As Ted DiBiase Once Said...


...Everyone Has Their Price.

...and Steve Stoute's is probably higher than yours. Elaboration, courtesy of the New York Times' Jeff Leeds.

"HP in the house!"

It was 2:30 a.m. in a converted factory space near downtown Miami, and the music entrepreneur Steve Stoute had briefly leaned into a microphone to trumpet his client, the computer manufacturer, Hewlet-Packard, to anyone on the dance floor who could hear him over the beats pounding from the speakers.

The MTV Video Music Awards had ended hours earlier on what would be just another work night for Mr. Stoute, a former record executive who has leapt into advertising. Sean Combs, in town for the awards and the party's official host, had taken the stage to place an order with the bar for 500 shots of tequila, while barely clad dancers writhed in cages on platforms around the floor. On Hewlett-Packard's tab, hundreds of fans were dancing, drinking and, so went the hope, trying out the company's mini-printers or digital photo technology.

It is in such climates, Mr. Stoute said after last month's party, that a buttoned-up brand name like Hewlett-Packard's can loosen up and, potentially, become cool. "It's not a party," he said of the event. "It's a Puffy party, which makes it an event that only the finest of the fine get invited to."

These days, a bevy of blue-chip companies are pressed up against the velvet rope, desperate for access to the trend-setting youth market, and many are turning to Mr. Stoute for a pass inside. At 34 he has emerged as one of Madison Avenue's surest guides to the wide world of young consumer spending, hip-hop style. Teenage spending alone was estimated at $175 billion last year, according to market research firm Teen Research Unlimited.

Mr. Stoute's job, in essence, is as a translator, explaining the music industry's subcultures, particularly the predominantly black world of hip-hop, to the typically middle-aged and white ranks of the corporate world, and vice versa. In that role he has helped transform the images of clients like Reebok International, McDonald's, Daimler Chrysler and Coors Brewing.

"We wanted to be outside our comfort zone," Doug Cole, director of entertainment marketing for Hewlett-Packard, said of the party. "And I think it's fair to say that we were."

Mr. Stoute would be the first to say that shuttling between corporate culture and daily life in the music industry requires interesting talents - one of them being the ability to put a happy corporate face on just about anything. Case in point: Mr. Stoute dutifully coordinated Hewlett-Packard's party in Miami without bristling that the evening's host, Mr. Combs, burst into his office at Interscope Records in 1999 with two accomplices and, in a well-publicized incident, beat him with a Champagne bottle and a telephone in a dispute over a music video. (Mr. Combs later pleaded guilty to a harassment violation, an infraction less serious than a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to a one-day class in anger management. The two say they have reconciled.)




(since Google was no help whatsoever finding pics of Steve Stoute being bludgeoned with a champagne bottle, you'll have to settle for this portrait of Ted DiBiase and Steve "Dr. Death" Williams).

Posted: Wed - September 22, 2004 at 06:57 PM      

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