Lack of Ability to Content Share Hurt Bud.TV

Bud.TV may have gone to its place in the cyberspace history books, but the lessons learned have not escaped Anheuser-Busch.

The company pulled the plug Wednesday on the two-year-old network.

“There were some lessons that we learned,” Michael Levy, vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, said. “We learned a lot of good and bad. Those things will serve our efforts going forward.”

Lesson No. 1: consumers want to share content, not just view it.

“Consumers loved to interact with our brands online,” Levy said. “They liked it so they were willing to spend an average of seven minutes [on Bud.TV]. That was good. But one of the things we learned is we didn’t allow consumers to share the content.”

Lesson No. 2: A-B was too conservative with its branding.

“We were reluctant to put a lot of branding out there, but we learned from consumers it was OK,” Levy said.

The company decided to “sunset” Bud.TV this week after traffic to the site had dropped off dramatically. Content from the site, which launched in January 2007, was removed on Wednesday. A message at the site lets visitors now that the doors have closed and thanks peopl for their interest. It then directs people to www.Budweiser.com and www.budlight.com.

“We’re not an entertainment company, we are a beer company,” Levy said. “To produce the amount of content to keep [the site] new and exciting to consumers was unbelievably hard.”

Bud.TV went live after much fanfare following the 2007 Super Bowl to target young, drinking-age men. The site featured 24-hour live and on-demand programming and other content, such as Webisodes, sporting events, consumer-generated content, field news reports, celebrity interviews, music downloads and comedian vignettes. Visitors spent an average of seven minutes each time they logged on.

A-B spent about $15 million to get the site up and running, Levy said.

The company hoped to attract upwards of 2 million visitors each month. But by the second month, there were only 153,000 unique visitors, according to news reports. While Levy wouldn’t discuss Web traffic, he said, “Traffic fell well short of our expectations. Anytime you do something like that in an entrepreneurial way it involves some risk.”

“It was a success in terms of what we learned,” he adds. “That learning can now be applied to a platform we can build off of. People are looking for great marketers to take risks and venture into areas where others are afraid to go. Those are things we are willing to do.”

What does the future hold? Levy said he expects to launch more digital work by increasing its presence with partners in the digital space such as Yahoo, Facebook and Hulu, among other sites.

“We’re not cutting back, we’re just re-purposing what we are doing,” he said. “We are going to spend more time on places people are already going. We realized that it’s not necessary to have your own standalone network. You can do things with partners and still have a strong presence.”