TC50: Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls
As TechCrunch 50 gets underway, there have been a few technical hitches – no wi-fi, difficulties with onstage demos and a lack of stairs preventing presenters getting on and off the stage – but Ashton Kutcher is here to bring some celebrity gloss to proceedings.
The reason he’s here is that his production company, Katalyst Media, is launching Blah Girls, a web video series in which three animated schoolgirls hold forth about celebrities and entertainment news. The animation style and attitude suggest that the end result will be something like a sassy feminine slant on South Park. Parents will hate it, which probably means they’re on the right track.
The brief demo doesn’t give much time for extended extracts. The clips we see certainly suggest that the characters have personality and presence, but it’s hard to judge whether the writers can turn this instant appeal into something substantial and sustainable.
Why is this at a tech show, not a media show? Partly, I suppose, because the clips will start life on the web (although they’ll be on TV too, Kutcher says), but mainly because the videos are designed to be the point of entry into an online, interactive world based around the Blah Girls.
"We understand that the web is not a passive place," Kutcher says. "This is the convergence of Hollywood and Silicon Valley that we have been looking for for a long time."
The idea is that Blah Girls fans will form a social network around the show, reacting to the videos and to each other's opinions. They’ll also be able to interact with the show, receiving video e-mails from the characters in response to comments posted in the community area.
This seemed to be the weakest area of the product: the video responses from the characters barely sustained the illusion that they were responding to the commenter's rather than picking up on one or two keywords. When asked whether TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington would ever find true love, the Blah Girls were non-committal: "Relationships are like skinny jeans," they said. "Sometimes you have to starve yourself to make them work."
Despite the show's need to develop more convincing interactivity, the judging panel seemed to like Blah Girls, especially its potential to appeal to advertisers who could integrate branding and product placement within the video clips.
Ron Conway, an investor and one of the TechCrunch judges, said that Blah Girls and Hangout Industries (another competitor), were evidence of a growing and increasingly lucrative market.
"We already know that display advertising and search advertising are multibillion-dollar markets," he said. "Now there is a new multibillion-dollar market surfacing right before our eyes, and that is product placement."
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