• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, June 1, 2007

Marketers are demanding more than home-grown humor

This just in: there's lotsa entertaining stuff on the Web. No, honest, there is. Ask anyone. Streaming music. The previous night's Letterman monologue. Home-made clips of carpenters accidentally nailing two-by-fours to their feet. 'Tis a wonderful time to be alive, assuming you're really bored at work.

Judging by the recent spate of marketing-infused entertainment content parked on all corners of them thar Internets, major advertisers have sort of noticed. Yet while companies have embraced such programs enthusiastically, most experts believe the market is due for something of a shakeout. More specifically, they think brand-type folks have gotten past their fascination with user-generated content and are now looking to ally themselves with more professional-looking online entertainment.

"The entertainment value of what we've seen so far has been very, very low," says Matt Wasserlauf, CEO of online video network Broadband Enterprises, whose firm conducted an online upfront showcase of its offerings for advertisers on May 17. "The user-generated stuff, the stuff with low barriers to entry - those have been fully exploited. Advertisers want more, and storytelling will rise to the top."

Humdrum Doesn't Cut It

This could be the kiss of death for the type of cutesy, participation-oriented programs that have flourished in years past. Now that broadband penetration has approached the point where many Web surfers can view high-quality video easily, why should companies settle for simple polls and other interactive doodads when they can amuse and enlighten (or at least try)?

"The programs that ask consumers to log on and choose a new Doritos flavor - everybody has done things like that," notes Andrew Leary, CEO and co-founder of Passenger, which has created private brand communities for the likes of ABC and Sara Lee. "But they don't go far enough, they're not particularly fun and they don't create an ongoing relationship. If you have better options, what's the point?"

Ultimately, what this means is a new set of rules for entertainment-centric marketing on the Web, which isn't to say that it doesn't have its upside. One huge boon for marketers in this entertainment-first era is that they can be a little more risqué than they can in other mediums. Take the online effort for we TV's  "Wife, Mom, Bounty Hunter," which debuted in April. Instead of the usual humdrum where/when banners, the women's entertainment network teamed with New York ad firm Filter for a campaign centered around a child's drawings - the mother's world as depicted by a little girl. In one execution, mom is shown zapping a miscreant with a taser; in another, she holds a chocolate-drenched blender in one hand and a gun in the other.

Other rules include respecting both the senses of humor and the tech savvy of audiences, - especially young 'uns weaned on a steady diet of Xbox and the Internet from an early age - as well as avoiding vanity URLs for entertainment-themed projects. "Every time an agency pitches a campaign, they just come up with a new name, rather than trying to build an audience around brands and entertainment content in a single space. It's a lot easier to keep the audience you have than direct them somewhere else every nine months," says Mike Burns, CEO and chief creative officer of online video game specialist Fuel Industries, which recently bulked up its production capabilities with full-fledged audio and video facilities.

Cautionary Notes

If advertisers are making any mistakes, they mostly have to do with a follow-the-herd mentality. Brand marketers express frustration that a media strategy often precedes the all-important creative one. "Sometimes the first thing you hear is, 'We gotta get a MySpace page up right away.' Okay, fine. Why? Do you have a reason for this?" says J.C. Addison, head of production and a partner at Filter. "People don't start with a powerful idea, and then they wonder why consumers don't find [their work] entertaining."

Too, companies should be cautious in their rollout of video-facilitating technologies, especially those that require users to download a plug-in. Fuel learned this the hard way when it employed a technology described by Burns as "Xbox technology in a browser" in games hyping Candyland and HBO's "Deadwood." "The quality was amazing and the response from those who played the games was through the roof," he says. "But did we access as much of a market as we could have? Probably not. The brands, they knew there was a risk of the plug-in not being adopted."

A handful of entertainment programs backstopped by marketers have earned high marks from industry execs. IFC gets points for having established itself as the online place where short films live in America - and where high-end, semi-edgy marketers go to reach passionate viewers. Brawny's "Brawny Academy" online reality show, in which the Brawny Man took semi-considerate husbands out into the woods and got them in touch with their sensitive side, generated a legit cult following and drove sales. Honda (for its new Fit model) and Monster got a lot of mileage from their sponsorship of "Cube Fabulous," a workspace-makeover show for the officeless. And 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's Volksdragon.com site, engineered by Fuel to promote the DVD release of the box-office bomb Eragon, worked a "pimp my dragon" motif to great comic effect.

As for cautionary tales, execs point to two recent higher profile entities: Anheuser-Busch's Bud.TV and AOL's "Gold Rush" - a joint effort with "Survivor" and "The Apprentice" mastermind Mark Burnett.

"Gold Rush" critics believe the concept was flawed from the start: "They brought one of the most successful TV producers in Hollywood, Mark Burnett, into a medium in which he hadn't demonstrated any success. What did they expect would happen?" asks Wasserlauf. That the "Gold Rush" online presentation wasn't especially intuitive - it was hard to find, plus advertiser tie-ins assaulted viewers from every angle - certainly didn't help matters.

The problem with Bud.TV, on the other hand, isn't the content. In fact, most consider a few of the recurring bits, like "The Arrogant Fake British Rich Guy," to be eminently giggle-worthy. The issue is the competition.

"Having people spending time with your brand can only be a good thing, but if [21-and-up male consumers] want to see funny, jokey things, there are hundreds of sites for that," says Filter executive creative director and partner Jay Sharfstein. Another problem: the registration process, which requires short-attention-span consumers in the 21-to-34 demographic to fill out a form before viewing the content.

That said, Bud.TV may ultimately prove a harbinger of things to come. At some point, big brands will likely go the BMW Films route and decide they should be owning and controlling their online entertainment content, rather than just the brand messages that run between, up, around and through it.

"Coca-Cola will be creating and managing music artists. They'll have their own online network and so will lots of other companies," Burns predicts. "It's not always going to be linear and there are going to be growing pains, but that's where we're heading."