by on 27 September, 2007 - 21:08
by: Karl Long
If there was a techmeme for marketing Firebrand would be the most talked about story for sure. Even technorati which famously lumps every blog in the world in the same category is listing Firebrand in it’s top ten searched terms. With Rohit, Jaffe (Firebrand is a client of Jaffe’s Crayon), and Steve Hall weighing in it’s generating a lot of buzz in the Marketing O’Sphere.
So what is Firebrand? Some would say it’s a YouTube for commercials, but it’s not really, YouTube implies consumer generated, and Firebrand is almost completely big company generated. It’s a place where companies can showcase their commercials, and customers will come to watch the commercials, or at least that’s the idea. Watch this ad for Firebrand and I think it will give you a very good idea of how ambitious this project really is:
If your a marketer your heart is probably racing after watching that commercial, but as with most movie trailers they just put a montage of the best bits together, it was really a montage of the best ads of the last decade. But how many Wasssup’s can their possibly be, are there really enough really GREAT commercials to sustain an enterprise this ambitious? If they create original, edgy, hysterical, and brilliant commercials for it then they have a shot. I think it’s more likely they are going to recycle their 30 second spots that less people are watching every year in which case they will go the same way as BudTV. They have some great investors behind them with extremely deep pockets like Microsoft, NBC Universal and GE’s Peacock Equity Fund, and advertisers like BMW, Coke, Ebay etc. yet the internet is famous for burning through enormous amounts of money on “big bang” efforts like this. If they don’t get it right out of the gate it will be a losing battle.
Adrants has a nice write up on this including some of the hyperbole from Firebrand CEO:
Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly said, “We program TV spots like a DJ spins music in a club. There is a rhythm and flow to it.” In an attempt to spin Firebrand as something other than a massive database of commercials, Vinoly adds, “On Firebrand, you’ll see more car chases, explosions, gags, drama, heroes, Oscar-winning actors, directors and producers in an hour than in a month of HBO.”
Now I’m actually a huge fan of good commercials check out Ad Critic, TBS’s Very Funny Ads,
BTW I just wen to check out BudTV’s traffic and it turns out my blog is higher rated on Alexa, weird. 
Original post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/firebrand-extremely-ambitious-advert...
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
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aaron@firebrand says:
03 Oct 2007, 15:32
Thanks for the post. You make very good points and thanks for the differentiation between us and YouTube. This is more than uploaded videos by commercial enthusiasts and we look forward to seeing you on October 22nd!
Stefan says:
28 Sep 2007, 11:25
My gutreaction was pretty much the same - if done right, this could be huge. But it's so easy to do this wrong. So many points of failure - registration, experience, intrusion, quality control.
Like Adrants, I do hope it succeeds.
As far as Bud.tv goes, I tend to use them as a worst case example. Main problem - a tedious registration procedure. And they cant help this of course, as it is deemed damaging for anyone under 18 to see anything made available by a beer brand...
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