Friends of Branded!
Happy Saturday and I hope you had a great week.
There are multiple meanings across different contexts of the word “crossover,” but for the purpose of this week’s H^2, I’m referring to entertainment crossovers and those moments when a character from one show appears on another.
In the entertainment industry, the driver of doing so is clear – to build a shared universe, boost ratings and deepen storytelling.
In the world of sitcoms, no one has done it better than NBC with Friends & Mad About You (from an episode back in 1995 for those keeping score at home regarding my dated references) with Lisa Kudrow’s characters, Ursula Buffay (Mad About You) and Phoebe Buffay (Friends) sharing the small screen on NBC’s ‘Must See TV’ (on a Thursday night).
While I'm saying the quiet part out loud, this week’s H^2 is bringing Branded’s Hospitality Hangout into the Hospitality Headline’s Top of the Fold and for good reason – we’ve just launched an exciting new mini-series, in partnership with our friends from Toast, and released the first episode this week!
Before diving into the new mini-series, let’s take a relatively short walk down memory lane to the Prosper Forum 2023 event.
At the event (as we do often), we recorded a number of episodes of our Hangout with industry executives. Our line-up was strong, and as we rolled through the recording of each of the 6 episodes, a clear trend started to emerge – each executive on the show started their hospitality career as a dishwasher or other entry level position (and mostly dishwashers). The math is unemotional (although I am not) and 6 out of 6 of our guests started at the bottom and rose to the top with, wait for it, 5 of the 6 guests advanced to become CEOs and 1 was a member of his company’s C-suite as its COO.
Interestingly, Mr. Scott Boatwright was the only non-CEO among our guests recording with us at the Prosper Forum and well, we know what happened next, Scott is now the CEO of Chipotle.
For avoidance of any doubt, I’m of course not suggesting that Mr. Boatwright’s appearance on our podcast had anything to do with his being promoted to the CEO at Chipotle (but I’m also not saying that his appearance on the Hangout wasn’t factor. Who can really say, right? Just saying.). 😊
But I digress, as usual.
