Could Honeyshed have worked?

The Honeyshed experiment is over. Today Publicis pulled funding for the venture.

For some time, I had a minor obsession with Honeyshed. The idea was described as “QVC Meets MTV.” It’s really a bunch of attractive hipsters talking about products. The vibe was strange, the girls are hot and the commerce is overt.

The Publicis-Droga5-Smuggler venture was very different, very risky. The content is strange and the business model is different. This is an instance of an agency actually creating a media property, not just running a campaign for a client. It had the possibility of marrying branded entertainment + e-commerce + performance advertising. Too many people in the ad industry, in my experience, complain about the status quo without doing a thing to change it. Honeyshed, for all its many flaws, didn’t do that.

It’s easy to criticize Honeyshed. The content is often criticized as bizarre. The site was initially very much an island while the Internet was moving to a share-and-share-alike mode. Then there’s the tiny problem of business model. How much will Honeyshed need to sell in order to support this kind of production? Publicis brought in former Digitas promotions exec David Griefer to turn Honeyshed into a real business. I wrote about his efforts with the relaunch in November.

The content undoubtedly improved. I’m not the target, so I have no clue if hipster kids are into this stuff. Numbers, though, don’t lie. According to ComScore, Honeyshed drew 117,000 visitors on the back on an aggressive relaunch marketing plan. But then the news turns bad: the site doesn’t seem keeping visitors. Check out Quantcast:

By Honeyshed’s own standards, it was falling woefully short. Honeyshed’s projections called for the site to reach 550,000 visitors a month after launch, and 1 million by February.

Even by less quantitative standards, I didn’t find many positive signs. Honeyshed has 257 followers on Twitter, the amount some bloggers add in a weekend. The Honeyshed Blog draws no comments. Things aren’t much better at the Honeyshed Beauty Blog. There are few signs of buzz about Honeyshed on blogs or Twitter.

Maybe Honeyshed was ahead of its time. CEO Steve Greifer mostly pinned its downfall on the bad economy. Maybe, although I don’t know if it would have worked in any economy. What would you change about Honeyshed to make it successful?

Comments

[Ian Schafer]

Given the state of the economy, maybe 'fun shopping' wasn't what people were looking for.

But what about if the more you shared the content, and the more people you got to buy the items, the cheaper the items got? At least then it would encourage sharing, traffic, views, and revenue...

I remember a site in the late 90s that worked like that.

Or maybe I'm just making that up.

[Tom Cunniff]

IMHO, Honeyshed was trying to be a high-concept business, but was missing a core idea rooted in meeting a genuine customer need.

For example, I freelanced for years for the J.Peterman catalog. Their high-concept idea was that after you had bought all the basic stuff (jeans, t-shirts, polos, etc) everything else was a costume. The job of the clothing was to tell a story about you that made you interesting.

In their heyday, this informed everything: product assortment, pricing, etc etc etc.

I know why Honeyshed felt cool to Publicis. I know why it felt cool to the production company. But, I honestly have no idea what consumer need Honeyshed was trying to fill. I suspect they weren't entirely sure either.

I would have started with "What are hipsters trying to say about themselves with the products they buy? How can we help them say that better than anyone else, online or off?"

I don't know if this would have been more successful or not, but it might at least have provided a tighter focus.

Secondly, I would have looked hard at all the basics of retailing and made sure I got those right. Zappos is a great example of a company that is laser-focused on getting the fundamentals right. It pays.

[Cliffbot]

i love the moxie of honeyshed. it needed to make money though. its so hard to know these days what is going to be a hit. i think whatever happens in the future will have to be cheap and fast so you could try it and then get out if it doesnt work. but droga5 will always be at the forefront of stuff like this. id love to hear what they learned from it all.

maybe id spend more time trying to sell ad space on honeyshed itself. make some events that simply COULD NOT be missed. like the honeyshed super bowl party. get those girls some PR and make them famous as individuals. it takes A LOT of pop culture connections to build up an audience.

anyway, i'm just a bot. what do i know?

[David Murphy]

I, too, was rooting for Honeyshed to succeed for the same reasons you mentioned. But in the end I might have been so blinded by the positive implications for our industry that I forgot to ask a simple question: why would real people actually care?

Hipster buzz usually stems from exclusivity. Perhaps there should have been new products revealed first and exclusively on the site. Or more cooler-than-thou pop up music and fashion events.

Or maybe just a super bowl spot featuring talking animals.

[Noah Brier]

Two things. One, I really like this: "Too many people in the ad industry, in my experience, complain about the status quo without doing a thing to change it. Honeyshed, for all its many flaws, didn’t do that." Right on.

Building on that for number two, I think what might have worked better is not investing so much money at the outset. Why not build something smaller and test and iterate? While it's certainly experimental in nature, the approach doesn't match.

[RIck]

I loved Honeyshed - though I never bought anything - and I totally agree with you it was awesome seeing someone trying to change things, rather than just bitching about it.

It's interesting to me you comment on an "aggressive marketing plan." Save for its Twitter feed, etc. - that I only read about on marketing blogs - I never saw a single bit of marketing for the site as a consumer, instead of an ad guy.

This would be okay, I think, in and of itself. Many sites on the web are grown organically, and build up over time - even Facebook and Google. But Honeyshed had a pretty substantial production budget. While its would have been possible to rapidly gain word-of-mouth viewership to hit their targets, it would have been luck.

So, then, simply speaking, I think: either a *much* bigger marketing campaign, to get viewership up to profitable levels as quickly as possible, or a much lower burn rate.

[Alan Wolk]

I think you all pretty much nailed it - why not start as a smaller experiment, why not actually market it (like Rick Webb, I only knew of it from ad blogs and the like- never saw anything about it from a consumer angle-- something as basic as search could have helped them tremendously.)

One other thought - it seems the one thing they didn't do is bring in anyone with actual retail experience. Not a promotions guy, but someone who worked for Nordstrom or Abercrombie or some other retail success story. (Or did they?)

The question now is what do we learn from Honeyshed? I hope the answer is not to avoid experimenting and trying something different, but rather to look at some of the things they did wrong and not make those same mistakes next time.

[James Cooper]

I agree - you have to try things out. It's really incredibly easy NOT to try stuff.

I had a friend who started an internet only radio station in London in 99. I had the Sunday Evening slot, it was loads of fun - but in the end was just that little bit too ahead of it's time. Now you have many successful radio stations.

We learn, we move on. Post it notes were 3m's FAIL.

[Ethan Bauley]

Honeyshed perfectly illustrates why 95% of "new" marketing programs will fail: the people in charge of green lighting this stuff have no useful framework for evaluating whether a given tactic or strategy will work or not.

I believe that, because of a lack of education, the media/agency execs were thinking this, regarding Honeyshed:
- "The Net gives us a cheap, direct comms channel!"
- "We can make our own cheap & global broadcast channel w/o having to do deals with cable TV companies"
- "It would be cool if we married MTV and QVC; that's a way better idea than either QVC or MTV!"
- "People love brands, that's why they watch advertising!"
- "Advertising is why people buy stuff!"

Some of those thoughts are decent ideas in isolation (except the last two, which are 100% and 98% wrong, respectively). In combination they make for a terrible strategy.

If people liked advertising, brands wouldn't have to pay for it.

ExpoTV is a lot closer to what might actually work or be sustainable.

I agree that there should be a modicum of applause for taking a risk. But the problems is twofold: not enough risk was taken, and the bet was wildly uneducated.

The fewer multi-million dollar mistakes that are made, the better; more failures like this shrink the opportunity for real revolutionary thinking.

This is also exactly why I constantly criticize facebook; their inability to capture value so far is "proof" that online communities are lame and unprofitable.

;-)

[michael maurillo]

Here is one good reason Honeyshed didn't succeed - unauthentic.

The concept was based on the insight that consumers (and in this case, hipster consumers) want to be told by an actor that something "is cool, so you should buy it." That, Mr. Droga, is called a commercial. No matter how trendy the talents hair cut is or how expensive his t-shirt was, they are still not REAL people like "me". IMHO, this was an old, dated tactic sold its way all the way up to the c-suite at Publicis b/c it was applied to a "new" medium.

Seriously, does this not fly in the face of everything we talk about every day (Noah, Alan, Brian, I'm looking at you). It is recommendations from people we trust, or at least from people that are real, that we put value in. That we seek out. I think people (especially the young people) saw thru this site the minute they landed on it (and never came back per the data). People want to find cool, new things thru their own methods, not from a bunch of wanna-be actors. Is this not why we all believe that traditional marketing tactics just don't work anymore?

I agree with Ethan, I came across ExpoTV almost a year ago. It's a much better model (that can use some tweaks) It can easily be applied to all different types of products, industries and brands. Is it as sexy as Honeyshed? No.

But sometimes sexy doesn't sell.

[Angel Alia]

Honeyshed was indeed a worthy experiment...It just concluded failure!...

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