What the Honeyshed?
Honeyshed launched recently.
"Honeyshed is a broadband destination that celebrates the sell," says Andrew Essex, CEO of Droga5, who was left to field calls in the agency's offices in New York City and who describes the venture as "MTV meets QVC." "There's a lot of so-called branded content out there, but it doesn't have many places to live," he says. "It gets lost on YouTube or it's like bud.tv, a brand in isolation. In contrast, this is totally transparent and completely entertaining. It's overt advertising based on the idea that people love brands. They just don't necessarily love it when brands interrupt or deceive them. This will make brands the life of the party rather than the uninvited guest." - extract from Businessweek article
When I initially read about Honeyshed I was concerned for a number of reasons:
1. it's very difiicult to successfully create your own media channel and to create your own content (to sell product) that will attract a significant audience
2. Dave Droga comes from a traditional advertising background where he is used to being in control and in this space the user is in control
3. I don't think people love brands as much as they think
4. Most people don't like to be sold to and that's why advertising is in the state it's in
Here is a typical video from Honeyshed...
Here are my comments:
1. Where is the entertainment?
I support branded content, but only if the content is entertaining. This is not entertaining. Ok, the models are pretty good looking, but the acting is bad, there is no humor and zero story. Maybe some character development would help...??
2. This just comes across like an infomercial. The selling is so overtly the focus of the content that it defeats what it's trying to accomplish - entertain.
3. The video player is buggy and really unresponsive
4. I do like the fact that people can embed the clips on their blogs/pages and get revenue share from it. But I gotto ask if this is cool enough for me to want to do that. I don't think so.
5. It seems like they needed content and went and shot all the content in one go. So there is little entertainment value.
6. Instead of having a soft launch, learning from it and then doing a big launch, they went out there blasting away in the media that this is the future of advertising and now that they've launched, it's very flat.
It's a bold move, but unfortunately one that hasn't been well thought through. Unless they seriously re-look the content, I think we are going to see this one tank.
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