Starbucks Hires Music Veteran
Starbucks Corp. has named a veteran music executive and entertainment lawyer to oversee the leading coffee retailer’s growing stable of Hollywood ventures.
Starting Monday, Alan Mintz, formerly Herbie Hancock’s manager, will lead Starbucks Entertainment, which will relocate June 12 to Santa Monica from corporate headquarters in Seattle.
Starbucks wants to become an entertainment destination by selling books, music and movies alongside lattes and cappuccinos. So far, the coffee retailer has made strides in music, although its venture into movie marketing has been disappointing.
Mintz has stronger ties to music than to the film industry. Before becoming a music manager, Mintz was a senior partner at Selverne, Mandelbaum & Mintz, where he specialized in music and new technology. He also spent four years at Sony Music Entertainment as senior vice president of Epic Records. Other than producing a Herbie Hancock documentary, Mintz has no movie experience.
As vice president of content development for Starbucks Entertainment, Mintz will manage the company’s relationship with William Morris Agency, which signed the coffee giant as a client last month.
Its next project is a DVD to be released June 27 in partnership with Image Entertainment. The DVD -- of Taylor Hackford’s 1987 documentary “Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll” -- will be sold at retail outlets such as Target and Wal-Mart. But Starbucks will carry an exclusive DVD and CD package featuring a Chuck Berry musical compilation in its 5,286 U.S. stores.
Starbucks hopes to build on its previous successes in music. In 2004, it sold 1 out of 4 copies of the Grammy-winning Ray Charles album “Genius Loves Company,” which it co-released with Concord Records.
Its first venture into movie marketing was not as impressive. Starbucks launched a partnership with Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. in January, promising to teach Hollywood a marketing lesson. But its first campaign, for “Akeelah and the Bee,” failed to deliver the hoped-for result.
A feel-good drama about a young African American girl who makes it to a national spelling bee against all odds, “Akeelah” was well reviewed when it was released in April.
But after spending $20 million in marketing, Lions Gate has taken in only $17 million at the box office. Lions Gate executives privately say the white viewers they were counting on Starbucks to deliver never showed up in great number.
Many Starbucks customers found the marketing campaign confusing, people familiar with the effort said. The campaign included printing “words of the day” on coffee sleeves and on bright green note cards posted in the stores. But some customers mistakenly thought the words were new coffee flavors, the sources said.
Starbucks maintains that the campaign resonated with customers, although it did not conduct polls to determine how many people saw the movie.
“How we measure our success is not always in terms of box-office receipts but our customers’ reception,” said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, who will remain in Seattle.
Mintz was not available for an interview.
