• Advertising Age, Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:06 PM

Fox Atomic, News Corp.'s recently shuttered studio, is being rebranded to become Fox Digital Studios, a unit aimed at branded programming. Roger Mincheff, former CEO of digital marketing agency Spacedog Media, is the unit's new senior VP.

Mincheff is a bit of an unorthodox hire, having worked primarily on comic books in his 11 years at Spacedog, where he integrated Mazda, Universal Music, Qantas Airways and Harley-Davidson into content. He says using actual brands enhances a story's credibility. "If you're going to tell a hip-hop story or a basketball story, you can't do it without brands, because brands make it more authentic," he says.

Fox is the latest broadcast network to put dedicated resources behind digital content, following similar moves from NBC and ABC. But despite ads and brand-name actors, no TV network has yet to truly crack the code of how to develop original programming that works as well online as it does on the boob tube. Whenever they put successful web series on TV, such as ABC's "In The Motherhood," it fails within weeks.

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