spaces within the square. The dispersals tell
6
Kimon Keramidas
a story of how consumers experience Times Square, how cultural producers try to best exploit
those patterns of experience and the feedback loops that occur within such a system. Next steps
are to consider the map more closely, assess how clearly it represents Times Square as a singleday look and discover the ultimate value of such an exercise on a contemporary experience as
well on historical data. At the least the mapping procedure promises to create a better visual
understanding of then cultural processes that we are aware are at work in Times Square. At best,
patterns both in the present and in the past will help open up a better understanding of not only
how Disney and other companies assert their identities through the deployment of their
intellectual properties in Times Square, but also how they practice similar strategies at different
scales and in different environments.
Materials
Below are links to the file that allows you to best view the Times Square map. Download
Google Earth to you computer first, then download the file with the photo data and open with
Google Earth. It is navigable much like Google Maps, so should be easily usable. You can also
turn off the groups and schema to allow for custom variable views within Google Earth.
Contact me at kimon[at]keramidas[dot]com with any questions. Below the two file
downloads are links to web versions (buggy and not as robust) of the two different schema and to
a page with the two videos available.
•
•
Download Files to view full map
⁃
Download Google Earth here
⁃
Download Disney Property Map KML file here.
Map of Different Types of Display of Disney Intellectual Property
7
Kimon Keramidas
•
Map of Instances of Different Brands of Disney Intellectual Property
•
Billboard Videos
Elizabeth L. Wollman, “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact
on the Broadway Musical,” American Music 20, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 445–465.
2
Murray Chass, “BASEBALL NOTEBOOK; ‘Small-Market’ Angels Enter the Disney Fold,”
The New York Times, May 28, 1995, sec. Sports,
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/28/sports/baseball-notebook-small-market-angels-enter-thedisney-fold.html.
3
Joe Lapointe, “NHL to add teams in Miami, Anaheim Huizenga, Disney high-profile owners,”
Baltimore Sun, December 11, 1992, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-1211/sports/1992346112_1_huizenga-miami-team-hockey.
4
Geraldine Fabrikant, “The Media Business: The Merger; Walt Disney to Acquire Abc in $19
Billion Deal to Build a Giant for Entertainment,” New York Times, August 1, 1995,
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/01/business/media-business-merger-walt-disney-acquire-abc19-billion-deal-build-giant-for.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
5
“Disney Finds Buyer for the Ducks,” The New York Times, February 26, 2005,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html.
6
“BASEBALL; Disney Reaches a Deal For the Sale of the Angels,” New York Times, n.d.,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/sports/baseball-disney-reaches-a-deal-for-the-sale-of-theangels.html.
7
Laura M. Holson, “A Quiet Departure for Eisner at Disney,” The New York Times, September
26, 2005, sec. Business / Media & Advertising,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/business/media/26eisner.html.
1
8
Ibid.
The Associated Press, “Disney to Buy Pixar for $7.4 Billion,” The New York Times, January
24, 2006, sec. Business, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/business/24wire-disney.html.
10
Dealbook, “Disney to Buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 Billion,” The New York Times:
DealBook, n.d., http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/disney-to-buy-marvel-for-4-billion/.
11
Michael Cieply, “Disney Buying Lucasfilm for $4 Billion,” The New York Times: Media
Decoder Blog, October 30, 2012, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/disneybuying-lucas-films-for-4-billion/.
12
Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995). Alan Bryman, The
Disneyization of Society (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2004). Elizabeth L. Wollman,
“The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway
Musical,” American Music 20, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 445–465.
9
8