Buffy on MySpace

To satisfy a dedicated niche demographic, MySpace has launched a destination dedicated to comic books: Myspace.com/comicbooks will be its official community for manga, graphic novels and comics, the social-networking site announced.

MySpace Comic Books is hoping to attract the comic book fan by offering comic book news, interviews, special features, contests, exclusives and more.

Current contests include “Buffy Changed My Life,” which asks fans of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comic to write in, detailing in 250 words or less how the teenaged vampire hunter changed their lives; the winner will be written in as a character in the comic book.

MySpace will also take its positioning to the real world by becoming the main sponsor of this year’s New York Comic Con this week. MySpace will host a booth at the event inviting fans to meet face to face and log on to their profiles at the event.

Nettwerk’s McBride

As music sales continue to fall, the major labels are being forced to get creative in reaching customers, including embracing a channel the industry has long attacked: file-sharing online. 

Starting this week, Suretone Records, a division of the Universal Music Group, will begin distributing online video clips of some artists, such as Weezer and Drop Dead Gorgeous, the New York Times reports.

But the clips will have two interesting characteristics: they won’t be encoded with DRM (digital rights management), meaning they can be freely shared and downloaded; and they will be incomplete, meaning the user will have to go to the label’s website to view the entire video.

Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride, who has repeatedly called for the industry to distribute music in forms the customer wants, says the move will result in users’ posting the clips on file-sharing networks, which will lead to increased sales for the labels and artists.

“This becomes public property,” he said. “We’re not going to tell the consumer how to consume.”

The concept of user-generated content is apparently expanding… to include major brands, which are beginning to produce their own online content.

Anheuser-Busch is launching an in-house film and TV production company charged with making humorous shorts and sitcom-like programs for the internet and cell phones, reports Ad Age. The ambitious effort could eventually branch out into full-length feature films. The country’s largest brewer is moving its top creative executive, Jim Schumacher, out of the advertising department and into the new entertainment production group.

Also, Michael Gianino, senior director of branded entertainment, is moving to a unit devoted to producing online content. He previously worked on A-B’s product-placement deal for New Line Cinema’s “Wedding Crashers.”

The Warner Brothers Studio 2.0 unit, which creates short-form broadband and mobile content for marketers, has struck a deal with Anheuser-Busch to create a show for the upcoming online entertainment network Bud.tv.

The deal with Studio 2.0 will involve the creation of an internet show called Hardly News, which will be a hybrid of comedy, news and games designed to attract consumers that want to test their current-events and pop-culture smarts Ad Age reports.

The deal comes as A-B is looking to flesh out content for Bud.tv, which is set to launch after the Super Bowl, . Bud.tv will be a 24-hour online network with seven channels featuring satirical newscasts, stand-up comedy, filmmaking contests and other entertainment items.

Also included will be sitcom-style shows, A-B ads created by consumers and links to the marketer’s many sports sponsorships.

Despite marketers’ desire to buy ads within online video, they are having a tough time expanding into the format, reports Advertising Age.

Interested buyers are reportedly saying limited inventory, specifically content created exclusively for the web, is one factor that’s holding them back. Also, the audience for web video is, to date, too fragmented to meet the needs of buyers looking for significant reach. The lack of a single model for the buying and accounting of video ads is also cited as a contributing factor.

The dollars for online video buying are expected to come from television budgets, but until the online audience expands some marketers appear unwilling to make that shift. Estimates have buyers spending just 10 percent of their TV budget on streaming video by 2010, with most of that money going toward professional content from mainstream media.

Bolt Media CEO Aaron Cohen says if independent producers are going to tap into serious advertising dollars, there needs to be effective syndication of content that can bring audience reach to niche videos.

Even so, the lack of a universal rating and measurement models continues to be a stumbling block to advertisers who need to justify their expenditures.

A Mist-Takes Spot

Sierra Mist, which has put comedians at the forefront of its marketing strategy since the brand launched in 2001, is planning to expand the theme with an online contest for animated shorts and a multi-episode TV series based on its “Stand Up or Sit Down” comedy competition.

Last year’s “Stand Up” challenge delivered 5 billion impressions on MySpace and resulted in a one-hour TBS special, writes the Hollywood Reporter. This year, Mist will run another online search, this time for the best animated content. Last year’s winner, Steve Byrne, was selected by a panel of judges and MySpace users out of a pool of over 700. Byrne won a $50,000 development deal with TBS and a comedy tour with the Improv chain.

Mist’s entire ad budget is dedicated to comedic spots with its Mist-takes improv group; it also devotes the bulk of its marketing to the development and sponsorship of comedic talent via content and live comedy festivals, a strategy aimed at the brand’s core demo of 20-29-year-olds.

With the fastest growing segment of its sales coming from Latino customers, Sierra Mist is also planning its first search for a Latino comedian. The brand has extended its comedy ad campaign into Spanish-language territory with a separate comedy troupe and ads on Univision and Telemundo.

Google’s YouTube and a company called Live Digital have complied with subpoenas to turn over the identities of their users who illegally uploaded episodes of Fox series 24 and The Simpsons, Internet News reports.

“We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights,” said 20th Century Fox Television Vice-President of Media Relations Chris Alexander.

Fox says it found four episodes of the series 24 on YouTube before the episodes debuted on the network. Episodes of The Simpsons also appeared on YouTube; 12 episodes were uploaded by the YouTube-user named “ECOTotal.” Episodes of the Fox shows were placed on Live Digital by user “Jorge Romero.”

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Jan. 18 granted the identical subpoenas, which were based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; L.A. law firm Loeb & Loeb filed them on behalf of Fox. The subpoenas were served on Jan. 24, ordering Google and Live Digital to produce the identifying information.

When Google began distributing clips from MTV Networks over its AdSense advertising network in August, Jennifer Feikin, Google’s director of video and multimedia search partnerships, said it was “an amped-up form of AdSense” - and the first, but not last, syndication deal of its kind.

Now the model that Google used to distribute MTV’s content could hint at its plans for YouTube, CNET writes. With Google giving little information on how it plans to monetize YouTube, analysts are left to examine Google’s past video projects for clues.

Still, one of the main problems for Google will be selling traditional advertisers on buying ad space alongside untraditional, and often “inappropriate” content - some of which, moreover, uses copyrighted material. Recent deals with music labels to distribute content via YouTube will alleviate some of those concerns, but not all.

Still, in the end, the interactive nature of YouTube may be enough to sway advertisers to follow their customers. “What all of this [concern] is missing is that video can be interactive. It’s still a lot like television; it begins and ends,” Dorian Sweet, executive creative director in Tribal DDB’s San Francisco office explains.

Cingular has teamed up with YouTube for an online promotion allowing independent musicians to submit videos that the YouTube community can then vote for.

The promotion, titled YouTube Underground, will run October 2-18, Internet News reports. Along with an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the four winning bands will receive airtime on Sirius Satellite Radio and could have their songs featured in an upcoming movie and television show.

Cingular’s partnership with YouTube is the latest attempt by marketers to reach the video-sharing site’s 13 million daily users. Recently, Warner Music Group announced it would distribute its library of music videos via YouTube.