Knock, knock? Who’s there? AOL and HBO. AOL and HBO who? AOL and HBO are teaming up to create This Just In, a comedic Web site that marries AOL’s interactive expertise with HBO’s comedic programming to create a venue that provides visitors with laughs and advertisers with new broadband inventory that is the first opportunity to associate their brands with an HBO property.
Janet Balis, senior VP of Sales Development for AOL Media Networks, New York, discussed the new site and the advertising opportunities it provides with iSPOT.
iSPOT: Can you give us information about the content of the site?Balis: The venture is going to enable us to capitalize on HBO’s leadership in comedic programming with our leadership in the interactive space to cover the white space that exists in the genre of comedy in the online world. The online medium is used to share comedic content on a viral basis and there are a number of mini genres, but in terms of a broad and high quality offering this is an unusual opportunity and we’ll take advantage of all the assets that exist within HBO, from their comedy videos to the producers and writers who create the content. It’s not about replicating the linear network experience or taking existing comedy that HBO created and bringing it online; it’s about co-creating new content and original programming for the Net.
I can go through a couple of examples. First, the idea of a newsblog where a real time monologue will deliver a comedic take on what happened in the day’s current events, a place to go for humor behind the headlines. The second piece is a Morning Show. Every day, every minute something is happening in the viral video world. The show shines a light on the best of viral video entertainment and pop culture from the past 24 hours. We also have a concept called The Pitch, which is the Matt Williams project. He was the producer of Home Improvement and Roseanne. He’s going to be soliciting from across the world of user generated content for ideas for comedy that people can pitch to Matt. Many of those ideas will be produced in a fast cycle time that can only be executed on the Web. We’ll execute user generated ideas, which will be a real incubator for original content in the comedy genre that demonstrates the power of the medium and user generated content.
iSPOT: Will all the content be original to the site?
Balis: Yes.
iSPOT: Who’s producing it?
Balis: A team we hired led by Steve Stanford who comes from Icebox.com, an Internet comedy site. He has assembled a team of folks who will program the site every day. Our vision for the site is a partnership between the program development team at AOL and the team Steve has assembled. They will collaborate to determine what it will be.
iSPOT: When will This Just In debut?
Balis: Sometime in mid-January.
iSPOT: Have you started selling advertising yet?
Balis: We have begun discussions with a number of advertisers.
iSPOT: How will advertising work within the format?
Balis: At the most basic level, it’s almost comedic to say, you’ll see traditional interactive media, banner display ads and pre-roll videos. More specifically, what we think the programming enables us to do is work collaboratively with clients who want a deeper association with the programming. We are exploring specific ideas to bring to the site in collaboration with advertisers who have an organic connection to the messages of the shows. We’ll integrate their branding message into the core essence of how the show is produced.
iSPOT: How will that be done?
Balis: Clients come to us with a specific scenario, focusing on a particular demographic in a category of consumer products. They have a sketch in their mind of a branded entertainment asset they want to create. We would consider producing it for them, not as an advertorial or advertising mini-site but as a lock, stock and barrel franchise. There are many advertisers who have a sketch of a concept they’d like to execute as programming.
iSPOT: Is this like product placement?
Balis: Product placement is only scratching the surface, it’s the setting of a show that might relate to the advertiser. This is infusing the brand attribute into the story line of the show without compromising the entertainment value.
Another creative thing we can do is with intellectual property. If we create something on behalf of an advertiser, in other scenarios we may not have wanted the content to appear anywhere other than our site, but we might let it appear on the advertiser’s site to create a wireless extension of it so we can provide a model of how we can get content into the hands of consumers.
iSPOT: How will broadband video advertising be used?
Balis: Anyone who has advertising that’s been formatted for broadband can run pre-roll videos and there will be lots of opportunities for that because of the wealth of video content on the site. It affords a great opportunity for video advertising with a number of opportunities to convert video footage into rich media, so we can use more of the site to distribute advertising. We hope advertisers will take advantage of the unique opportunity to juxtapose their message with the HBO brand.
iSPOT: What’s the significance of being able to offer advertisers the opportunity to run on HBO?
Balis: It’s a tremendous breakthrough, because HBO has been a brand that many advertisers have been wanting to use because of the quality and engagement of the programming. It’s a breakthrough that in the interactive medium they’ll have the opportunity to juxtapose their message against the edgy elements of the HBO brand.
iSPOT: How does AOL benefit from that?
Balis: It bolsters our broader commitment to content. In a moment where other interactive offerings are less focused on content, we continue to emphasize it as an overall core element of what we bring to the marketplace every day. Working with HBO builds on the trajectory we already have working with Telepictures, Warner Brothers and others. We bolster our portfolio of extraordinary programming built by traditional media content production companies that brings the power of their content vision into the interactive medium by partnering with AOL.
iSPOT: How will the advertising be sold?
Balis: It depends on the deal. We’ll be doing predominantly sponsorship based programs. For some advertisers it may be more of an impression based play. In general, we’ll play highly integrated sponsor models. We’ll seek to integrate advertising into the experience with breakthrough visual executions all the way through the example I gave before by creating original content. Some of the advertising is CPM and some is flat fee based; it depends on the deal.
