Verizon Wireless Enrolls at Valemont U

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For Web series, sponsors often foot production costs of the shows and help get them noticed online. In Valemont's case, Verizon Wireless is also buying roughly 36 minutes of commercial time for two of MTV's most popular shows.

In return, Verizon Wireless gets prominent product placements. In the show, a teenage girl named Sophie Gracen enrolls at Valemont in hopes of solving the mysterious death of a person presumed to be her older brother. She's aided by a phone—from, you guessed it, Verizon Wireless—found among the belongings of the deceased. The device includes snippets of video and other content meant to show off the range of features available on Verizon Wireless phones.

The Critical Target: Young Consumers

As it gets easier for audiences to skip through commercials using TiVo (TIVO), "marketers need to embed their messages in new ways," says Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, a media planning and Internet strategy firm.

Winning over young users is key for Verizon Wireless, the joint venture of Verizon Communications (VZ) and Vodafone Group (VOD), as it battles for customers against AT&T (T), the exclusive U.S. carrier of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

To foster that pursuit, Valemont uses multiple platforms besides TV and Webisodes, including a Web site that is organized a lot like a traditional university site (fans "apply" for admission). The show also has a page on Facebook and characters send tweets from microblogging site Twitter.

The brands believe that Web series are a new way to connect with viewers in a more intimate and engaging way than TV enables, even if the audiences are smaller. Companies trying to get their message across need multiple platforms to capture the attention of a multitasking society that's typically online or on the cell phone while watching TV. "Producers are realizing that old TV broadcasts only capture a small portion of the viewer's total media habits, especially during commercial periods, and they want to gain more of a piece of the pie," Kunz says. "This helps both ratings and also the advertisers, who are the real target of producers."

The guiding philosophy for shows with sponsors is to target niches. The more specific and difficult-to-reach the audience is, the higher the premium for a sponsorship deal. "A show can be monetarily successful if it really owns and curates that audience," said Marc Hustvedt, founder of the Web series blog Tubefilter.

Don't Overexpose Product Placements

Gennefer Snowfield founded Space Truffles Entertainment in hopes of matching brands with Web-series creators. She starts with scripts, concepts, and produced shows and then tries to find brands that match the show's tone and target audience. The brands then work with the show's creators on plot and ways to integrate their label.

Marketers and series producers need to guard against too tight an integration or too prominent a product placement. If the brand is "associated with an experience that I really enjoy," it benefits the sponsor, Snowfield says. Products need to be woven in the narrative organically, so as not to tarnish the audience's emotional experience, she explains.

Overdo it and you lose your audience, says Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, chief executive of online video site WatchMojo.com. Overexposure of a product will be more glaring in a three-minute Webisode than a longer TV show. "Are users that dumb to sit through and watch something that is blatantly commercial?" he asks.

Probably not. But without some form of sponsorship, many online series won't see the light of day. "Now it's very rare for something to take off without any marketing," says Marshall Herskovitz, producer of the Web series quarterlife, which briefly aired on TV. "There's just too much competition."

Aymar Jean Christian is a freelance journalist and graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania researching new media. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Newsweek, among other publications.

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