Every year Forbes Magazine publishes its list of the richest dead people in the world — those estates of deceased stars that are still generating mega-millions from loyalty rights to merchandising and content — and though I find it interesting from a tabloid perspective, it doesn’t cast the best light on the marketing profession. Exploiting the names and reputations of dead people is clearly a profitable venture, but it strikes me as a little seamy at times.

One of those times was the recent sale of the rights to Marilyn Monroe for $30 million to a dealmaker named Jamie Salter, who also owns the rights to Bob Marley.

Salter, through his Canadian-based company Authentic Brands Group LLC, has purchased the name and image rights to Marilyn Monroe LLC from the estate. The administrator of that estate is Anna Strasberg, who will be a minority partner in the new venture. Included in the deal are all images of Marilyn Monroe’s lips and eyes — do we see a line of cosmetics? And images of raised skirts perhaps — a new line of lingerie products?

Funding comes from a private equity firm called Leonard Green & Partners, which is busy selling merchandising rights while shopping a Marilyn Monroe reality TV show concept.

The economy may be down but American capitalism is well and good, as evidenced by Salter. Here’s a guy who was hawking Barb Marley t-shirts and posters, and ends up middling a deal with the woman who is middling the Marilyn Monroe estate and the vulture capitalists who are circling another dead celebrity brand. They’ll all probably make a ton of money because we the consumer public buy that stuff.

Reality is way better than television.

* Deceased stars in North America generated an estimated $2.25 billion in revenue in 2009. Marilyn Monroe revenues were reported at $4-5 million last year.

R.I.P. – Retention of Income Potential

There’s big profit potential and relatively low risk in managing dead celebrity brands, as evidenced by Iconix Brand Group‘s purchase of the Peanuts brand this week for a reported $175 million. Iconix owns the rights to several notable brands like Joe Boxer underwear, but this is its first venture into character-based brands. They figure they can pump some new life into the Schulz characters and generate as much as $75 million in annual license fees.

According to Mark Roesler, CEO of CMG Worldwide — one of the largest managers of intellectual property rights and owner of several dead celebrity brands including Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain and Babe Ruth — consumer interest in famous people tends to increase even more once they’re dead. As a result, the earning potential of those brands is often far greater than when they were alive. Posthumous brands are definitely more stable and easier to manage without the scandals or career ups and downs, so there is less risk.

Roesler is a recognized authority on dead celebrity brands, having recently been enlisted to help calculate the future value of Michael Jackson. He also was retained as a subject matter expert in the O.J. Simpson civil trial to help estimate his future earning power for settlement purposes — a dead brand that is out-lived by its celebrity.

The Peanuts brand has actually dropped in the standings over the past couple of years, according to the Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities, due largely to the addition of a couple of bigger hitters to the dead celeb circuit: Michael Jackson and Yves St. Laurent. Interestingly, Albert Einstein finally cracked the top 10 on revenue generated from his bobblehead promotion in McDonald’s Happy Meals — there’s some marketing genius.

Here’s the 2009 Forbes list of posthumous brands with the highest estimated annual earning potential (you can see the full list, and find lists for past years, here):

Yves St. Laurent–$359 million

Rogers & Hammerstein–$235 million

Michael Jackson–$90 million

Elvis Presley–$55 million

JRR Tolkien–$50 million

Charles Schulz–$35 million

John Lennon–$15 million

Dr. Seuss–$15 million

Albert Einstein–$10 million

Michael Crichton–$9 million

Social media is built for scale — opening the aperture to sharing more personal information with more friends and followers. Marketing, meanwhile, is about narrowing the aperture to smaller, more targeted communities, down to a one-on-one level of engagement.

As media focus continues to shift from utility to content, social media may also have to move from a quantitative to a qualitative model that makes sense for business, not just the public at large. This is clearly not where the self-proclaimed leaders of social media are headed, like the celebrity Twitterholics who view it as more of a popularity contest than a method for meaningful personal communication.

Ashton Kutcher, who has become known more for his social media exploits than his acting accomplishments (Dude, Where’s My Tweet?), was the first to gain a million Twitter followers and is now claiming four million. Where does he go from here, ten million?  The experts who study social media contend that once a following gets too large, any meaningful communication disappears and the members fade to the background, as the person being followed becomes larger than life. So it’s more ego-centric than it is market-centric.

I came across an article about Kutcher in the Delta Sky magazine in which he states that social media is “the most extraordinarily valuable communications device ever invented in the history of man.”

It might be a little premature to make that kind of claim, but it certainly could serve to extend his personal brand a little longer, until nobody cares anymore. Keeping four million followers engaged in today’s attention-deficit world for any length of time could be a monumental undertaking.

A recent episode with Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines provides another glaring example illustrating that in today’s business landscape the customer rules, whether right or wrong. I’m not saying Smith is wrong, but I don’t think he was totally right either. There was a fair amount of media exploitation going on.

What he did was launch a Twitter tirade after being asked to leave a flight from Oakland to Burbank last Saturday, because his over-sized body was supposedly too large to fit in the seat and he was infringing on the space of the person next to him, as well as creating a safety threat — at least that’s how it was rationalized by the pilot and crew.

The story quickly became a national media sensation, from tweets to blogs to news syndicates and network television.  It will no doubt die just as quickly. This is the nature of media today; it has become way too overblown, with a daily appetite that far exceeds the availability of substantive news important and relevant to our lives. I’m wondering if the media attention wasn’t a little disproportionate to the news value, and if this ordeal would’ve gotten the same play had it been just another Smith and not a famous movie director, or a skinny person tweeting about the overweight person next to them taking up half their seat space.

Of course, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) had to weigh in on the matter, charging the airlines with discrimination and encouraging people of size to boycott the company.

For their part, Southwest claims they were just trying to follow protocol. The airline doesn’t guarantee standby seating, and they do have a “customers of size” policy that protects the rights of other passengers.

Southwest handled the situation in a professional manner, with humility and numerous public apologies. It is a reputable company, known for its customer-centric business practices, but they took it in shorts on this one. Perhaps the lesson learned is that, when it comes to meeting the needs of different customers, one size does not fit all. With the high rate of obesity in this country it might be a good idea to offer the option of wider seats in the back of the plane at a nominally higher price, much like first-class in front but without the frills.

I’ll probably be hearing from NAAFA for proposing to relegate people of size to the back of the plane, but they should support such an idea. They are holding their annual convention in San Francisco on August 5, so the airlines may want to be prepared.

The celebrity elite is another story, as personal branding is the key to success with those icons in sports and entertainment whose lives we follow on television, gossip magazines and Twitter. After all, inquiring minds want to know.  Many are a flash in the pan and most are not able to sustain for any length of time. Personal brands are far more perishable than product or company brands, susceptible to the short attention span of a fickle consumer public, or to self-destruction. Even major brands like Martha Stewart can be taken down by a single incident or breach of trust. We’ll see how Tiger does now that his brand has strayed off the fairway.

One of the biggest and most enduring personal brands in the past decade is Oprah Winfrey, who has clearly taken hers to an enterprise level. Now she will attempt to transcend the brand beyond the person as she trades in her show for a cable network: the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Her brand has grown bigger than CBS.

This will be an interesting test of brand extensibility.

The odds are not with her as this kind of play has not been successful very often. But Oprah is not just any brand, having achieved cultural icon status, largely because of The Oprah Winfrey Show over the past 24 years. It is a brand built on her personality, emotion and empathy — a real person talking to people about real-life issues. She has been successful in extending her brand to the movies (Color Purple), a Magazine (O) and a multitude of business ventures, amassing a wealth of $2.3 billion. But she’s always had the show to continually fuel the brand.

Now she is killing off the show, leaving her loyal fans hanging while she spreads herself out over an entire network, and coming to rely on the name more than the person.

Whatever the risk, it’s necessary as Oprah’s show is clearly in the mature end of its cycle, with viewership declining steadily from 14 million in 1998 to only 7 million today.  No doubt she will create a media splash, but can she deliver content that will sustain the brand once unplugged from its primary energy source in an ultra-competitive and ever-changing world of media?

We’ll see how strong the O brand really is.