This Bud's Not for Everyone - Part Deuce

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part two of a continuing series about Bud.TV and advertiser generated content. The previous posting in the series is from June 13th.

The underlying question of the whole thing still remains what is the point of Bud.TV for Auhiser-Bush when doled out at a 30 million dollar price tag? How many eye-balls will see this content and will they even deliver the message they are looking for. I’ve scene a lot of online ads looking to find a way around the cost of broadcast, but the truth is that TV is expensive for a reason it has a built in audience that’s be growing for years.

Bud.TV is an attempt at vertical integration but with restrictions on who can access the site (which a number of state attorney’s generals have said aren’t strong enough) there is no way for it to ever achieve the viral status of a YouTube video. The most watched videos that I have found so far on Bud.TV have play counts around 25,000. Bud Cursing jar video on YouTube has achived close to a half million views. Yet despite all that success that number of viewer times ten could be achieved by running during Dr. Phil, times a hundred and it would be on the Super Bowl.

CBS said in their first month of launching their inter tube player they received more than 11 million views. I haven’t seen any metrics since then but we can only assume the numbers have sky rocketed since then. This are established content providers though. Will Bud.TV ever be able to establish themselves?

Well the news from A-B is not good for Bud.TV and the project is expected to be scraped at years end.

But the idea of ad-supplied content is far from gone.

ABC is currently running a fun little show twice a week called Fast Car & Superstars - The Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race and is streaming the episodes via the ABC viewer. One might see the show and think it is just chocked full of product placements, especially for Gillette who the announcers plug about once a minute as they talk about the Gillette Young Guns, a group of young superstar Nascar drivers who guide celebrities like Jewel, Bill Shatner, John Elway and other around the track.

But for those who stick out the credits and stay till the end will see that the show is actually a commercial caulked full of content. In prime time it is a paid presentation of Proctor and Gamble, the owners of Gillette and the largest TV ad buyer in the world.

When judged as a show, I’m not sure if I can say it’s that good, when judged as an infomercial, it’s fantastic. Nascar may be one of the only venues that can support this much product placement while still fooling people into thinking it’s a real show. On the other hand P&G has scored what some might consider a miracle; an ad so attention getting that they can sell ads for it.

What the financial arrangement between P&G and ABC is for the show is not clear though based on the amount P&G paid for the production (co-produced by ad firm BBOD) I wouldn’t be surprised if ABC got the show for free and called it a day.

The ratings haven’t been great but you know that people aren’t fast-forwarding through it on TIVO. These sorts of shows aren't going to be replacing the fall lineup anytime soon, or at least I'd like to hope not, but everyone is pitching their advertiser created content and at some point some of these are going to start sticking to the wall.