Ryan MacMillan

Ad-age is reporting that Anhauser-Busch may be canning Bud.tv due to (colour me shocked) an “audience in free fall”. When Iain wrote about Bud.tv at its launch, he wondered how AB were going to measure success - it seems that it turned out to be the old bums-on-seats (or clicks-on-pages) metric. Launched in February this year, AB expected upwards of 2million visitors a month. They promptly lowered it to a somewhat more modest 500,000. By last month the site was no longer registering on ComScore’s Media Metrix - suggesting that the audience was less than 100,000. Now, the site will seemingly just sort of fade away quietly (like the taste of Budweiser, hoho).

So what went wrong?

Well, the Byzantine entry system didn’t help. Designed to keep American teenagers out (or, perhaps more accurately to keep American Attorneys General off AB’s back), it ended up putting potential viewers off. Even AB’s CEO described it as “Fort Knox”, admitting that “I can’t even figure out how to get into the website”.

The real problem may have been that getting into Fort Knox wasn’t really worth the trouble. Like Iain said, the content raises a few laughs, but South Park it ain’t. What I saw was mostly forgettable, and nothing gave me any reason to come back again. Now, I’ll admit I’m not exactly the target audience here (I’m more Stoli.org, I think), but even for the fratboys and good-ole’ boys AB seem to be trying to reach, the content is weak. A quick trawl around youtube and a Jeff Foxworthy DVD would probably be more satisfying.

On the face of it, Bud.tv’s underlying principle, “You love our beer, you’ll love our TV” seems foolproof. An American friend of mine points out, though, that no-one really loves Bud. They love their adverts (”Wassssup” etc etc), but the beer doesn’t elicit much devotion, and thus neither would a TV channel by the same brand.

Or maybe, just maybe, beer brewers shouldn’t make TV shows, and TV producers shouldn’t brew beer?

(image from AdClassix)

ADDENDUM (25.05): It occurs to me that this post probably belongs in the Dept. of Inevitability