Where consumers go, advertisers will follow. And with reality TV viewers flocking to some of the most active communities on the Internet, sponsors have found a rich new playground on their sites.
Whether advertisers are repurposing old TV spots or coming up with new, interactive features to lure "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" fanatics, companies like Sprint and Acura have made reality sites a favored landing spot for commercial content, and a place to try out innovations in online sponsorship.
The media players that stream full episodes on most of the network sites, for instance, often find the episodes preceded by versions of normal broadcast ads, sometimes shortened to 5- or 10-second bumpers and some running a full 30 seconds.
On the official “Survivor” site – a site that is prominently sponsored by Sears – full episodes of the series are preceded by a brief Sprint logo, and interrupted periodically for a Chevron commercial.
At the “Dancing With the Stars” website, meanwhile, viewers are told the show is presented “with limited commercials by Cesar Canine Cuisine.”
But straightforward ad content like that is just the first step, says Bryan Hjelm, the VP of marketing for Unicast, an interactive advertising and marketing company for online publishers and ad agencies.
“Some advertisers are using short repurposings of broadcast TV spots as pre-roll bumpers,” he says. “But the leading advertisers are starting to realize that they can extend the connection with what we call ‘branded canvas’ ads, which essentially allow advertisers a blank canvas to introduce more and more interactivity into an ad spot that is focused on or around online video content.”
The idea for advertisers, wrote Mark Sherman at the One Degree marketing website, “is to look … for ways to break through a cluttered online environment and to figure out how to attract consumers to their message rather than the traditional model of simply pushing the message out to them.”
At Online Strategies Magazine, Caleb Hill called the branded canvas ads “a revelation for marketers, a huge financial success for the publishers, and consumers seem to accept them as well. These products enable the networks’ premium full-episode player environments with custom, immersive advertising experiences.”
Up for grabs in all of this: the rabid fans of reality TV who’ve created -- sometimes with the help of the networks and sometimes without -- communities of fans and foes, aficionados and bashers.
“Online is helping to fuel the popularity of those shows," says Hjelm, "and reality TV has always been at the forefront of enticing audiences online with original content.”
The germane statistics: Reality shows routinely occupy most of the Nielsen top five; the number of unique viewers of online video increased more than 10 percent in the past year, according to Nielsen’s February-to-February figures; and Americans are using TV and Internet simultaneously 35 percent more than they did a year ago. The ensuing landscape presents, in Hjelm's words, “infinite opportunities for advertisers.”
Steve Pond, author of the L.A. Times bestseller The Big Show, has been covering entertainment for more than two decades. He also writes on the awards circuit for TheWrap, in his column "The Odds."
The media players that stream full episodes on most of the network sites, for instance, often find the episodes preceded by versions of normal broadcast ads, sometimes shortened to 5- or 10-second bumpers and some running a full 30 seconds.
