Unfortunately, Blackstone made another funny Christmas video

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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

If you like cafeteria workers with Beatle wigs and tennis racket guitars, you shouldn’t miss this:

For most of the year, Blackstone is a leveraged buyout shop and commercial landlord whose purchase of single-family homes after the global financial crisis had “devastating consequences for tenants,” according to a 2019 report from the U.N. human rights office that company rejected. You may have heard of BREIT, a private real estate fund with gravity-defying grades and a scared investor base. You may know Blackstone through the political philanthropy of billionaire CEO Stephen Schwarzman or through previous companies like Southern Cross Healthcare, Packers Sanitation Services and Extended Stay America.

Well, forget all that because for one day in the year 365, Blackstone is here crazy!

This year’s long holiday video is a meta-documentary of how poorly last year’s holiday video was received.

After a while, it becomes a parody of reality TV, where the production values ​​are disturbingly high and the quality of the jokes reeks of committee approval. Jump to 3:36 and 4:05 for the lazy British and Japanese stereotypes, respectively, and to 4:58 for Schwartzman slicing a cucumber in the manner of a person who didn’t previously know it was being delivered uncut.

The country-western song about alternative asset management is tacked on at the end. Good luck getting this far. Blackstone’s turning off comments on YouTube is probably the only evidence of good judgment in the entire process.

Someone wanting to fill an article might argue here that Blackstone is doing to corporate videos what it did to residential real estate: It’s a $1 trillion gorilla that has decided to compete against local independents. The idea is that his bosses are charmingly stupid in real life. But when the message is so skillful, even modest lack of seriousness seems corporate and calculated.

Will Blackstone’s video build customer relationships as naturally as, say, a cheesy Christmas ad from Ontario, Canada-based Rempel Capital Wealth Management? Obviously not. Did it cost much more to produce? Of course – but the value of brand management cannot be easily measured.

Despite it. It’s all just a bit of fun, right? No, it’s not that. It’s fun to wash. It is the recruitment of corporate creatures for the purpose of reputation laundering, and the blackest stones of all are the ones in our hearts.

Further reading
— We Watched Blackstone’s Entire Christmas Video, So You Must Do It Now (FTAV)