This blog was originally posted and featured on FastCompany.com. The original post can be found here: http://www.fastcompany.com/1675170/tony-robbins-perosnal-branding-breakthrough

By Nick Nanton, Esq. and JW Dicks, Esq.

If you missed Tony Robbins’s new mainstream premiere of Breakthrough, his new reality TV show, you missed the evolution of the blending of infomercial, reality TV, and soap opera.

While these adjectives describing Tony Robbins’s new show could be viewed as negative, we don’t intend them that way. It is the representation of the re-launch of Tony’s career in personal development and the launch of a new and powerful blended medium. Had this show been an infomercial, there would have been a strong call to action for viewers to buy the hot product Tony was selling. This may have resulted in successful front end sales followed by following up the sale with offers for additional products and services under the traditional infomercial format.

In the new media, Tony’s production company has mixed reality with message and created fans instead of buyers. While this may have a slight delayed effect in product sales, that delay will undoubtedly be outweighed by a strong new fan base for the entire spectrum of Tony Robbins Experiences including product sales as well as high end events and personal coaching at price points that might have seemed unattainable prior to the new show’s launch. Make no mistake, this show will be a commercial success–perhaps even on the front end from ad sales, but it will be also undoubtedly be a success for Tony Robbins Productions, the producer of the show, and the mix of Robbins’s products and services that will be revived as well as newly created, all at the same time.

First, from a reality TV test, the show was good. Great production, good story and the people were unquestioningly real. From Tony’s prospective, he too is to be congratulated because he recognized that in the new economy (arising post Great Recession), the focus will be on credibility as much as celebrity. People are tired of what they see in the news and the “BP BS lie detector” will become a new method of judging what people and companies say about their products and services. If you aren’t transparent from today on, you won’t pass the public BS lie detector test and you will get raked over the coals by your prospects and customers for anything your try to “sneak” by them–publicly we might add. On the other hand, if you are able to pull off what Tony Robbins did last night, which is to set up the next sale at the expense of a short term gain, the world will be your oyster.