Are we sure that Bud will launch at the Superbowl? Here is an article but dated Sept 6 and that was months ago:
By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: September 6, 2006
IF Anheuser-Busch has its way, it may not be long before consumers start insisting “I want my BTV.”
That’s “BTV” as in Bud TV, an online entertainment network that Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s biggest brewer, is preparing to introduce the day after Super Bowl XLI is played in early February. The network, which will be on a Web site that will have the bud.tv address, accelerates a push by Anheuser-Busch into the business of providing program content.
Advertisers becoming content providers, a practice known as branded entertainment, is helping reshape how Madison Avenue peddles wares. It reflects an effort by marketers to regain some of the power they wielded from the 1930’s through the 1950’s, when they owned the radio and television shows they sponsored.
Anheuser-Busch is joining a lengthy list of marketers turning to branded entertainment. Others include American Honda Motor, Best Buy, Cadbury Schweppes, General Motors, Krups, Nestlé, Pepsi-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Stolichnaya and Washington Mutual.
Critics complain that branded entertainment is hastening the commercialization of American popular culture.
“It’s the advertisers swallowing the programming,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director at Commercial Alert in Portland, Ore., a nonprofit organization that fights what it considers to be creeping commercialism.
“We live in a time of great overreaching by the advertising and marketing industry,” Mr. Ruskin said. “This is one further step toward advertiser control of media.”
Marketers are embracing branded entertainment because it can serve as a counterweight to the growing ability of TV viewers to use devices like digital video recorders and remote controls to skip, flip past and otherwise avoid conventional interruptive 30-second commercials.
“We still have plenty of strong, traditional national TV venues for our messages such as live sports,” said Anthony T. Ponturo, vice president for global media and sports marketing at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, part of the Anheuser-Busch Companies.
Going forward, “the Internet will be equal to or better than television,” Mr. Ponturo said, particularly in reaching the company’s target audience for beers like Budweiser and Bud Light, which is men ages 21 to 34.
“We’re trying to get out in front of consumers who are spending six hours a week online,” he added. “Marketers had better understand how to effectively reach them.”
Mr. Ponturo and James M. Schumacker, the new leader of the Anheuser-Busch digital marketing team, discussed the company’s plans yesterday with reporters. Anheuser-Busch is scheduled to announce today the intended start of Bud TV on Feb. 5.
Although it is too soon to discuss the specifics of spending on Bud TV and its complementary program offerings on cellphones, Mr. Ponturo said, Anheuser-Busch is expected to double the share of its marketing budget devoted to online advertising, to 10 percent.
That would include spending on Web sites that the company already operates, he added, like budweiser.com and budlight.com, as well as spending for ads on more than 40 third-party Web sites like espn.com and yahoo.com.
According to TNS Media Intelligence, Anheuser-Busch spent $919.4 million last year to advertise in all major media, ranking the company 40th among the largest American advertisers.
The plans call for Bud TV to offer computer users six channels of comedy, reality, sports and talk programming created for and by Anheuser-Busch. The tentative names for the channels include Comedy, Happy Hour and Reality.
Sources for the programs will include agencies that create advertising for Anheuser-Busch like @radical.media and DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group; companies owned by Hollywood stars like LivePlanet (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon), TriggerStreet.com (Kevin Spacey), and Wild West Picture Show Productions (Vince Vaughn); and production companies like Omelet and Seed.
Anheuser-Busch is in discussions with Joe Buck, the sportscaster, to develop a talk show, Mr. Schumacker said, and “we may add a fashion channel” at some point.
A seventh channel on Bud TV, tentatively named Bud Tube, will be styled after the popular Web site YouTube (youtube.com), Mr. Schumacker said, giving consumers a chance to “generate their own Anheuser-Busch ads, comedic in nature,” which can be shared with other computer users.
The idea for Bud Tube, Mr. Schumacker said, came from another agency that works for Anheuser-Busch, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, also part of Omnicom. The first assignment consumers can tackle, he added, is to make their own versions of a series of Bud Light commercials featuring a character called Ted Ferguson, billed as the “Bud Light daredevil.”
Anheuser-Busch will borrow another page from the YouTube playbook, Mr. Ponturo said, by setting up the programming on Bud TV so that computer users can repurpose it on other Web sites like YouTube and MySpace (myspace.com).
“We see this as a marketing tool to talk to consumers,” Mr. Ponturo said, “rather than as a production company or a network whose goal is to make money on programming.” His reference was to efforts by some networks and producers to have content they created removed from sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube.
There has been speculation that Anheuser-Busch wanted to expand its presence in the content arena beyond a unit, Bud Productions, that creates sports programs. That speculation reached a fever pitch before the Super Bowl in February, when trade publications reported that the company would offer computer users a desktop application so they could take another look at the Budweiser and Bud Light commercials that ran during the game.
Instead, Anheuser-Busch chose to offer downloads of the commercials on budweiser.com and budlight.com. After 700,000 downloads, Mr. Ponturo said, “we learned a little bit” about the preferences of computer users, adding that the commercials were watched by an additional 22 million visitors to other Web sites like video.google.com and video.yahoo.com.
The trade publication Advertising Age reported in its Aug. 21 issue that Anheuser-Busch would make entertainment programs available online. Mr. Schumacker said that Bud TV would also offer a desktop application that can be downloaded to deliver a program from the Happy Hour channel each day at 4:55 p.m..
Anheuser-Busch intends to monitor the use of Bud TV so that it is not watched by minors under 21, Mr. Schumacker and Mr. Ponturo said, adding that when computer users sign up and create profiles, they will be asked to provide identifying information beyond age and birth date.
To critics like Mr. Ruskin of Commercial Alert, there is one small silver lining in something like Bud TV.
“As advertising becomes more and more aggressive and intrusive, people will dislike it more than they do,” Mr. Ruskin said, “and we’ll do better at efforts to keep advertising in its proper place.”
