A Mad Man Gets His Head Together

Related Images

Right and Left Brain From left to right: Maurice Lévy, Davig Droga, and David Kenny at Droga5 offices in Manhattan.

Related Stories

• Infographic: The Publicis Machine
  Publicis has 44,000 employees in 104 countries. Here are the Groupe's six major agencies, with a sampling of key clients.

Under the direction of Brian Beletic, the 33-year-old director from Smuggler, who created music videos for the Black Eyed Peas and commercials for Adidas, Sprint, and Coca-Cola, the Honeyshed staff has spent the past few months on their spare, MTV-ish set, producing more than 150 product-centered segments for everything from lip gloss to consumer electronics to thigh-high socks. Each item is introduced by a cast of regular hosts -- a young, attractive, rainbow-hued crew whose improv skills aren't exactly Saturday Night Live material, but who are definitely way more attractive than Ron Popeil.

Droga's original plan was for each segment to be devoted to a single brand. But because clients have proved reluctant to plunge in, the site was redesigned to launch with a series of "curated" bits, sort of a Lucky magazine for the Web, with a variety of sneakers, or DVDs, or 12 great bras from different manufacturers. To find the best stuff for each "show," a team of Honeyshedders crawls the Web, tracking down the latest in sexy lingerie, handbags, gadgets, and hoodies -- all, of course, attached to brands, some big, some obscure. "The goal became to launch with a mother lode of content that would attract a mother lode of traffic," says Droga5 CEO Andrew Essex. Potential clients would see how their products would be featured on the site, in nonsponsored segments, along with those of their competitors. By phase two, they'd be asked to pony up, or risk seeing frisky mentions of their wares disappear into the ether. Essex insisted at press time that Honeyshed already has paying clients, but refused to name them.

The goal now is to establish a Honeyshed editorial voice, "to build our reputation as tastemakers," says Kim Howitt, 33, the head of development, who came to the enterprise after stints at Nickelodeon and the N, the nighttime network for teens. "Everything that goes through our doors, whether it's a paying client or not, is cherry-picked. At the end of the day, if we're really good at our job, we'll have the ability to make something hip." Going forward, "sponsored" content will likely commingle with "editorial" choices.

Honeyshed itself does the programming, mixing products and themes based on feedback transmitted through the site's digital backbone. A chat window alongside the programming lets viewers talk about what they're seeing. Each item featured will have an I WANT IT! button, and viewers can roll over it to get more information, or hit it to be connected to the relevant page on Nike.com, for example, or Sephora.com. A STASH button lets users save items to a kind of wish list, then email it to friends or drag it into a chat window or even a Facebook page.

Honeyshed hopes to induce its young target demo to open the site and leave it running on their desktops -- forever. The idea is to forge such a visceral connection that the cast members become constant companions, whether they're hawking from the corner of your PC screen or from your cell phone. "We want the site to have a family feel," Howitt says. "In this audience, shopping is a much bigger experience than just exchanging money. There's a social currency to just being informed, and expressing yourself through the things that you love. We want to embrace all that."

The Master Plan

B ack in new york, Droga knows that wish-listing alone ain't gonna cut it. In a world where you live and die by the numbers, he needs traffic -- and conversions. Last spring, Kenny sent a crew to Honeyshed New York to drill into everything from production workflow to platform architecture to online analytics. "Our advice was to make sure the experience extended beyond the site," he recalls. "So we suggested they create more social-network linkages, and construct the site so that pieces could be pulled into MySpace pages or linked to widgets." Now every product segment can be plucked from the Honeyshed site and passed along through any number of social media, self-propagating messages powered, Droga hopes, by the creative juice behind them.

"It's a very transparent model," he says, sounding remarkably Kenny-like. "Clients pay for time spent, for clicks. You're only paying for definitive eyeballs, not the promise of eyeballs. If people aren't clicking through, no one's being charged." He knocks wood. "Heaven forbid."

Droga may not yet know how this experiment ends, but in spirit, at least, it's true to Lévy's master plan. Sitting between his two Davids last spring at the Microsoft summit, Lévy had foretold a technology-enabled tsunami that would change media, consumer behavior, and access to content -- and have a massive disruptive effect on his industry. Accountability and creativity would work in unison, he said. The old silos would fall.