A few months ago, to much fanfare bud.TV launched. This is Budweiser’s online presence chock full of Budweisery goodness. As you can imagine, I am a huge fan of brand advertisers embracing the online space. And embrace it they did. Back in September when the Anheuser-Bush marketing department was full of excitement and optimism they proudly announced that they were doubling their online spend to about $60 million (which accounted for roughly 10% of their overall marketing budget).

Here it is, six months later and Alexa ranks my food blog higher than they do bud.TV. I kid you not!.

This is just nuts. Let’s even say conservatively say that they spent half of their online budget creating the content, putting up the site, and promoting it. I bet it was more, but for argument’s sake, they may have spent $30 million dollars for this disappointment. And now the articles are appearing talking about what the folks at Anheuser-Busch are going to do to fix bud.TV.

It’s not that I am not a fan of creating a bunch of cute videos, pouring them onto the net, and seeing what sticks. That’s a fine idea in my opinion. In fact, I thought it was an especially fine idea given that sites like YouTube will host that video FOR FREE. All you have to do is produce the content and they’ll take care of the rest. If you can make sure to incorporate you brand connection into the video and the video takes off, you’ve really hit a home run. And even if millions of people see it there’s no incremental cost to you to serve it up.

Apparently that was too good an idea for the folks at Anheuser Busch who decided they needed their own site to serve up their videos. Not to mention all the associated costs of building, maintaining, and hosting said site. They also smartly included no ability to embed the video in other web pages thereby forcing people to come to their “aggregator” to get all the benefits of their site. Not smart.

One of the best videos on the site is “Swear Jar“. (Apologies in advance that bud.TV is so dopey that I can’t even provide you a direct link to the bud.TV copy of the video without you registering for their site first). Apparently this video has been viewed 74412 times as of this morning on the bud.TV site. Over on YouTube (where I can provide you with a direct link to the video) the ad has been posted (not viewed… posted!) over 200 times so far. It feels like more people are posting the ad on YouTube than are viewing it on bud.TV. As far as views on YouTube the ad looks like it’s been seen (by my rough counting) over 1.1 million times in the 3 weeks since it has appeared. Now imagine what Anheuser-Busch’s costs would look like if we took the cost of making Swear Jar plus the cost of putting up their site divided by the number of views on bud.TV and compared it to the cost of making the video plus the cost of posting it on YouTube (though apparently there were at least 200 people willing to do this part for free) divided by the number of YouTube views.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Among the changes Bud.TV plans to implement are:

1. Putting its content — tagged with Bud.TV — on more popular sites like YouTube, AOL and Yahoo to gain awareness and encourage people to check out more on Bud.TV. A-B is in talks with the major portals about getting Bud.TV content on their sites.

“We now realize we should be open to sharing to get the content exposed, and that’s one of the ways to do it,” Ponturo said.

Uh… Yeah.

But fine… it’s easy for us to make fun. This is new territory. And to their credit, instead of giving up, the bud.TV folks are learning… kind of. You would think recognizing that their content will do better on other sites would lead to other similar learnings that involve embracing the broader web instead of trying to elbow your way into it. Not clear. They want edgier programming, shorter videos, and link to content on other sites from bud.TV.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the content strategy in general as I think it’s a hit-based proposition in terms of entertainment value to customers and content is expensive to make as it needs to be made fresh all the time. I believe that brands should be spending the bulk of their online spend on creating software with repeatable value for customers (either entertainment, information, productivity, or communication value). But that’s just me. (You can read more in the White Paper here.) If they want to go the content route why not shut down bud.TV altogether. Keep producing the videos. Brand them bud.tv. Then find ten kickass bloggers in all the areas that their demographic cares about. Cars. Sports. Girls in bikinis. Etc. (This is clearly where they think their bread is buttered if you look at the bud.TV content.) Take these bloggers and become the EXCLUSIVE sponsors of their sites. Pay them 50k per year. Brand their sites with Budweiser and then let them keep going on their merry way writing what they please. What Budweiser would do with the other $59.5 million a year they spend would be up to them of course. Hey… screw it… hire 100 kickass bloggers. If 50k isn’t enough to get them to quit their day jobs then pay them more. Anheuser-Busch would still have tens of millions left over to produce their videos and promote their bloggers to the world. If bud.TV is about getting Budweiser branded content out to the masses online then why not let the content go wherever it wants. Why limit it to just their site.

The big question of course is why do marketers like the ones at Anheuser-Busch keep trying (unsuccessfully) to do a 1:1 translation of their TV marketing chops into web experiences? If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

My favorite new sitcom on network TV is 30 Rock. Tina Fey is awesome and her show is hysterical. One of my favorite characters was her now ex-boyfriend the Beeper King of New York. Note: 30 Rock is set in the present where the need for beepers is let’s say questionable. Cell phones be damned!!! The Beeper King is still cheerily pushing beepers. The marketers who keep trying to come up with ways to leverage their decades of TV spot skills into the online space are the Beeper salesforce of the marketing ecosystem. It’s not that beepers perform their function worse than they used to, it’s just that cell phones are better.

Slowly but surely I see a new brand of marketer who is understanding not only the dynamics of the net, but the value of software over content. The interesting question will be, with this tough lesson learned over at bud.TV will the Anheuser-Busch marketing department start selling cell phones or have they just restocked with the “new” alpha-numeric pagers? Time (and budgets) will tell.