Where are the branded entertainment success stories?

The surprise is it took this long. It didn’t take a genius to see that Bud.TV was doomed to fail. The entire premise of the venture was flawed, from its ambitions to its execution. Bud.TV was crippled by some structural flaws. Its age-verification system was Byzantine. The site launched as a standalone destination just when the power of YouTube’s take-content-anywhere model was becoming very clear.

And then, like any good tragedy, there’s hubris. Just like David Droga and Maurice Levy oversold Honeyshed as “the future,” Anheuser-Busch was grandiose in its expectations for Bud.TV, which it poured some $30 million into. How grandiose? Check out the Feb. 2007 The New York Times Magazine cover story on the effort. It’s embarrassing. You have beer company executives, not to mention their agency counterparts, play-acting as Hollywood moguls. Unintentional hilarity ensues.

Here’s the thing: A-B isn’t in the entertainment business. It’s harder than it looks. There are good arguments that the lines between publisher and marketer are blurring. After all, TV began with marketers calling the shots. Easier said than done. Bud.TV’s content wasn’t very good, certainly not good enough to jump through the hoops needed to see it. Most people didn’t visit Bud.TV. I did. It was pretty bad. Sure, the “Swear Jar” commercial was OK, but the rest of the stuff I saw sucked. Joe Buck riding around in a New York cab and bantering about life? No thanks.

There are many examples that come to mind of brands thinking the world revolves around them. That’s why they do things like Bud.TV or “The Coke Show,” where Coke tried to (re)create its own YouTube. Didn’t work so hot. It’s the thinking that leads brands to do things like create their own cookie social network.

I’m hard pressed to see many successes in branded entertainment. People still point to “Gamekillers” as a prime example. It’s nearly three years old. AOL and MSN have made a big push into creating programming on behalf of marketers. Perhaps I’m not the target audience but it’s not exactly scintillating programming. (Remember “Gold Rush,” the Mark Burnett production?) More often than not, I see marketers trying too hard to be hip. In the words of MRM Worldwide’s Alistair Duncan, “It’s like watching your dad dance at a disco.” It’s an enticing idea: brands can take over content creation instead of just buying ads. More often than not, however, it’s going to fail badly. The advertising message will be lost entirely or it will be basically a long-form commercial. Either way, it fails. People aren’t as dumb or bored as many marketers seem to think. Maybe the “new model” isn’t that different from the current model. Maybe the role of advertisers is to underwrite professional content creators. Right now, it seems like there are a lot of cases of overreach, where marketers get in over their heads.

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