How to manage Miley

I suspect you're getting tired of this topic, but there's an intriguing business story behind the semi-naughty pics in the June Vanity Fair. That is, what to do with Miley Cyrus now that she’s becoming, ahem, a woman. Truth is, she has already gotten to be womanly, as Karl Taro Greenfeld points out on portfolio.com. The Mouse House planned on milking another year or two out of the Hannah Montana schtick before repositioning Miley for a somewhat older audience - with or without Hannah Montana. This is tricky stuff because teens can be a fickle audience.

A little sexiness on the part of Hannah Montana, at the right time, would have been a shrewd Disney marketing move. But Disney Channel president of entertainment Gary Marsh, president of Disney Channel Rich Ross, and president of Disney-ABC Television Anne Sweeney—the Disney brain trust that found Cyrus and produced Hannah—would have had a much different timetable. A little sexy might have been welcome after they had the next incarnation of Hannah Montana ready to launch. As it is, they have been caught unprepared for this next step in Hannah's career.

[CUT]

Marsh admitted to me that the possibility of an unscripted Hannah Montana meltdown was what kept him up at night. He counted on Miley's, and her parent's, awareness of how much money was at stake to keep her from, say, posing in racy photos. But as the Disney-approved Chinese billboards of a lingerie-clad teenager proves, these are business decisions. A Disney character can appear one way in China, where the brand is built less on a tween fan base and more on her being a celebrity; in the U.S., where there is still a great deal of money to be made from her younger fans, Hannah must stay carefully clad.