Family Guy Creator Teams With Google to Re-create Banner Ads (and Mass Media)

(MoneyWatch)  Seth MacFarlane, who helms Fox's raunchy cartoon Family Guy, and Google announced a new plan for advertising today, as reported in the New York Times. The plan will see MacFarlane creating a series of animated shorts, titled (for now) "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy," that will be placed via Google's AdSense on websites where MacFarlane's favored demo, young males, like to congregate. Instead of traditional banner or static silo ads, however, there will be two-minute cartoons with advertiser-sponsored interstitials instead. For an additional fee, MacFarlane will even whip up a cartoon ad for the sponsor. From the NYT article:

But the partnership with Mr. MacFarlane represents a bold step into the distribution business, one that, if successful, will surely send shock waves through the entertainment business. "Cavalcade" is not only from a high-profile Hollywood talent, but also carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag, by far the largest amount spent on original Internet content to date.

"We feel that we have recreated the mass media," said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

No advertisers have yet been announced for the new deal, but it's not hard to imagine brands salivating at the idea of engaging the web-surfing young males that are abandoning TV in droves. A recent report in Variety pegged the average age of a network television viewer as now tottering around 50 years old, older than most advertisers' target demos. Banner ads, meanwhile, have fallen further and further out of favor, and hopes that more behavioral tracking will combat the decade-old problem of "banner blindness" seem more and more unlikely.

"Calvacade" could mark the moment when advertisers and publishers finally unlock the secret of online video advertising -- pour enough money and talent into it to make it worth online users time -- or it could represent another highly-touted, little-watched video bust. In most cases I'd vote bust, but with Google and MacFarlane behind the push, it could be the opposite.