If you’re a regular viewer, you may have noticed a new sponsor across many of our networks this week: Lionsgate’s new movie WAR, which hits theaters this Friday. We’re pretty excited about this campaign, not just because it’s nice to have major sponsors interested in our programming, but it’s also offered us a chance to demonstrate a number of the advertising models we think can be effective for our networks, besides standard banner advertising placements.

For instance, on Fast Lane Daily, we’ve put a 15-second spot in what we’re calling first position. It’s not quite a mid-roll, as it’s early in the show, and it’s not a pre-roll, as viewers first get an intro to the episode from the hosts, and we don’t force them to watch the ad. On Bleacher Bloggers, we’ve run a brief sponsor bumper at the top of the show, then a 15 second spot at the end. And on a couple of our networks, we went a step further.

We felt there was an opportunity, based on the audiences we have, to do something deeper. So we put out a challenge to our network managers and show producers: could we show the value of an advertiser becoming part of the programming, allowing us to set our sights higher on a few episodes. What we all agreed on: the sponsored episode needed to be authentic, credible, totally transparent, and give something to the community that watches the show.

On Indy Mogul, this became an opportunity to do a special New York City episode of Backyard FX, with Erik and the Next New Networks Indy Mogul team banding together to try to recreate one of the special effects from the movie. The result, to me at least, was a great example of how to bring a sponsor into the world of a show in a fun way without the audience scratching their heads and wondering, was that an ad?

JETSET happened to be in New York City visiting the offices as well, and worked War into their NYC episode by letting their audience know they had a sponsor, and challenging them to upload their kung-fu moves to MIX, with the winner to be crowned JETSET’s Kung Fu Champion.

We’ll have more as the week goes on, including a sponsor integration on Fast Lane Daily. The end result: we get to show on almost every one of our networks that we’re open for business, and committed to doing it in a way that respects our audience and gives advertisers opportunities to innovate in this medium. We’ve also gotten great instant feedback from our viewers, who will help us to better integrate sponsors in the future. On Indy Mogul, many viewers congratulated the show on the sponsorship and just asked us, in the words of phishphansj3151, to “just remember the ‘B’ in BFX” and keep things real. JETSET’s episode forum has shown a real positive response to the way the sponsor was integrated, and one viewer even went as far as to reveal his “man-crush” on Jason Statham. Awesome.

Many thanks to Lionsgate for having the vision and creativity to try this, and to everyone on our team who worked hard to pull this off without a hitch — this was a total team effort, from George and the business team working hard with our client to line everything, up to our network managers, producers, and technology team pulling together an amazing number of moving pieces in a short period of time. It’s a sign to me of many good things to come.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 10:09 am on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 in Advertising, Featured Networks. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.