New Balance Web Series Solid and Unseen

New Balance is behind an extremly well-made doc-reality series called SEASON IN THE BALANCE, that follows around a high school lacrosse team.  As AdRants says, “Think Friday Night Lights with lacrosse sticks.”  Also reminds me of MTV’s “Two-a-Days” series.

It appears that a great of deal of thought and at least some financial resources were dedicated to this project but it looks like it is being nearly completely ignored.  This is based mostly on the viewcount on YouTube, where the five episodes posted so far are averages something like 200 views.  Now, to be fair, there could be huge traffic to the home site or maybe on some other platform but YouTube tends to be a solid indicator of popularity and 200 views is miserably low.

Even if these numbers are lower than the actual viewership, it can’t be much lower. So, what went wrong here?

For starters, the only way I even found out about the series was via a posting in the industry-centric AdRants.  I’ve seen no promotions or press releases or ads that would create even a whiff of awareness.  Since the nature of the content is not sensationalistic or star-filled or just plain crazy, there is little chance of the videos gaining traction in the world of Facebook updates and Twitter ReTweets.

Oh, and it is about lacrosse, a sport this country has shown an extreme reluctance to embrace outside of high school and college.

What can we learn here?  First, just making a great series and putting online is not nearly enough to guarantee viewership.  TV networks spend millions to promote their shows so that they can boast of huge viewerships and raise their ad-rates.  If a brand goes it alone and creates and releases their content outside of the traditional TV network marketplace it is now up to them to do that marketing.  Otherwise, the show will go unseen as will any embedded marketing.

Second, you need to target your key audiences.  Maybe New Balance did this and I am just not part of that target (fair enough) but if they did it was clearly unsuccessful.  I wonder how many high school and college lacrosse teams have been directly contacted and made aware of a series that speaks directly to their life experiences?  Not only could these players become viewers but they could also become brand evangelists for New Balance.

As it stands, this is a great looking webseries that deserves some attention but this won’t happen all by itself.

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