AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Amway Adds Entertainment to Product Line

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 19 — Amway, the door-to-door peddler of vitamins and soap, wants to reinvent how Hollywood sells entertainment.

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The owners of the multilevel marketing company are pouring millions of dollars into a new online store called Fanista (pronounced fa-NEE-sta). The Web site, set to make its public debut this week, will initially sell DVDs and CDs.

In the coming months it plans to add video games, digital downloads and books.

People can simply use Fanista as a place to shop. But the company hopes most consumers will join as members — signing up is free — and then recruit their friends.

The carrot: If your friend joins and buys something, identifying you as the reason for joining, you get 5 percent of the sale in cash or credit.

Think of it as part Amazon (online retail), part MySpace (social network) and part Amway (direct pitch from somebody you know).

“The distribution system for the entertainment business is broken,” said Daniel H. Adler, Fanista’s founder. “We’re pioneering a new model.”

A newfangled Internet business pops up every few weeks in Hollywood and promises to revolutionize something or other. But movie studios and music labels are taking the upstart seriously.

Money is a reason: Alticor, the owner of Amway and Fanista’s sole financial backer, says it generates about $6 billion in annual revenue.

“Those are awfully deep pockets,” said the writer and entrepreneur Norman Lear, who helped connect Mr. Adler with the direct-sales giant.

Through his various business partners and friends in Hollywood, Mr. Lear knew that Mr. Adler was tinkering with a new Web-based distribution system and that Alticor was looking for a new angle, perhaps in entertainment.

More important, Mr. Adler, 44, is an entertainment insider. He formerly worked at the Creative Artists Agency, where he led the new-media division, and Walt Disney, where he was a creative developer, or “imagineer.”

Mr. Adler helped introduce LidRock, which created a stir in 2004 by distributing music on miniature CDs tucked inside the lids of movie theater soda cups.

“His Rolodex of relationships is what makes this different,” said Sherry Lansing, the former chairwoman of Paramount.

Mr. Adler aims to exploit the increasingly cynical view of consumers, particularly young ones, about the way Hollywood pushes its wares.

“Regardless of what the big marketing campaign says is hot, regardless of what the big-name critic says is good, people make entertainment purchases based on the recommendations of people they encounter directly,” he said. “That is the only authentic voice.”

The company arrives as Hollywood experiments with the Web to build a more direct relationship with consumers.