If you were expecting Anheuser-Buschs Bud.TV to signal a return to the early golden age of television when advertisers associated their brands with such toney undertakings as the Hallmark Hall of Fame, the Kraft Television Theater and the G.E. Playhouse, you can keep on dreaming, Alice.Â
Bud.TV, which went live last night during the Super Bowl, is pretty much what you would expect from a beer company with mucho dinero looking to attract mostly 21- to 27-year-old males with notoriously short attention spans: lots of extremely pretty girls, edgy reality stunts, monkey business, even the beginning of a 130-episode (2 minutes), 2.5D animated science-fiction series called Afterworld, about a man who is one of the few survivors in an America where the electricity has mysteriously gone away. Did I mention pretty girls?
There will even be at least one truly interactive featurea Finish Our Film contest developed by Matt Damon and Ben Afflecks LivePlanet.  Viewers will be able to watch the beginning and end of the film and then imagine what happens in between. The winner gets a trip to Hollywood to work on the finished product. Â
And, of course, there are Bud commercials that visitors are not obliged to watch although a surprising number of people volunteer. Last year, 22 million people visited Budweiser.com and its partner sites to view the ads in the six days after the Super Bowl, and 30 million people visited in the 10 days after the game. Budweiser ran nine spots during the Super Bowl this year, which will be available for viewing on Bud.TV and other beer brand sites.
To refute charges that it is peddling booze to kids too young to drink, the site has a tougher than usual registration process. Potential users must register, providing a name, birth date and home ZIP code and a company called Aristotle Inc. will verify each persons age by immediately checking the information against databases, such as drivers license records and voter registration lists. If Aristotle cant confirm an age of 21 or older, the person cant get in. Â
The notion of a corporation producing its own branded content is not a new one. P&G invented the soap opera for radio in the 1930s and produced the first of the genre for television.   But, as the first online entertainment network built around a brand, Bud.TV is a watershed moment in the shifting media landscape and represents a bold new strategy in merging old and new media.Â
In essence, Buds Super Bowl ads were used to drive traffic to a web site whichif it grabs viewers as A-B expectswill become a part their daily web surfing routine. For a company that spends about $700 million a year on advertising, $30 million for the first year is not a bank-breaking investment.  If the content is compelling enough, I suspect Bud.TV is going to turn out to be a bargain.   Â