What happened to creating a solution to a problem?
“It’s another way for us to engage with our advertisers and our audience” said Chris McCumber, senior VP of marketing and brand strategy for USA.
The preformatted fluff to the right, care of USA Network’s Chris McCumber, is in regards to their latest project (USA Network and NBC Universal) called Didja. Like, “Did ya see that?”. Ha ha, he he, hilarious. Didja is said to be an archive of old and new TV ads, movie trailers, and other stuff that usually interrupts the content you’re trying to enjoy.
“Both efforts are designed to give NBC a bigger share of the ad revenue being generated by streaming video.” Exactly. Didja is being made to help NBC milk a medium for as much as they can.
Look at what TBS has done with Very Funny Ads. They transformed an annual highlight show on their network, into a popular online archive of some of the funniest ads. Conceptually, being that their tagline is “very funny”, such a site ties into their brand perfectly.
How many intrusive, annoying, ads are slipped into the content on Very Funny Ads? Nada. How many pre-roll ads do you have to sit through? None.
The problem they solved: We have tons of people tune into our show each year and watch our countdown with Kevin Nealon. But how do people that missed the show or want to see an ad again watch them? Ding! How ’bout a website that features all the ads, and maybe we could even add a few new ads every now and then, not just before each New Year.
“We know people like watching commercials,” McCumber said. “They just don’t like being force-fed at the wrong time.”
Yes, they’d rather spend their precious time digging through an archive of “on-demand” commercials that would have been force-fed to them, had they not made a pit stop in the washroom while it originally aired.
Ivan, creator of AdsoftheWorld.com, whom I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with in the past, plugged his website in Digg’s comments on this announcement, saying “Sorry, the concept already exists. 15M page loads / month proves it’s a working one.”
But his site is nothing like what NBC is trying to do, which is far from conceptual. Ads of the World is aimed at advertising and marketing folk. That’s why it works. They, and I, enjoy analyzing any and every ad, good and bad.
TBS was able to target a mass market by only featuring funny ads. Not just any ads.
NBC and News Corp. are already working on a “YouTube killer” which has been declared Clown Co. and valued at $1 billion, even though it doesn’t exist or have a name yet. It might be in their best interest to focus on that much needed site (sarcasm) instead of wasting a significant amount of creative’s and developer’s lives on “brand-related content” crap.
Bud.tv, move on over, there’s a new swimmer in town, just dying to dive into Arrington’s DeadPool.
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Satish said on August 10, 2007...
I would have to wholeheartedly agree. This all just reeks of poor catch-up behaviour on the part of the big guns (aka NBC and co.). Instead of making wise decisions of what relates to their brand, what the gaps are in the market, and what they have expertise in (or at least can acquire expertise in)… they’re just shooting blindfolded with half-baked ideas.
Didja may or may not survive, it’s only chance will be if other companies actually latch on to the concept of owning their brand’s sections. Good or bad PR, it’ll get a moderately nice traffic flow to start with so that won’t entirely be a beginning problem.
Clown Co. on the other hand… I just don’t see it being done any righter than anything that’s out there.
Eric said on August 10, 2007...
*YAWN*
It’s amazing how clueless they are
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