Launchpad: Marketing on Cruise Control
“[An] indication for us was Tina Brown’s book on Princess Diana,” says Baldacci, of last year’s “The Diana Chronicles,” published almost 15 years after Morton’s Diana biography, and a decade after her death and the subsequent media storm. “What was interesting was that it didn’t feel like Tina Brown was going to have anything new to say about Diana. And in a way, it felt like, ‘What can Andrew Morton tell us about Tom Cruise that we haven’t already heard?’ And Tina Brown’s book, of course, just exploded. And once we read [Andrew’s] book, we realized Andrew is not necessarily telling you anything you don’t know. … It’s the way that Andrew put the book together. … Andrew has taken a lot of heat for basically painting Tom Cruise with a bad brush, but the book is actually very admiring of Cruise.”