Break.com Finally Lands One - WSJ.com

Break.com Finally Lands One - WSJ.com: "Break.com Finally Lands One
Site Known for Edginess
Signs Up Big Marketers
For G-Branded Videos
By EMILY STEEL
August 15, 2008

Break.com Finally Lands One
Site Known for Edginess
Signs Up Big Marketers
For G-Branded Videos
By EMILY STEEL
August 15, 2008

For awhile now, edgy niche video sites like Break.com and College Humor have been desperately trying to get marketers to hire them to create shows that promote the advertisers' brands -- to no avail. The audiences were simply too small, and the sites too unknown.

But recently, several of the sites have broken through, striking deals with major marketers including Samsung, Mountain Dew and Old Spice. One big reason is that the sites have built up their distribution and now reach sizeable numbers of people. Another important factor is that the sites now have their own production teams to create Web videos that are safe for marketers. (Read: G-rated.)
See an example of the "World Office Sports" ad campaign from Break.com Video courtesy of Break Media.

Break.com, which features plenty of videos of scantily clad women and sophomoric pranks, created the three-part series "Ballpark Invasion" to promote Samsung's Instinct phone. The episodes take viewers on a tour of several professional baseball stadiums, using the phone along the way to take some of the footage. The phone also makes assorted other random appearances during the segments.

The online branded-entertainment market until now has been dominated by Internet giants like Microsoft and Yahoo and traditional media companies like MTV. Marketers have tended to advertise on those sites because they had established relationships with marketers but more importantly had the most traffic by a mile.

But for online marketers, sites like Break.com and College Humor are increasingly compelling because of their ability to attract young men with their videos about sports, girls and comedy. At the same time, they have built up significant distribution networks for their videos, so that the clips that appear on their own sites often spread across the Web and end up on larger video sites like YouTube.

The fact that big marketers are starting to spread their spending to smaller sites isn't great news for major Web publishers like Microsoft and Yahoo. Both of those publishers are aggressive in the area of branded entertainment and have landed a number of these deals with big advertisers, such as a cooking show on Yahoo that promoted Unilever's Hellman's and Best Foods' mayonnaise.

For Break.com and College Humor, it's too early to know whether their move into branded entertainment -- which isn't cheap to produce -- will pay off. Those sites and others, like Bebo, the social-networking site owned by Time Warner's AOL, have hired production teams to create original series and shows for advertisers.
[Photo]
Break.com
AOL's branded entertainment channel on Break.com is 'Thank God for Fantasy Football.' The channel will house five Fantasy Football videos created by Break Media.

Branded-entertainment series are among the biggest-ticket ad items they sell, but they aren't much more lucrative. Costs for the shows, which are typically a couple of minutes long and include anywhere from two to 20 episodes, range from about $250,000 to $750,000 -- an amount advertisers easily could spending on more basic display ads on the site. Creating the series typically requires a significant amount of labor.

The sites believe it will open the door to bigger ad dollars. "We're small enough that we really have to work for it," says Josh Abramson, president of College Humor, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

On these sites, the branded-entertainment shows are mixed in with the other videos. Old Spice recently drafted College Humor to produce a series to promote its two-in-one body wash and moisturizer. The result: "The Great American Twofer Hunt." "A two-fer is a girl who's not only hot, but smart too," reads the description for the show, which revolves around two hosts who quiz attractive young women on the streets of New York about trivia like politics and geography.

These deals come as the marketers are trying to figure out the best formats and venues for advertising through online video. While consumers are rabidly consuming online videos, the ad dollars have been slower to follow than many analysts expected. Research firm eMarketer on Thursday revised its projections for online video ad spending, saying that U.S. advertisers will spend $505 million through online videos this year, down 63.9% from earlier estimates.

The marketers who worked with Break.com and College Humor say that while they try not to dictate any plot lines, they are careful to set a tone for the show by giving the sites descriptive details about a broader campaign and providing them with props ranging from logos to footage from TV commercials.

Sometimes the marketers find that the problem isn't that the results are too risque -- it's that they aren't quite spicy enough. Samsung, for instance, asked Break to create a G-rated version of its ballpark series. The advertiser thought the series was a bit dry, and asked Break to make it PG. So the site added in some shots that it had edited out for taste. One example: footage of urine troughs in the men's rooms at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Another scene that was restored was one during a tour of the San Francisco Giants' ballpark, in which one of the hosts stands behind bars and says, "No, mom. I'm not in jail."

Write to Emily Steel at emily.steel@wsj.com