Bud TV is coming

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on September 6th, 2006

The WWW is turning into the Wild, Wild West. Anheuser-Busch has swamped the wires with the announcement that they’re planning an internet site. And not just a site where you can register complaints because your beer wasn’t fresh enough. This site will have… entertainment on it.

Anheuser-Busch announced partnerships with some big-name stars who plan to contribute shows, including comedian Vince Vaughn. The Web site also will receive material from actor Kevin Spacey’s TriggerStreet.com project and actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Project Greenlight filmmaking contest.

Schumacker said one channel will imitate the YouTube phenomenon, letting viewers produce their own skits and advertisements featuring Anheuser-Busch products like Budweiser and Bud Light.

“We know this cannot be a passive site,” Schumacker said. To engage young consumers, it must be a “lean-in experience” that lets them vote on shows and make their own content, he said.

While the shows will be original, Anheuser-Busch won’t make them itself, Ponturo said. The company will act as an executive producer, choosing ideas to fund and buying completed shows to broadcast.

Our first impulse, as it always is with announcements like this one, is to flash back to that big announcement that Mike Ovitz made when Coke formed that freaky partnership with CAA. (That was 1991. There was no WWW as we know it today.) That was a big, fat bust. This is different.

Budweiser is going to become a miniature television and movie studio. Only, it won’t be all that miniature. A-B is chugging along nicely, with an annual profit last year of nearly $2 billion. That article ends with this, a quote from a beer analyst:

“It’s just part of the whole shift away from traditional media in advertising, which seems to be accelerating.”

The gates are opening. And there are more gates. The Entertainment Industry is changing fundamentally and we are fortunate enough to be entertainers who are alive to witness it. This is going to get very interesting.

BTW: Since when is Vince Vaughn a “comedian?”

BTE, Pt. II: What exactly is a “lean-in experience?”

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