MyMediaMusings

I had to love the article the other day in the NYT about NBC’s partnership with insurance company Liberty Mutual to develop and produce back-door pilots in the form of sponsored TV movies.

“Branded entertainment efforts were a mainstay of TV in its early days — and of network radio before that. Series were developed jointly by advertisers and agencies and brought to the networks, which frequently named them after the sponsors.

Thus, NBC once offered programs like “Colgate Comedy Hour,” “Kraft Television Theater,” “Philco Television Playhouse” and “Dinah Shore Chevy Show.”

“We’re going backward, 100 percent,” Ben Silverman, co-chairman at the NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios divisions of NBC Universal, said, laughing.”

It’s nice to see the same language I used in our recent New Media pitch a couple of big corporations - except in my pitch you don’t really need NBC at all.  Really, all they truly offer is distribution and that has become nearly free.  True, they can drive a lot of eyeballs through marketing power, but so can magazines and blogs and the brands themselves.