• by august , Avida Landau , June 6, 2005

To promote the new season of the HBO comedy series "Entourage," the network last month started an online ad campaign targeting males ages 18 to 34. The ads, which are running on sites including Ign.com, Ugo.com, and Darkhorizons.com, consist mainly of streaming video ads, including streams that ran inside expandable banners, said Ian Schafer, president of Deep Focus, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based interactive shop that created the campaign.

The successful Mark Wahlberg-produced "Entourage," which launched its second season Sunday night, follows a young rising Hollywood actor and his closest buddies, brought over from their native Queens.

One 50-second ad, featuring a video clip from the show, asked the audience to guess how a beautiful woman will react to a pickup line by Turtle, one of the main characters who is trying to break a dry streak with women. The clip concludes by letting the audience see the woman's reaction--which was to walk away.

"The idea in this ad was to keep audiences interacting with the content for as long as possible," said Schafer. "We wanted to give the audience a look at the series that they might not be getting anywhere else," he added. He said HBO helped pick the scene.

In all, said Schafer, the online campaign includes about a dozen different creative units, including skyscraper ads, meant to introduce the cast, as well as repurposed television ads promoting the show. The repurposed TV ads reside in a 728X90 banner at the top of Web pages, with the video playing inside the banner itself without sound. When the mouse rolls over the ad, the banner expands and plays in full size. Some of the skyscraper ads include a "schedule this" link, which alerts users about the show in their computers' calendars.