Written by Colin Donald
Posted Thursday, 2 July, 2008 at 02:23 PM
Google is about to deliver television-scale audiences to brand advertisers with a new online cartoon series.
It is taking a giant step forward in advertising by offering brands everything online that they can normally have only via television – professionally-produced video programming by top talent, distributed to a well-targeted demographic and with TV-scale reach.
As reported in the New York Times, Google is the distributor for an Internet-only cartoon series, Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. MacFarlane is the creator of the highly popular Family Guy (pictured). The new cartoons have been made with online viewing in mind, targeting the young male demo, with a multi-million dollar budget (probably the largest ever for original Internet content) funded by Media Rights Capital.
MRC is the Hollywood finance company behind movies such as Babel and Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming Brüno. Its investors include the major talent agency Endeavor, advertising conglomerate WPP, AT&T and Goldman Sachs. (More details from another New York Times article.) MRC is both funding the show and also selling the advertising inventory.
Google will present the series not only on YouTube, but throughout the publisher sites signed up to its extensive AdSense network. This transforms the already powerful and hugely profitable AdSense pay-per-click system into a content syndication service. PPC has never been particularly well-suited to brand advertising, but MacFarlane’s cartoons offer the choice of pre-roll ads, a banner under the video, a “brought to you by” announcement and even original commercials animated by MacFarlane himself.
This gives advertisers the best of both worlds – the cartoons can properly showcase brands, while the platform can still provide the accountability of pay-per-click.
Competing platforms
If you look at this innovation from the viewpoint of competing platforms, its significance becomes even more profound.
AOL’s Bebo and New Corp’s MySpace commission original online series such as Roommates and Sofia's Diary to entertain their membership and gain revenue from them by offering brands the opportunity to integrate their products into the shows. This means bringing together talent, a format, funding, advertising and distribution.
And now Google is assembling those components in a different combination: high-profile talent and an original format from MacFarlane, backed by MRC funding and ad sales into brands – all supported by unrivalled distribution from Google.
It finally gives the advertisers what they always complain that they cannot find online: television-size reach. Google claims that the Google Content Network has a 75% reach of unique Internet users in the USA and UK via hundreds of thousands of publisher sites, including The Times, The Daily Mail and Channel 4.
Through the Content Network, MacFarlane's new show will not be restricted to just one site however large (Bebo or MySpace) but it will be, in practical terms, ubiquitous for the young male demographic.
So Google can leverage its network with top-quality content, but without having to manage the whole commissioning process. Or pay upfront for it.
And the sheer scale of distribution unquestionably makes an enormous difference to viewing figures. When we interviewed online TV producer Kathleen Grace, who made the comedy series The Burg, she pointed out that the episodes distributed via the VideoEgg platform reached ten times the viewers that the top episode gained from the show's own site. (From our report 2008: The Birth of Online TV.)
With YouTube already a massive presence in online video, this initiative to extend professional video content into AdSense takes the platform war onto a whole new level.
If this experiment with MacFarlane’s cartoons proves successful, how many other Web shows will look to Google as their primary, perhaps only, means of distribution?
Is Google about to become the dominant Web show distributor?
Comments