Zooey Deschanel and Digital Broadcasting Group join forces, bringing a web series to Deschanel's site, HelloGiggles.
Zooey Deschanel is getting into the web series business. She's serving as creative consultant on season two of The Single Life, a show created and coproduced by Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) and Real Mom Productions. The series will "live and breathe on HelloGiggles.com," a website Deschanel cofounded with Sophia Rossi and Molly McAleer, DBG's CEO Chris Young tells Fast Company. The deal swells DBG's long roster of original web video content, while nudging Deschanel into a growing coterie of Hollywood starlets who moonlight as entrepreneurs.
DBG calls itself a "content production and distribution company," and is something of a hybrid between a production company and an advertising agency. One of their highest-profile productions to date was Kiefer Sutherland's The Confession; the company also often works with brands to build video series offering what Young terms "utilitainment" ("providing a brand utility while entertaining the consumer at the same time," he explains). DBG also produces a lot of brief video content that it then pushes to 2,600 partner websites. The company's "sizzle reel" lays it all out.
The trick, Young says, is to keep the branding subtle and integral to the story. "The idea is to try to figure out brand objectives, where are the natural integration points, where it works with the story arc." To "tastefully integrate" the brand is key: "If we the beat user over the head with the brand, they’re not going to engage." Subtlety is so key, in fact, that Young asks me not to divulge the name of the brand DBG collaborated with on the first season of The Single Life, though you could probably figure it out if you watched it.
The collaboration with HelloGiggles came about, according to Young, through conversations with the CAA agency. For the girl who already has everything, though--a hit TV show, a talent for the viral music vid...
[Source: Fast Company]
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