Alas, Blackstone has made another fun-washing Christmas video

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If you like cafeteria workers in Beatle wigs with tennis racquet guitars, you won’t want to miss this:

Most of the year, Blackstone is a leveraged buyout shop and commercial landlord whose buying of single-family homes after the GFC had “devastating consequences for tenants,” according to a 2019 UN Human Rights office report that the company rejected. You might have heard about BREIT, a private real estate fund with gravity-defying marks and a spooked investor base. Perhaps you know Blackstone by the political glad-handing of carried-interest billionaire CEO Stephen Schwarzman, or by formerly owned companies such as Southern Cross Healthcare, Packers Sanitation Services and Extended Stay America.

Well, forget all that, because for one day in 365, Blackstone is wacky!

This year’s long-form festive video is a meta documentary about how badly last year’s festive video landed.

After a time it unravels into parodies of reality TV, where production values are disturbingly high and joke quality reeks of committee approval. Jump to 3:36 and 4:05 for the lazy UK and Japanese stereotypes, respectively, and to 4:58 for Schwartzman slicing a cucumber in the manner of a person who didn’t previously know they came unsliced.

The country-and-western song about alternative asset management is tagged on at the end. Good luck in lasting that far. That Blackstone switched off the comments on YouTube is probably the only demonstration of good judgement in the entire process.

A person needing to fill an article might argue here that Blackstone is doing to company videos what it did for residential real estate: it’s a $1tn gorilla that has chosen to face off against local independents. The idea is that in real life its bosses are charmingly dorky. But when the message is this slick, even self-effacing unseriousness comes off as corporate and calculated.

Will Blackstone’s video build client connections as naturally as, for example, a hokey Christmas promo from Rempel Capital Wealth Management of Ontario, Canada? Obviously not. Has it cost a lot more to make? Obviously — but the value of brand management can’t be easily measured.

Still. It’s all just a bit of fun, right? No. It’s not. It’s fun-washing. It’s conscripted corporate levity for the purposes of laundering a reputation, and the blackest stones of all are the ones in our hearts.

Further reading
— We watched Blackstone’s entire Christmas video, so now you have to (FTAV)