"Wizzy's not like a sorcerer's apprentice who doesn't deserve to wear the sorcerer's hat," explains Baccei, who's already fleshing out an obvious alter ego in the person of a hero in an animated cartoon series. "Wizzy's supposed to be a magician. We all root for him because we know he's well-intentioned. However, the magic doesn't always do quite what he expects."
Baccei couldn't hope to "buy" the weekly exposure Wizzy now receives each Sunday morning in papers such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Denver Post, and the New York Daily News, some of which have given the Magic Eye prime space -- the front page of the comics section above the fold. The combined circulation of the 230 to 250 participating papers easily tops 20 million. Likewise, the General Mills deal offers another mass-market penetration that pays N.E. Thing handsomely to solidify its Magic Eye brand name and introduce kids to Wizzy Nodwig.
All licensing deals, in fact, have been viewed through this eye-on-the-future filter. Thus did Baccei turn away from a possible poster deal with Zima (landed by NVision) but accept a call from CBS to help produce a 16-page sales booklet for the company-owned and -operated TV division. You guessed it: the cover will contain a 3-D image of the CBS eye logo. "Don't tell CBS, but I'd probably pay them for the opportunity to do this job," says Baccei, eager for some network contacts and a leg up with the legions of Fortune 500 advertisers who will be sent the CBS sales booklet.
"I see this [the fad] as the first stage of a rocket," Baccei says the next morning in a meeting his lawyer has arranged with some Boston investment bankers. "I'd like to see this as a creative multimedia company. I'm talking Disney of the 21st century. Why shouldn't I aim big?" says Baccei, who is dressed in a pink short-sleeved shirt and jeans, to a semicircle of suits. A moneyman, who only moments before had said, "Wow, this is cool," upon successfully viewing a Magic Eye image for the first time, has apparently snapped back into less starry-eyed focus. "You already hit the ball out of the park," he suggests. "Just circle the bases and take a shower."
Baccei, however, isn't ready to retire and live the easy life. He drives a three-year-old Subaru. He wears a $50 Casio watch. "This is my yacht," he says, swiveling in his chair to take in a room full of computers staffed by three artists working on images. He says he knows it's foolish to imagine he'd hit another home run, that he'd be happy stroking singles. His dream, for the second stage of N.E. Thing Enterprises, is a Hollywood-like work cycle: months of intense creativity followed by creative relaxation. Something similar comes through in Baccei's foreword to the second Magic Eye book. "It was Wizzy who once said: 'The secret is to find the balance between order and chaos . . . to find your place in the almost symmetry."
Such "manic bursts" appear to be a hallmark of the fad person, says Christopher Miller, professor of marketing at Rice University, who has studied and written academic papers on fads. His assessment of Baccei's hopes for a Wizzy Nodwig animated series? "If he can leverage it past the pure novelty, past when six months or a year from now people are saying, 'Seen it. Done it. What's new?' he may be successful," says Miller, acknowledging Baccei's strategically improved chances of a second hit. "But the odds are so low to begin with. No one really knows what makes these things go. There's so much randomness. It's a lot like gambling. I think it's hard to maintain the attitude, 'Hey, I got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time,' because the ego takes over."
Not many slot-machine winners, he reminds us, hit the jackpot and successfully swear off casinos. Imagining Wizzy Nodwig rising to a possible peak, Miller talks about the real profit in children's cartoons -- the plastic figures and dolls. "That's where the money is. That's nirvana."
Yes, Baccei and Gregorek have thought those thoughts.
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John Grossmann is a freelance writer based in Jamison, Pa.
FADS: THE ULTIMATE CAPITALIST TOOL?
What is a fad? "A fad," says Ken Hakuta, who made some $20 million selling Wacky Wallwalkers in the 1980s, "is something that gives just a couple of minutes of extreme fun. It can be useful. It can be useless."
"A fad implies a convulsive market response," says John Kao, who teaches a course on creativity at the Harvard Business School.
"A fad is a lot like a niche brand, but instead of a very loyal, small segment of the market, you see an intense loyalty by a large segment over a short period of time," says Wharton Business School marketing professor Pete Fader. Long-lived niche brands -- for instance, Freedent Chewing Gum for denture wearers -- are, in fact, as rare as fads, according to Fader. He maintains that most niche products, like light beer, soon become a category unto themselves.
"There's definitely a feeding-frenzy quality to a fad and a short window of opportunity," says Christopher Miller, a marketing professor at Rice University, who has "spent a good bit of time thinking about fads" and writing about them as well. Miller believes a fad spreads like a joke and dies like a joke that's made the rounds: when there's nobody left to tell it to. "Fads are sort of the ultimate capitalist tool, the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. Thousands of entrepreneurs dash themselves on the rocks so one can survive," says Miller, who admits, "I don't have a really clear definition of a fad."
