Everyone who’s watched James Bond movies knows the power of branded entertainment. I can still picture Sean Connery’s Aston Martin from Dr. No, and that was run in 1961. There was an article recently in the WSJ about the success of branded entertainment. We agree, involving the advertiser early and often is the best way to integrate the content/video with the brand, get all the ideas flowing, put the brand in the right context and generally make everyone happy. There are a few problems though and it will be interesting to see if the industry can figure them out. The first is whether this system can scale to volume. It’s time consuming, onerous work, and repeating it at scale to build a $100M business may not be easy. Each set of webisodes or videos takes time to figure out (where do I put the soda can, car, etc.). The second, more interesting problem, is the same problem faced by TV in the upfronts. How many people am I going to get to see this? Since it’s new content, there’s only comparables to the content or comparables to the site. (On a side note, there are several companies who generate traffic by syndicating the content in players with auto-play turned on to blog sites to solve this problem. More on whether that is a scam or works well later).

So, how does the agency know whether their $750K for a sponsorship and branded entertainment video is going to be a success? Is the publisher/content owner going to guarantee views? The last question is whether advertisers will care if the branded entertainment gets syndicated onto sites of questionable repute or they don’t care where the content ends up. At least on TV, you know it’ll be on NBC. Online, it’s a more difficult problem.

- Jayant Kadambi

It used to be that it cost millions of dollars to produce high-quality programming, and it was only possible by the privileged few. Nowadays, everyone with a mid-range Apple and an HD camcorder can become producers, directors and, if necessary actors. Of course, most made-for-the-Internet productions or webisodes are not 22 minutes with built-in story breaks at particular times suited for TV. They tend to be shorter, and the lengths vary.

The trend towards this type of programming has hit the studios as well, with Stage 9, an offshoot of ABC announcing a series of programming tailored for the web. It makes sense. It’s cheaper, far cheaper, than a TV show, and so this programming choice requires less money from advertising and sponsorship in order to break even. And the syndication choices are far greater, Stage 9 can release the show on ABC.com, a couple of other sites, give advertisers some sort of share of voice or exclusivity and then make a further release (think reruns on TV) all over the place.

What is the best form of advertising for this type of content? Sponsorships are going to be the norm for a while, but we at YuMe will be trying everything, to see what user’s respond to the most. Maybe a combination of a 15 second pre-roll, with a few contextually placed overlays, followed by a post-roll announcing the next episode? We’ll let you know.

- Jayant Kadambi