Corporate Budgets for Very Specific Petty Revenge

Using Network Marketing Budgets for Petty Revenge

Chloe Radcliffe, a Minnesota-raised comic and former staff writer for Jimmy Fallon, just released her debut hour Eyes Down Here on Comedy Central. When a television network buys your first standup special, they eventually sit you down and ask how you would like to market it to the general public, which is a dangerous question to ask a comedian who has kept a list of every guy who ignored her in her twenties.

On stage, Radcliffe’s hour covers the indignities of flirting when you feel out of place, people staring at her prominent facial birthmark, and why Doritos are engineered to feel like they are exclusively for boys. Off stage, she realized she had access to corporate outdoor advertising money. Recounting the pitch Meeting, she explained: “You know, Comedy Central said, how do you want to promote this first special? And I laughed and I went, what if I put up billboards across from where my old crushes live?”

The network actually paid for it. Radcliffe targeted three specific former crushes from high school, college, and an early job who never paid attention to her, and had the network install massive ads directly across from their homes. “There are billboards. My face is 15 feet high in Minneapolis and St. Paul, back where I’m from,” she noted, before flying back to Minnesota just to film herself standing in front of them.

Most billboard campaigns are a terrible waste of money because you are paying to show a comedian’s face to fifty thousand commuters who are just trying to merge onto the highway. An audience of three specific guys who now have to look at a 15-foot portrait of the woman they ghosted every time they open their blinds to check the weather is a 100 percent conversion rate.

The Trouble With Renegotiating a Guarantee Mid-Tour

“And the reason is, is because the promoter hasn’t been paying me. I’ve been doing the tour for the last two months. I’ve done 39 shows. It would have been 40, but one of the shows was cancelled without me being told. And I’ve been paid for five shows, so I can’t go on.” That is how Scottish comedian Karen Dunbar, best known for the BBC Scotland sketch show Chewin’ the Fat, announced on Instagram that she was pulling the final 20 dates of her 60-date Aw Roon The Hooses tour.

In the live comedy business, a fixed guarantee is a simple financial instrument. The promoter promises the comedian a set amount of money per night, taking on the risk of whether anyone actually buys a ticket, and in exchange keeps the upside if the room sells out. Aberdeen-based promoter Breakneck Comedy seems to have discovered a flaw in this model: if people do not buy enough tickets, the promoter loses money.

Breakneck Comedy disputed her version of the numbers and admitted they tried to change the deal partway through the run: “Given the low sales across the tour, we asked the comedian to help us reach a fair, workable agreement that would allow the remaining dates to go ahead and to minimise our losses. Our proposal to renegotiate the fee to align with actual ticket sales was declined, and the matter was then referred to her solicitor.”

You can see why a small business would prefer not to lose money on 60 shows, and Breakneck has already announced that all its future tours will use revenue splits instead of fixed guarantees. Converting a guaranteed contract into a revenue split after you have seen how empty the rooms are is bold financial engineering. It is like buying flood insurance after your basement is full of water, and then acting hurt when the insurance company refers you to its lawyer.

Releasing a Standup Special Straight to PlayStation

PlayStation 5 has a free ad-supported Live TV streaming feature built into its video game consoles, which raises the question of what kind of standup special belongs inside a menu people only open when they are tired of losing at Call of Duty. Pauly Shore, who spent the nineties on MTV as the Weasel, has an answer: he released his self-directed half-hour specialRoad Comic: Live From Portland exclusively on the console for two and a half weeks before moving it to YouTube.

Bypassing a traditional streamer for a video game console has one major creative advantage: there are no network standards executives around to read your paperwork. Because Shore directed the Portland Helium set himself, he used the official credits to list Ronald McDonald and Burger King as his producers, with Taco Bell serving as executive producer. The material inside the half-hour is just as unpoliced, trading his nineties party persona for personal grievances—including a grudge against Will Ferrell that happened inside an Equinox gym.

As Heckle Magazine put it: “He covers growing up around the Comedy Store, old co-stars, health scares and his feud with Will Ferrell, a feud I suspect one of the two men is aware of. It’s one of the first specials to go this route, so somebody had to be the canary, and the Weasel volunteered.” Streaming platforms spend millions trying to make standup specials look like prestige cinema. If you are going to air out a one-sided gym dispute with Will Ferrell while crediting three fast-food mascots as your bosses, tucking it inside a PlayStation dashboard for sixteen days is the most honest distribution strategy in Hollywood.