Online animation company JibJab Media, Brooklyn, has entered into an agreement with bicoastal/international Chelsea Pictures to team on an Internet advertising venture. JibJab will be part of Chelsea’s as-yet-unnamed online marketing division.
JibJab opened in the fall of 1999, and is headed by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis. MBA and former banker Gregg serves as CEO, while Evan, who graduated from Parsons School of Design in ’96, is an animator and JibJab’s chief creative officer. At JibJab, animators use Macromedia Flash to create comic, interactive content of varying lengths. One such piece is Capitol Ill, in which presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore rap their virtues, hip hop style.
Gregg Spiridellis related, "We saw we could create shorts, build a fan base and actually create a nice little entertainment brand for ourselves. And we’ve seen that there’s a unique opportunity: If we can create these things that literally have an audience of millions, the smart thing to do is to team up with advertisers who want to target specific segments and create content that also has a marketing message in it."
Lisa Mehling, Chelsea’s executive producer/sales, said that because JibJab creates content, advertising projects would take an integrated approach to products. "Because they’re not 10- or 15-second segments—they’re a bit longer than that—you have a little more time to present the product or the message you want to get out there," she explained. Jeanine Pepler, the head of Chelsea’s Thru-Line division, which reps film directors in the commercial market, added, "There’s also the idea of a product being branded a cool form of entertainment, and having a huge appeal to the target demographic."
Chelsea is just now launching its Internet marketing division, and company president Steve Wax said he expects to sign several more marketing/creative hybrids. Currently, Chelsea’s other Internet marketer is Thru-Line directorial team Haxans Films, the maker of The Blair Witch Project. Chelsea and Haxans Films have worked on several online projects, including one for outdoor activity Web site Planet Outdoors.com via Crispin Porter+Bogusky Advertising, Miami, and another for teen site Bolt, through Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), New York (SHOOT, 9/1, p.7). Pepler has been managing the online projects because she works closely with The Haxans, but Wax said that Chelsea may eventually hire "someone who works in the Internet world, but has agency experience as well," to run the division.
Wax has high hopes for JibJab: "We signed the JibJab guys because we felt they had this unique combination of talents that I think is really necessary for people who are creative in the Internet marketing world. They’re very talented; they do really wonderful funny stuff. But at the same time they have a real business savvy, and they know how to get that stuff out to hundreds of thousands or millions of people on the net. They’ve proved that both with their Web site and with a lot of other stuff they’ve licensed and syndicated to sites like Atom Films and Shockwave.com….Their selling point is their sense of interactivity. All the stuff they create is stuff you explore. That’s really what differentiates them."
JibJab prides itself on creating content for an audience that doesn’t necessarily have access to the latest technical capabilities. As Gregg explained, "All the content is designed to stream over a regular modem phone line connection." He added that "viral marketing"—whereby viewers send online content to friends over the Internet—is key. "People who know you send you something that they think you will find relevant or funny or entertaining. And that’s a great thing that doesn’t really exist in the offline world. It’s like a heat-seeking missile: Your message goes to the people it’s going to be most relevant to, just by the nature of the way people share content online."
JibJab puts "Send this to a friend," or "Download this" buttons in the content itself, so "All of the viral elements are strategically placed and in the user’s face as much as possible without distracting from the experience," Gregg continued. Circulation is fueled by "the quality and relevance of the content," while tracking statistics monitor how many people have seen the content or sent it to someone else.
As Evan observed, "We get the content out to half a million, a million people—but it’s also a million of the right people. It’s not just again blasting it out to everybody."
The way that JibJab became involved in advertising bears out the Spiridellis’ enthusiasm for viral marketing. Matt Campbell, BBH, New York’s head of design/new media, was sent JibJab’s animated short "Founding Fathers" (or, officially, "The Mutha Fo’ Fathers"). In June, Campbell contacted JibJab and asked it to create a short promotional piece for BBH client TimeTo.com, an online financial information company. Campbell later put Wax in touch with Gregg and Evan, who were interested in doing more marketing work.
