Now with More Snoopy and Charlie Brown!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:15)
Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today, we are talking to the ambassador of the Peanuts brand. Melissa Menta is here. She's gonna talk to us about the beloved Peanuts brand created by cartoonist Charles Schultz in 1950, recently celebrating its 75th anniversary.
These are beloved characters. They are all around the world, as we talked about before we jumped on. Thanks for joining us today, Melissa.

**Melissa Menta** (0:38)
Well, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

**John Wall** (0:41)
So before we jumped on, you said you are drinking coffee. I have to ask, what's your choice of coffee and choice of mug?

**Melissa Menta** (0:47)
Well, I'm a cat lady. Don't tell Snoopy because he doesn't really like cats. So I have my cat mug and I'm drinking a macchiato.

**John Wall** (0:57)
Ah, excellent. Good choice. Yeah, I have made the transition. I had my normal morning run, but I'm already switched over to iced for this afternoon, even though it's cold and snowy here. I need my afternoon kick, so we've got that going. Talk to us about how you got attached to the Peanuts brand. I mean, what kind of background ultimately gets you to what you're doing here? What did you start out working in and studying?

**Melissa Menta** (1:19)
I have a very quirky history and career, but it's sort of all kind of worked, believe it or not, in college. I was a East Asian Studies major. I studied Japanese, but I also had a side hustle with theater. Then a professor of mine said, you should go into marketing and communications for Broadway. Long story short, I did go to grad school at NYU for performing arts administration. While I was there, a friend of mine ran into somebody at Brooklyn Academy of Music here in New York. She said she was leaving the Jim Henson company.
She was in a junior level publicity role. My friend came home and said, you've got to apply for this role. I said, but I'm going to work in theater. She said, it's the Muppets. That started my niche career of working for characters. I've worked for the Jim Henson company. I worked for a company called pets.com in the late 90s that had a sock puppet mascot. While I worked at pets.com, Charles Schultz passed away and the media outlet Nightline reached out to me and said, we would like the pets.com sock puppet to do an interview about Charles Schultz passing. And I said, that's insane. He's a genius. Why would you want the puppet? Long story short, they convinced me the puppet did the interview for Nightline. His eye fell off in the middle of the interview, which was terrible. It was like the failure for me, but the next day a friend of mine who I had worked with at the Muppets reached out to me and said, you know, I work at United Media, which is the equivalent of United Feature Syndicate, the original syndicate for Peanuts. And it continues, but as soon as pets.com, the bubble burst in 1999, that same friend said, hey, we're hiring at United Media. So here I am working at Peanuts 25 years later.

**John Wall** (3:26)
Oh my God, I have to talk to Alison. I can't believe that backstory is insane. Now I get that this is nothing related to peanuts, so she didn't want to put it out there. But of course, so the Muppets, another gigantic brand. And then of course, Chris and I have both lived through.com and pets.com is classic as far as the bubble there. The fact that, you know, people shipping 50 pounds of dog food for free, you know, that's part of what made that all happen. But okay, all right, so we have to rewind all this stuff and dig back a little bit. We have to get at least 30 seconds on the Muppets. I mean, how was that? Did you love being there? It seems like you would love it and it would be crazy, but...

**Melissa Menta** (4:02)
Working on the Muppets was a blast. I was really young. I was learning publicity. I got to go to the Today Show with Miss Piggy and Frank Oz was of course, the actor behind Miss Piggy. I took Kermit to the Rose Parade. He was the Grand Marshal. It was just an incredible experience. But I will say, like after when I worked at pets.com, also a puppet, there were no rules with the pets.com sock puppet. There were a lot of rules as the publicist for the Muppets. You had to make sure that the puppeteer was never caught on camera. I was always stressed during events, but they were certainly career highlights.