Yahoo! Partners With Mark Burnett For New Season Of 'The Apprentice'

Yahoo! Inc. announced Thursday that it scored a deal to become the official Web site for the next two seasons of Mark Burnett's hit reality show "The Apprentice," currently airing on NBC.

As part of the initiative, Yahoo! will advertise on NBC and will receive product placement for its HotJobs site on "The Apprentice," in which aspiring moguls compete for the chance to work for developer-turned-reality-TV-star Donald Trump. For its part, NBC.com will direct visitors to Yahoo!

"We're working directly with Mark Burnett and his team to create a value-added experience for the viewers," said Jim Moloshok, Yahoo!'s senior vice president for media and entertainment. He said that Yahoo! began discussions with Burnett about six months ago.

For instance, said Moloshok, twice a week, Yahoo! will broadcast new, previously unaired footage that's been edited specifically for the Internet. The first such broadcast was scheduled for Thursday, after the second season's premier ended at 10 P.M. West Coast time. Each Internet segment will be preceded by a 15- or 30-second ad. Historically, Yahoo! has been reluctant to allow potentially intrusive advertising to precede content.

Yahoo! has already sold out advertising space for the spots before the new footage, as well as for the site itself, to a total of five marketers, said Moloshok. Online ads for the office supply company Staples, Inc. and the movie "The Grudge," by Sony Pictures, were on the site Thursday afternoon. Moloshok declined to name the other advertisers or to disclose how much they paid, other than to say the initiative was a "more expensive project than most online advertising."

Some industry experts say that whether similar deals make sense likely hinges on very specific facts. "It all depends on how you take advantage of it. You have to really work to make the pieces come together between a Yahoo! and an 'Apprentice,' but if you have the creative that can connect the dots between the media, it can be great. Everything has to fit," said Sarah Fay, president of Carat Interactive. "Your message has to have relevance with the medium and it has to have some kind of indicator to give people a reason why they should go online."

Fay cited Fox's "American Idol" as a good example, which offered an online voting component that drove lots of traffic.

Asked whether the premium advertising value of TV's version of "The Apprentice" would translate to Yahoo!'s online component, Fay said: "That depends. I'm not sure how they've structured the package yet, but if I was going to buy into that, I would want to buy into both the TV package and the online package. I'm not sure it makes sense to buy one without the other."

Yahoo! promoted its site for "The Apprentice" on its home page and through its Instant Messaging service. Also, at the end of every episode, a short spot will air before the final credits, directing people to download Yahoo!'s Instant Messager.

The deal marks the first time Yahoo! has gotten into the reality-TV business, but not the first time it's teamed up with a specific show. Since Moloshok came to Yahoo! in 2002, after 11 years at Warner Bros., Yahoo! also partnered with Paramount's "Entertainment Tonight" and its new spinoff "ET Insider." Moloshok says he hopes to do more partnerships with reality TV shows. "Reality is a great area for us," he said, adding that Yahoo!'s users "skew very heavily towards reality programming viewers."

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