TV

Ad Space – Yes, You Got a Community Notification for This

You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
TV series Community

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
Why do you keep mentioning Honda?

Now this is some damn fine cross promotion!

It’s 2015, and you’ve been put in charge of Yahoo! Screen, the laughingstock of the streaming world. Your video player is barely functional, you’ve not near-zero name recognition, and even the Yahoo! homepage doesn’t seem eager to advertise Screen. How do you keep such a tottering business afloat?

Well, you’re running a streaming service in the 2010’s, so the obvious answer is: GO BIG!! More original series! Exclusive sports broadcasts! And, hey, was a beloved metafictional sitcom recently cancelled by NBC? Revive that sucker and make it your own!

Two problems, though. One, reviving a series will only draw in its fanbase if they’re aware that you’re bringing it back, which is far from guaranteed – again, no one knows that Yahoo! Screen exists. Two, doing all this big stuff costs money, and even in these gold rush days of streaming, Yahoo! only has so much cash to burn.

But you’re not deterred, no ma’am! You’re gonna bonk both those birds with one stone. You commission this video that could be a short scene from an episode of Community, pairing up its two most popular characters (or at least its two most memeable), who we rarely got to see interact in the show itself, for some classic Community style humor. And it serves, both as an announcement that Community is moving to Yahoo! Screen, and as a quick source of revenue, as Honda will shill out fat Benjamins to target some product placement at Community‘s “small but hard to reach demo”.

And, since it’s a Community production, it’s of course meta as all heck, drawing attention to its role as an advertisement in truly bizarre ways.

It wasn’t enough to save Yahoo! Screen, which folded the following year, but it got us at least three more minutes of Abed and the Dean being hilarious. For that, we salute you, you fallen soldiers of the streaming wars.