Mans Best Friend

Blackhawk Content announced the debut of their live-action, web-based sitcom series on the www.petcentric.com web site yesterday.  The site, supporting Nestle Purina’s PetCare division, is a content-rich environment for people who are crazy about their pets.

So, it makes sense that content for pet-crazy people should be fun and entertaining, right?

According to Jim Allen, Branded Entertainment Manager for Nestle Purina, that’s the idea:

This program is another example of our commitment to providing fun and entertaining pet content to consumers in the digital space. While Man’s Best Friend is meant to be funny, its underlying message is about the positive experience of pet ownership. Hopefully, those who view the webisodes, will take away just how smart dogs can be to and for their owners.

But while the idea is fundamentally sound, the sitcom itself falls a little bit short.  It’s a little off-center, sure, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is that it’s not particularly funny.

Then again, a lot of the stuff we see on YouTube, DailyMotion and the rest is not particularly funny either.

But web-based video content seems to fall into two distinct categories: the “home made” and the “tv-like”.  This series, self-described as a web-based sitcom, appears to fall into the second category.  Add to that the “better than home made” lighting and canned laughter and you get the idea that the entertainment bar has been set at the professional level.

Unfortunately, the concept, writing and acting all fails to clear the bar.

The idea of a web-based sitcom seems (to me, anyway) to be right on target.  It’s a good idea.  It’s just not very well executed.  But you can’t knock either Blackhawk Content or Nestle Purina for trying.  It is an ambitious undertaking and lessons will, undoubtedly, be learned.

There’s no doubt that as the content improves, the views will go up (because good content has better pass-along value than poor content) and the effort will pay off.

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