Jazz Odyssey

The WB network has partnered with Yahoo to make the debut episode of their new series Supernatural available online for one week prior to its television premiere. This effort to reach their target audience (viewers age 12 to 34) coincides with an offline branding campaign with promotional messages on coffeecup sleeves, on cocktail napkins at hundreds of bars and promotional glow-in-the-dark bracelets distributed at movie theaters in L.A. and New York City. Additional promo on the Yahoo search engine (its featured prominently on their homepage today) is also part of the marketing mix.

So this is sort of the television equivilent of "listening parties" that we often set up to run the week before a record hits stores, and it can be very effective at building a buzz. One of the key differences here is that the partnership with Yahoo is very tightly integrated as opposed to trying for a premiere across several partners. Both strategies have their pros and cons–Yahoo is one of the most heavily trafficked search engines and primo placement on their homepage and throughout their network in exchange for some exclusivity is valuable. Then again, spreading a premiere across several partners (additional search engines, places like iFilm and major content portals like MSN and AOL) can create the impression of a much larger event and for afficianados of online entertainment may instill a sense that they are missing something if they don’t tune in, though such an approach generally gives you less prime placement on the partner sites.

We’ll see if this pays off for the WB…if the word of mouth is strong this campaign could significantly increase the audience for the television premiere.  It’s certainly a forward-thinking approach to launching a television program. The only thing I question at this point is the sole reliance on Yahoo in terms of search.  If you go to Google and type "Supernatural" into their engine you get no sponsored search links to the homepage of the show, nor does it appear anywhere on the first page of search results.  It seems that with a lot of creative offline branding in the pipeline and the popularity of Google, a sizeable potential audience that may not do their searching at Yahoo may not easily find the info that they’re looking for.

You can read the full AP article here.