Great Idea: Poor Communications

There is a real challenge in creating compelling integrated advertising and entertainment. How do you achieve brand communications objectives without making the viewer's flesh crawl?

Today I watched "The Broadroom" from Maybelline, and the faux music video from Muscle Milk, and was disappointed by both.

The Broadroom has real potential - written by Sex and the City author Candance Bushnell, and has spared no expense to hire real talent. Unfortunately the premise and the script reads like a draft of the brand segmentation study, and cannot figure how to subtly include product ID's.

The Muscle Milk faux music video is used to to promote the sexy pilgrim... a guy with the ripped torso who got ripped because of Muscle Milk. Good idea for a gag, well produced, but just awful.

So here's to a new year with a better idea of how to do product endorsed entertainment. Otherwise the decade of the teens may be more of a throw back to the sponsored content of the 50s, rather than the brave new world of digital marketing.