• by Shankar Gupta , October 14, 2005

MSN Video will host five new short films by JibJab under a deal announced Thursday. The first of the series, "Big Box Mart," which parodies large retail store chains, appeared on the Web immediately after its Thursday night debut on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

As part of the deal, MSN will sell ads to run in both the streams on MSN Video and the streams on JibJab's own site. The deal marks the first time MSN has sold ads off its own network, according to MSN.

In addition to the 15- to-30-second ads, MSN and JibJab will also jointly approach major brands about product placement. Brands that enter into placement arrangements with MSN and JibJab will be featured in the shorts, and possibly mocked a bit.

"The notion here with JibJab is that they're snarky, irreverent--they're equal opportunity maker-fun-of-ers," said MSN's director of advertising and business strategy, Todd Herman. "How advantageous would it be for JibJab to say: 'Look, we find this product cool enough--we find this relevant enough to our audience--that we want to put it into one of our films.'"

JibJab founders, brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, rose to fame last year with the satirical "This Land," a Web short that parodied President George W. Bush and opponent Sen. John Kerry as they faced off in the presidential campaign.

Gregg Spiridellis said he believes companies can benefit from being able to laugh at themselves. "If you have a sense of humor about your own brand, and poke a little fun at it, then people appreciate that," he said. "It's a more honest approach, maybe."

He added that JibJab is going to be selective with the brands it includes, and that product placement won't be simply soda cans placed in the shot. "We're going to be very opportunistic about weaving those in when it makes sense creatively," he said. "We all know that there's good and bad product placement."

Before partnering with MSN, JibJab had previously had an exclusive content deal with Yahoo!, which expired this January. Spiridellis said JibJab chose MSN this time around because MSN promised him more control over the brand and how it was displayed. "There were just subtleties in how we would be able to control our branding, and that was very important to us," he said.