• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 1, 2006

Can an ad-sponsored mobisodic series accelerate adoption of mobile video, and maybe even sell a few cars in the process?

History suggests the answer is no, but the process will be entertaining to watch. Marketing dweebs and digital media veterans will remember BMW Films' bold, expensive experiment in broadband programming with its "The Hire" branded entertainment of years back. Trying to drive rather than ride the dual trends of integrated marketing and Internet programming, BMW pulled out all the branding stops; it hired marquee directors, drenched the shorts in production values, plastered them everywhere, and even created a dedicated cable channel at one point.

I will defer to the brand effectiveness bean counters on whether this project really helped BMW. I imagine that it did. BMW Films claims 100 million downloads over the years. Regardless, I am more confident in arguing that these Webisodes did little to advance the Web as an entertainment vehicle. How fitting that "The Hire" ended its run in September last year, about the time everyone else and his auntie were starting to launch broadband entertainment channels.

Webizens have never embraced a Web-exclusive series in a culturally significant way. In the last year, spin-offs of familiar TV properties or news and passalong YouTube clips have been the driving force in broadband video.

Don't get me wrong. I love Heavy.com's "Behind the Music that Sucks" and AtomFilms/Aardvark "Angry Kid" series, but they do not constitute breakthrough Webertainment. Video podcasting may be the proper venue for serialized broadband fare ( I love "TikiBar TV"), and arguably, RocketBoom is the closest thing we have to a Web blockbuster (more than 250,000 downloads a day!).

But if you look at the current broadband favorites, it is clear that BMW's highly polished and somewhat pretentious "The Hire" is not what got us here. Aesthetically, it made the same mistake early programmers make in every medium; it arrogantly presumed that what a new platform really wants and needs is to be blessed by the prestige and seriousness of the last aging platform.

I say all of this in anticipation of Toyota's upcoming attempt to do for mobile what BMW tried to do for broadband. Working with Sprint and mobile comedy developer Fun Little Movies, Toyota is pouring about $8 million, I am told, into producing and promoting "The Pool" (as in carpool). This free, fully ad-supported comedy series will run on the 1 million Sprint multimedia-capable phones now in-market. This is the first mobile-only series to get TV promotion, with spots running now in anticipation of an Aug. 9 series launch on Sprint's Power Vision service.

For carriers like Sprint, "The Pool" likely represents an opportunity to get people to try mobile video, appreciate its qualitative improvements, and ultimately consume more of it and subscribe to other channels. It does have a few things working in its favor that "The Hire" did not.

FLM CEO Brad Gillingham assures me that unlike other types of blatant product placement and ham-handed brandertainment, Toyota "gets it" in this project. I am hoping not to see too many cutaways to the Camry logo or sexy transition sequences of this shiny car cutting through the night, just as it does in the formal ads. Gillingham says the program aims for young audiences, skewing urban and male, who already know the marketing drill. "They are a pretty sophisticated audience. They know when they are being had," he says. "We don't want that to happen."

Character and adventure will make the series a success, he argues. Also to Toyota's credit, "The Pool" creators are using a development house with experience in the platform, and they are leveraging the genre that has already proven to be both popular and highly viral on phones--comedy. Stand-up bits and zany sketch comedy of the sort FLM produces are among the most successful mobile genres, much bigger draws than the big media news and financial updates the carriers often use to sell their data services.

But can a unique and high-profile mobile video series help sell the platform itself? Nah! Getting people into mobile video is going to involve an evolution of habits, not some epiphany. One recent study showed that half of those who subscribe to mobile multimedia don't even access them, and I have to say that I rarely remember to or even care to access the VCast and PowerVision services on my handsets. You just forget that it's there.

Mobile video is going to have to be more than just good. It is going to have to be insistent, to find some way to push the stuff we really want to the top of the deck and remind us to watch. That is one reason I keep pulling podcasting into this column. I really think that some of the disciplines of format and distribution there eventually will serve phones well. The phone deck is the worse interface this side of the microwave oven. Why would I want to navigate it just to tease up the right video from a relentless set of menus? What I would prefer is the ability to subscribe to mobisodes and have them float to the top of the deck and present themselves to me much as they do on my iPod after it synchs up, or my TiVo. What I am really saying is that Web surfing for clips is a less relevant model for phones than is the DVR.

I think it is great that advertisers are lining up to underwrite these mobile video experiments. Gillingham says he is speaking with a number of brands and agencies about similar projects. And I hope "The Pool" is a good, funny series. But I think it is a mistake for the wireless or marketing industries to believe that such projects will grease the skids of mobile TV adoption. This curve will bend as habits and expectations shift, as delivery mechanisms mature.

My first guess is that mobile video should spend less time worrying about content and more time figuring out delivery. Impulsively, mobile keeps looking to the Web for precedents. I think the medium might do well to look instead at TiVo.