Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee calls the above episode of Roommates a bad commercial.
We’ve talked before about what role product placement should play in web video, and how web video is turning into a shill game. But this makes the massive product placement in Kate Modern look like PBS.
I’m no hippie. I get and appreciate commerce. Independent producers want to make web shows, but have no money. Brands have lots of money and want to connect with today’s hip, young audiences. Today’s hip audiences hate pre-roll ads, so advertisers must find other ways to get their message out. Which brings us back to the independent producer who will gladly take the brand’s money.
Speaking of shill games, Ad Age has a piece on Droga 5’s Honeyshed.
It’s not an e-commerce site, but it does aim to facilitate online shopping on behalf of multiple marketers by offering a curated hub of brand information and culture. “Everyone is scrambling to do branded content, but for the most part, there is no real home for it,” Droga says. “The strategy has mainly been to create entertaining content and then seed it, put it on YouTube or elsewhere. So content is king, but the king didn’t really have throne. Our idea was to have a site where you could be overt about the brand. The site gets at the entertainment value and the sociability of shopping.”
Great, but being “overt about the brand” is not content, it’s advertising. So content isn’t king in Honeyshed land, advertising is.