Heavy.com gears up for lift-off in Canada

The Ottawa Senators' Stanley Cup dreams may have been shattered, but New York-based Heavy.com's designs for Canada are still very much alive - and, at least initially, very much dependent on our love of hockey.Knob Hockey, the broadband video site's first effort designed expressly to woo Canadian audiences, consists of a series of videos using figures from the beloved vintage table-top hockey game. It's not new for this year's playoff season, but it is the first time Molson Canada has bought sponsorship rights.David U.K., VP and GM of Heavy.com Canada, points out that it's not branded entertainment, created expressly to suit an advertiser's message. "It's our content that we've allowed Molson to wrap their brand around," he says. "When people think of Knob Hockey they're going to think of Heavy, but the idea is to involve Molson Canadian as a brand within it."Unlike Molson's sponsorship of television properties - including the National Hockey League - the deal with Heavy.com allows the brewery a more integrated buy according to U.K., with randomly sowed pre-roll ads, branded video skins and product placement in the content itself. The site has even used "assets from advertisers for programming" in the past, he says, pointing to a machinima series called Pimp My Weapon, created in conjunction with Sony Computer Entertainment and based on the engine for the game developer's God of War title.But what you won't find on the site, U.K. adds, is overuse of top-layer display advertising. "In the past, it was ‘If they don't click on an ad, it's not a successful ad campaign," he says of Heavy.com's move away from reliance on traditional online display ads. "That's not a measurement anymore. The measurement now is brand awareness, and if people are watching 15 minutes of programming, their natural step is not to click on an ad and leave Heavy during that experience. However, if you surround the video in a skin, very well-branded, then you're making a fairly large impact on the consumer."Heavily skewed towards males in the 18-34 demographic (60% of male visitors) and 35-49 (40%), Heavy.com melds custom-created series with acquired content and user-generated submissions, the latter through a video upload channel called My Heavy.The deal with Molson was brokered by Toronto media planning firm Mediaedge:cia; other Canadian clients include Virgin Mobile Canada - also Heavy.com Canada's partner for mobile content distribution - Warner Bros. Canada, and Sony of Canada, among others.U.K. says that Knob Hockey will also be made available to US viewers. "I have no idea how much traffic we'll get in the US," he says. "It'll be interesting to see."And, other content initiatives targeting citizens of the Great White North are already in the works. The second installment of a battle-of-the-bands series, dubbed Contraband, will be launching July 2, and will focus on Canadian acts this time around. "We are essentially creating Canadian programming using Canadian producers," U.K. says.Heavy.com's plans for expansion in Canada are quite bold. "I'd like to see our audience grow to two million unique visitors Canadian IPs," U.K. says. "I'd like to see us develop more programming initiatives that are in concert with the Canadian flavour, and work more with our clients to utilize their assets and take their initiatives out to the Web."Of course, so would many other players in the Canadian online content space, including Bell Sympatico - now venturing into movie downloads over the Internet - and Canada's incumbent television broadcasters. But U.K. believes Heavy's youthful focus and hyper-compact content - one feature, Daily Suture, stitches together only the most popular bits as voted on by users to form a highlight reel of sorts - gives the newcomer the upper hand."The audience on the Web is looking for shorter-form, more dynamic content," he says. "They're also looking for something that's different, something they can't find on television."Indeed, traditional TV broadcasters have yet to find breakthrough success with broadband video. According to figures from online audience measurement firm comScore Inc., the US broadband streaming video market was dominated by Google and its affiliated sites in March. The Mountain View CA search engine firm accounted for nearly 17% of the more than seven billion online video streams during that month. By comparison, Yahoo Inc. and Fox Interactive Media - second- and third-place finishers respectively - each grabbed roughly 6% of all video streams in March.News Corp.-owned Fox Interactive is the highest-placing firm with ties to conventional TV broadcasting in comScore's Video Metrix rankings. Further down the list, Viacom Digital and Time Warner Network (fourth and fifth places) garnered a combined 7% share of video streams, with Microsoft sites taking sixth place with slightly more than 2% of the overall market. Pure-play online video provider Roo Group Inc. filled the seventh-place spot and Disney Online weighed in at eighth.With CBS Broadcasting Inc. separating from parent Viacom in 2005, ABC.com - which, like Disney Online, is owned by the Walt Disney Co. - finished ninth in comScore's top 10 streaming video sites, the highest-ranked of America's Big Three traditional networks. But it's not for lack of trying: the triumvirate of ABC, CBS and NBC have been feverishly formulating strategies to keep pace with the rising tide of video content on the Web.CBS' ill-starred Innertube, which sought to recapture and aggregate the network's content that was being posted on video sharing sites, is one such example. The US broadcaster launched the site in May 2006; less than a year later, it had all but abandoned the experiment, instead reverting to putting up free clips on Youtube and farming sales of full-length paid content out to iTunes.But U.K. says that don't necessarily mean old-media broadcasters don't have a place online. "They could be too soon before their time," he says. "I also think the networks really need to develop content just for the Web."Of course, timing is everything: Heavy.com was founded in 1999, making it a relatively embryonic firm when the dot-com bubble burst two years later. Nevertheless, it's persevered. "You'd be surprised by the number of people aged 35-49 who've known Heavy for more than five years," U.K. says. "We're one of the oldest broadband brands that have survived."

Heavy.com gears up for lift-off in Canada

News | 06/07/2007 1:36 pm EDT

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