Bud.tv: How to blow $30 million on beer

There's a reason why Anheuser-Busch and Omnicom’s DDB bombed this year with the launch of bud.tv. You can build the most brilliant portal in the world, but if you check your audience at the door, visitors will bail. Just look at the horrible original front-door to the web site bud.tv (screen shot from back in February).

Call this the lesson of the bad lead form.

Bud.tv launched after the Super Bowl with a $30 million blitz, a "portal" site meant to lure young men with celebrity scandal, girls on film, and humor from Kevin Spacey's Triggerstreet or Matt Damon's LivePlanet. The site targeted 1 to 2 million users a month -- and ended up with just 253,000 unique visitors in February and 152,000 in March. Traffic fell so low that ComScore stopped tracking it in April.

The site imploded because Anheuser-Busch asked too much of users. The front page asked you to sign up: First time? You'll need to register ... for what? A big black screen? In an Internet universe of free videos and full-frontal nudity, bud.tv came off like a frowning granny, asking the young boys if they really were old enough to stay out late Saturday night. The original site was actually an improvement over the long lead form that sat at the bud.tv URL in fall of 2006, prior to launch, asking users to punch in their birth dates etc. as they waited breathlessly for Bud to go live. The Bud message of the entire period was gimme gimme gimme.

Anheuser-Busch has been trying to fix the site with help from guerilla marketing firms such as New Media Strategies. The current site is a bit of improvement, offering free previews of funny videos to whet the appetite.


We don't think it takes rocket scientists or web consultants to figure out the failure. It's simple. (1) Bud.tv asked too much of users. (2) Users didn't want to sign up for something unknown without seeing the value clearly for themselves. (3) YouTube is loaded, free, and just one click away. The lesson for Bud: if your web audience is thirsty, don't demand ID before showing what's on tap.