The New York Times is reporting through one of its blogs that an NBC-backed online and broadcast experiment called Firebrand is being shut down.
The idea was to provide content that was nothing but well-done advertising, with the idea that it’s just as compelling as a lot of scripted stuff on TV and online.
Well … it’s apparently not.
The fire has been banked in an experiment to transform advertising into entertainment.
Firebrand, a television and online service that since October has been presenting commercials as content, is being shut down as its major investors decided to stop providing more money.
A spokesman for NBC Universal, Cory Shields, said on Tuesday afternoon, “we are not putting any additional capital into the company.”
Mr. Shields responded to a question from a reporter who was told by an executive of Firebrand that the company had shut down, effective immediately. The executive was not authorized to discuss the status of the company and as such declined to be identified.
Mr. Shields declined to discuss the reason for the decision or how much NBC Universal and the other partners had invested.
But there had been reports of low ratings for the Firebrand TV show, on Ion Television at 11 p.m., as well as reports that sponsor support for the show and the Web site (firebrand.com) were lagging.
Many ads Firebrand showed ran free of charge; others were to be included because sponsors paid to show them.
Firebrand was introduced in October by partners that included NBC Universal, part of General Electric; Microsoft; Ion Television, part of Ion Media Networks; and the Peacock Equity Fund, a venture of NBC Universal and a unit of General Electric.
The goal was to capitalize on the nascent trend of ads as entertainment, which intends to make commercials compelling enough that they are watched for fun rather than avoided, ignored or skipped.
I mention this because there are digital screen network operators who are looking at models that are nothing but ads on their screens, and while the online and TV experiences are different, the base idea is the same. The kind of viewership this approach can generate, when there is no real value in looking, is suspect.
If ads that cost $500,000 to produce can’t get people watching, imagine the mighty power of an endless stream of $750 spots.
I’m not a believer, at all, in just throwing things like news headlines and filler video into the mix to break up the monotony of the ads. The guys who do this stuff well actually do programming, just like networks (other than Firebrand) do programming.