It’s very hard to get an engaged audience in the U.S. today. It’s become more important for brands to talk directly to their targets and have the brand, the talent and the distributor all sitting on the same side of the table – pushing together.

Sounds easy enough, but here are the challenges. When Brands choose to finance their own content, broadcasters and portals immediately assume the quality is not the same caliber as their shows. Additionally, these deals tend to fall in a “no man’s land” between programming, ad sales and marketing solutions making it difficult to rally all the resources from a Network or Portal.

Finally, beyond the perception problem of “branded entertainment” the biggest challenge is to create value for both advertisers and broadcasters when both want to control the creative, the rights and the activation. This requires all of the players – programming, ad sales, talent and brands -- to create new deal structures that deliver ROI for everyone.

Both Fuel TV and Yahoo! promoted Schick’s Clean Break as an original series because we did not have any forced product placement in the content. The story lines in Clean Break were picked up by Yahoo! editorial for eight consecutive weeks on the Yahoo! homepage. We had Yahoo! drive to Fuel and Fuel drive to Yahoo!. The series was backed by banner ads, and social media content that invited guys to share their stories on Facebook, a sweepstakes for the same Clean Break as the show and on pack/on shelf. Schick’s Clean Break was even offered for sale on iTunes.

Media: Clean Break delivered 10 million brand equity pre-rolls (+40% over goal.) We also bartered five brand equity spots per 30-minute episode on all FUEL TV airings; the network promoted the series with 150 Hydro-branded promos per week.

The program earned 225 million total media impressions more than 10x the “bought” impressions of 24 million.

Fuel TV: In its launch month (6/12) Schick Hydro’s Clean Break delivered the highest concentration of Men 18-49 of all shows on Fox’s Fuel Cable network. FUEL liked the program so much it extended it to sister network FSN and offered the series for sale on iTunes carrying the Schick Hydro brand with it.

Yahoo!: 8 million views and 84,000+ hours of Clean Break streamed to date. At peak, 92% watched the full video. Interactive banner engagement hit 5%, 3X the CPG benchmark of 1.76%.

Over 2 million unique visitors on the Schick Hydro Clean Break hub.

Facebook/Twitter: 3.25 million Facebook impressions; 3.4 million Twitter impressions from Clean Break distribution and consumers uploading their own Clean Break photos and stories.

Brand results: Schick Hydro Total Sales +15%

Schick Hydro Refill Share +2 points