An online video series created by a marketing company for Sauve and Sprint is being developed into a network television show.
The video series “In the Motherhood” features the stories of real mothers and streams on MSN.com, where it has recorded 21 million video views. The television series “In the Motherhood” will air on ABC later this year or early next year, turning into yet another example of branded entertainment, where the products are embedded in the story lines.
At ABC’s upfront presentation on Tuesday, advertisers seemed to enjoy the clips of Leah Remini, Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler playing funny, frazzled moms. Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, said the show might be ready in time for midseason.
MindShare Entertainment, a unit of the media services agency MindShare, developed the series about 18 months ago. If the series is shown by ABC, it would represent the first branded entertainment campaign to leap from the Web to television.
Marketers have jointly developed shows on television for decades — soap operas were a genre created to sell Proctor & Gamble soap — but prime time exposure for those shows would be something new. “It’s a new world out there,” David Lang, the president of MindShare Entertainment, said. “It goes to show that great ideas and great creativity can come from anywhere.”
By developing a separate script and storyline for the television version of the series, MindShare and ABC hope to avoid the problems that plagued “Quarterlife,” a show about Web-savvy twenty-somethings that debuted online before being picked up and rebroadcast by NBC. The show was pulled off NBC after one airing. Additionally, the online sponsors for “Quarterlife” were not attached to the TV version the way Suave and Sprint will be involved in ABC’s “In The Motherhood.”