Style is launching a feel-good marketing campaign around Isaac, the hour-long Isaac Mizrahi lifestyle talk show, which starts Dec. 5.
The “Have a Better Day” campaign, designed to promote Mizrahi as a positive persona, involves a “haveabetterday.com” web site with encouraging “Isaac”-isms about life; porters at a Philadelphia mall carrying shoppers’ bags and handing out Isaac-branded hand-warmers; and street teams in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore dispensing Mizrahi stamps with the slogan, ‘you don’t need my stamp of approval.’
“The show’s more than strictly fashion,” says E! Networks senior VP of marketing, Suzanne Kolb. “Isaac is an overall lifestyle person and brand. He’s not simply fashion.”
Isaac, which will run daily at 7 and 11 p.m., is a mix of celebrity interviews, man-on-the-street pieces, lifestyle segments on subjects including diet and decorating, and fashion advice. The show has been taping two episodes a day in New York for the past several weeks.
Slogans on the “haveabetterday” site include, “Feeling chubby? Buy something nice for your house. You can never be too fat for a comforter,” and “Never jump to conclusions. Saunter over to them."
Most famous in recent years for launching a clothing line at Target in 2003, Mizrahi’s prior media ventures include the 1995 documentary, Unizipped, and a 2001 reality/celebrity interview show on Oxygen, which ran for three years. Nothing came of a 2004 development deal with NBC Enterprises for a nationally syndicated series.
At a taping last week for his show, Mizrahi was certainly a talker.
He told B&C: “You know, it’s like people say, ‘Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these designers are trying to get into the entertainment industry,’ and I’m like, ‘Excuse me? I have one word for you: Unzipped. I mean, what are you thinking? That was 10 years old, you know what I mean?’ So it’s like I don’t know what other designers are trying to get into other areas or other arenas, but it’s like, I get very bored of the status quo and I always, like, need to move on, I think, you know? And I think that’s what makes me a good fashion designer, but it also makes me, like, a little too fast with things, you know what I mean? It’s like, you know, I love this show? And to me it’s going really, really well? But for some reason, if it doesn’t work, someone will copy it somewhere and make a fortune.”
Mizrahi told B&C he was an obsessive watcher of Law & Order, Food Network and Tiurner Classic Movies.
He says he has moved his design studio behind the set of the Style show and says Isaac will differ from shows created by television executives who “suffer from this kind of pregurgitated demograph that needs to get satisfied.” Still unzipped.
