Old-School Sponsorship From a Digital-Era Company

Match.com will sponsor the new TBS program “My Boys,” whose young characters are searching for love in Chicago.

MATCHMAKER, matchmaker, make me a match. So sang the daughters of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” For a TV comedy series that begins tonight — about a young woman’s dating life, appropriately enough — Madison Avenue is playing matchmaker, bringing together an advertiser and a network for an elaborate sponsorship deal.

The matchmaker is MediaHub from Mullen, the media planning and buying division of Mullen, an agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies. MediaHub is hooking up Match.com, the dating Web site operated by IAC/InterActiveCorp, with the TBS cable network for a season-long sponsorship of the new sitcom, called “My Boys.”

Under the agreement, estimated at $1 million to $2 million, Match.com will be featured in all 13 episodes of “My Boys,” which chronicles the adventures of a twentysomething who covers sports for a Chicago newspaper as she juggles her career and social life. The Web site will be featured prominently in two episodes and play cameo roles in the rest.

Other elements of the deal include identification of “My Boys” as “sponsored by Match.com” in a television, print, radio and online promotional campaign that TBS is creating for the series; the posting of a profile of a character from the series on Match.com; billboard-style ads for Match.com on a special “My Boys” Web site (tbs.com/shows/myboys/); and a discussion of “My Boys” and Match.com during an episode of another TBS show, “Movie and a Makeover.”

The sponsorship is another example of an advertising technique that is being revived, decades after fading from the media landscape. Known as branded entertainment, it recalls the days when announcers intoned at the start of TV and radio shows that they were being “brought to you by” some name-brand consumer product.

Branded entertainment is returning to television because of its ability to interweave product pitches into the story lines of the shows that consumers want to watch. The goal is to counter viewers’ increasing ability to ignore or avoid more interruptive advertising like traditional commercials.

Among other advertisers that are taking part in the revival of branded entertainment are Coca-Cola, General Motors, Philips Electronics North America, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

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Branded entertainment projects “are easier when it’s an organic fit,” Ms. Yaccarino said. “Otherwise you’re just going to turn off the viewer, and then all of your work was for naught.
“As long as we respect the creative process, and that takes the lead, that’ll keep the viewers watching.”
The deal is “the biggest co-branded effort that Turner has ever done,” Ms. Yaccarino said, “and I think you’ll definitely see more of this.”
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NewYorkTimes (pour l'article complet)