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What went wrong for Bud.tv?

By Dan O'Connor on May 24, 2007

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

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Dan O'Connor

Dan is responsible for translating social media research into the analytic and conceptual frameworks which underpin the team’s product and service development. He is particularly interested in how social media has changed the ways in which people exchange information within networks, and the impact that these changes have had on traditionally top-down information systems, such as those prevalent within the health, education and NGO sectors, where he leads RMM’s activities.

Dan’s focus upon health and education stems from his background in academia: He has a PhD in History and, as well as being Head of Research at RMM, he is a member of faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. He has published and lectured widely on the ethics of social media use within healthcare systems, and is involved in the application of social media in medical education at Johns Hopkins hospital.

Dan likes cooking, martinis, and irony. Frequently at the same time.

2 responses to “What went wrong for Bud.tv?”

  1. Charles Frith
    Charles Frith
    May 29, 2007 at 11:49 | | Reply

    No surprises there. Did you see there email language?

    http://tinyurl.com/2buftb

  2. Dan O'Connor
    Dan O'Connor
    May 29, 2007 at 12:09 | | Reply

    “log on or lose out” – that’s the saddest thing I ever read… I mean, “Live and Licking” was using “Be there or be square” as an ironic tagline for kids in the mid-90s…

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