This Bud's Not for Everyone

Bud TV was launched by Anheuser-Bush earlier this year to great fanfare from the advertising world. It wasn’t that everyone thought it was a great idea, it’s just that they were excited to learn how it was going to turn out. A-B, one of the top five advertisers in the country was going to be re-directing a large part of their 2007 ad budget away from conventional TV and putting it into their own online content channel.

So, now, half-way through 2007 is Bud TV paying off?

It terms of content, they’re doing alright. There are some shows that have garnered decent attention, Replaced by a Chimp, is one of the most well recognized series. But it only has a few episodes and they loose their appeal pretty quickly. Swear Jar, has done well after leaving the confines of Bud TV and being seen almost a half million times on YouTube. But it's not anything new, it's just another one of A-B's creative but old school advertisements. There are also accusations that it plagiarizes an early 90's episode of the Simpsons.

Afterworld is one of my favorite shows though it play count only barely breaks 2,000. It’s a post apocalyptic piece that is done in a jumpy animation style. Afterworld's plot is some where between Lost and Jericho but the story telling style approaches noir in tone. Though when placed against boob feasts like What Girls Want, it’s hard to see how it advances Bud Light’s goals at all. Maybe they are trying to depress us into drinking more, but the plot is so depressing I would skip the light stuff and go straight for the scotch.

A new interactive game show called Hardly News is also going to be launching soon which I think is one of the most creative items on the site from a use of the medium standpoint. Using multiple screen video clips provides humorous clues and a host narrates from another screen. The series is light in nature, ties back into the product subtly but most importantly is interactive, it draws people in, it's a show you literally can't fall asleep watching.

One of my biggest issues with Bud TV is not the quality of the content but that the content really is just short snippets that make a larger show. When given such a budget, 30-million dollars to be precise—about the same as an entire prime time season series—you’d think A-B could have come up with something more interesting that what are essentially bad mini-tv-episodes.

Now this may also be what are called webisodes, but websiodes when done well are not one-beat jokes or sixty minutes long stories told in three minute segments. Afterworlds is the rare exception on Bud TV of a webisodic done right and taking advantage of the medium. But shows like Sebastian on the other hand is literally a funny comedy show broken down into 20 three-minute segments. Some of the episodes separated by nothing more than an edit.

Bud TV is on the brink of releasing a desktop player to access their site. Not exactly a novel idea, it may help retain the viewers who are already visiting Bud TV. As that audience has slipped from a few hundred thousand to only a little over a hundred thousand in a few short months, there may not be an audience left to save.

Editors Note: This posting is part one of a series about Bud TV. In the next segment learn how Anheuser-Bush is hoping to bring Bud TV back from certain cancellation.