Send help! It’s chaos over here. There’s lawlessness in the halls of the media companies, studios, advertising agencies, and brand advertisers.

Seriously though, media fragmentation and audience attrition have forced a retooling of business models across the industry. One result is advertisers stepping into the entertainment world – first just dipping their toes – but we expect they’ll soon jump right in.

To date, the lion’s share of branded entertainment is product placement – a brand trades dollars to have its soda can sit on a tabletop, its car logo blatantly visible during a chase scene, or just mentioned in a script.But within the chaos, there is opportunity for brands to develop their own media that creates the ideal context to communicate their messages, entertains their audiences, and has strong multi-platform-activation potential.

This is especially necessary when it comes to engaging the youth audience. Today’s teens and young adults are totally connected and more media savvy and media literate than any previous generation. They’re immune to conventional aspects of branding. They have a keen nose for authenticity; and they want – strike that – they expect to be involved in their media experiences.

Recruitment: AT&T launched a national search for a 'Rockumentarian', supported by AT&T and blink-182 social media (tweets and status updates), film/journalism school outreach, PR, and a little paid media.During Production: We created a blog and frequently posted on it – lots of short-form videos, photos, and stories from the tour. AT&T, the production team, and blink-182 promoted it via Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and there was PR, on-the-ground guerrilla marketing, and a small amount of paid media supporting it.When the documentary was finished, it went live online and also on AT&T’s U-verse (VOD, mobile, & online).

Well – according to @zachlonsinger – the program was a huge success. He told us so when he tweeted “@blink182rocku I love your tweets and posts. Youre living thousands of kids dreams around the world. Including mine!! Kill it brah!!” We heard the same kind of positive feedback from @preyaOWNS, @aidansweeney93, @HotAsLucas, @sarav19, and hundreds of others on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. We also got a lot of social media love from the band and individual members – Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, and Travis Barker. In fact – when Mark re-posted a behind the scenes video we made. We had more than 10k views within 3 hours.Against the marketing and media objectives, this first-of-its-kind program was a success, and there are – of course, lots of statistics: Production – more than 60 hours of footage shot; approximately 60 minutes of video content was produced as webisodes and the documentary.Online Video - more than 76,000 video plays; 459 video embeds on other sites.

U-verse (VOD, Online, and Mobile) – the blink-182 content was the most viewed content in 2011 – almost 310,000 plays.Social media – 180,000+ Facebook Tab views, almost 73,000 blog visits, 800+ Twitter followers.