Claire Beale on Advertising

ate is gorgeous. It helps. Big eyes, nice hair, good teeth: handy if you're asking people to stare at you on a computer screen, day in day out. See, Kate's a Bebo chick. She's got her profile up on the social- networking site so that she can showcase her art, and has taken to posting a regular video diary about her life.

So, we know that Kate likes listening to Prince and The Kooks, watching Toy Story and The Sound of Music, the art of Jeff Koons and Peter Blake, and is scared of werewolves and doctors. You can check Kate out at bebo.com/abstractheart.

Except that Kate's not real. She's an actress and this is a very 21st-century commercial venture. This is KateModern and you're being sold.

Kate's a con. She's a work of fiction and an advertising vehicle and a smart solution to the thorny question of how to make more money out of the web. She is also, according to Bebo, "at the centre of the dialogue about how online programming is shaping teenage viewing habits". Interesting, then.

If you've heard of Lonelygirl15, you'll get the picture. Lonelygirl is another internet video diary that last year became the world's most popular interactive drama. That might not sound like much of a claim (how many interactive dramas are there?), but it has been viewed more than 60 million times. For a web-based story-line, 60 million is good going.

Bebo claims 8.8 million UK users. MySpace is bigger, Facebook, the social-networking site of the moment, is the fastest-rising. So Bebo has a fight on its hands when it comes to a share of advertising budgets.

To make more money, Bebo has turned its hand to broadcasting, teaming up with the Lonelygirl creators to produce its own soap: KateModern. There's a similar soap-opera idea running on Youtube. "Where are the Joneses?" is produced by Baby Cow, sponsored by Ford, and only accessible online. The difference with KateModern is that it's being paid for by Bebo, making Bebo just like a traditional commercial broadcaster.

Here's the thinking: if KateModern is a success, and word spreads, more people will log on to Bebo, which will give the site a bigger audience to sell to advertisers. And the audience will hang around on the site a little longer, not just watching Kate's videos but reading her blog, posting messages and pictures on her page, suggesting story lines, interacting.

Not just that, though. KateModern gives Bebo a whole new revenue pool in which to fish. Bebo is recruiting advertisers to get involved in product placement in KateModern, weaving their brands into the story line to give them greater commercial exposure. And it allows Bebo to break free from the traditional online advertising model, where the website owner gets paid depending on how many of their site visitors actually click on the advertising banners and buttons. Microsoft, Orange, Buena Vista and Procter & Gamble (Gilette, Pantene, Tampax) have all signed up to place their products into the KateModern show.

So far so good. But what are the advertisers really getting for their money? Well, Kate's profile on Bebo has been viewed 23,000 times (at the time of writing), and counting, so people are tuning in, but that's still pretty tiny: compared with a typical Coronation Street audience (15 million on a good night), Kate's a squirt.

But she's a cool squirt, and one with whom you can have a two-way "relationship": post her a picture and she might post a note back saying thanks. When was the last time you shot the breeze with Vera Duckworth? And if you're chasing young consumers, Kate's a good icon to hitch your brand's star to: smart, interesting and, like I said, gorgeous.

Bebo says that the advertisers involved with the show are paying the "equivalent" of a high-profile TV show targeting a similar 13-24 year-old audience. I'm sceptical about that, but then I guess it depends how you define "equivalent". If it's pro-rata on the numbers of viewers and time spent watching, then maybe.

Either way, one thing's sure: you'll be hearing more about KateModern and stories like hers. The web soap is broadening advertisers' horizons and swelling digital coffers, and the novelty of getting involved in a story line is drawing us in fast. The online soap has arrived.

After a few minutes' viewing, it's clear that KateModern is a slick production. Compared with the user-generated content (UGC) elsewhere on the web, this is class. Which is just as well for the advertisers involved, because a new study has found that we're getting fed up with all this UGC stuff. It's just not very good. And once the novelty has worn off, you're left with a load of juvenile stunts and dodgy editing.

Research by the interactive media consultancy Conchango and the Future Laboratory has found that nine out of 10 of us don't trust blogs, forums and all the other user-generated editorial you find all over the web.

Maybe that's partly because 20 per cent of us are now "generating content" ourselves, and know what blather we're apt to post, so why should we trust others to be more accurate?

All of which is resoundingly encouraging for the experts (journalists, broadcasters, producers). You see, professional content-creators worry that, as digital gains fashionability at the expense of traditional media, demand for their skills and experience will die out. But it seems that, when we're online, we want proper editors to sift through the content and present us with trustworthy, well-crafted and expertly selected information.

The survey also found that, in spite of recent phone-in/Queen-tiff scandals, the BBC is still the UK's most reliable source of information, whereas the web encyclopedia Wikipedia is only trusted by 2 per cent of us. And although 62 per cent of us go online for our fix of news, we still gravitate towards the established publishers (newspaper and magazine sites) for our information.

All of which is good news for good old-fashioned media owners worried that the web will eat their lunch. The message seems to be that, if they can capture online the essence of what they've been doing for years offline, then both they and their revenues can survive in the digital age. Phew.

* You've got to hand it to Trevor Beattie. Despite being one of adland's more seasoned creatives, he still has an infectious passion and enthusiasm for his craft. And true to the launch positioning of his agency, Beattie McGuinness Bungay, Beattie is now exercising his creative muscles well beyond traditional advertising.

Beattie, a lifelong aviation obsessive, has just landed the brief to design the look of the new super plane, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for the holiday firm First Choice. From the seat covers to the tail fin, BMB will spearhead the look and feel of the craft.

At a time when ad agencies are worried that their clients just see them as peddlers of a commodity, it's great to see a client/agency relationship that goes well beyond just filling spots and space.

Beale's best in show – smirnoff (JWT)

Where have all the advertising blockbusters gone? Those ads that cost a fortune and then stretch the budget to the max to create a full-length, filmic visual treat; the sort of ads with better production values and scripting than the programmes they punctuate.

Blame the advertising bean counters for the proliferation of cheap ads made in haste, and applaud Smirnoff for giving it large on its new campaign: a 60-second cinematic breath-taker of a TV ad by JWT, backed by a live-action web game by AKQA.

The TV commercial is a full-on extravaganza, with all the junk (old ships, crashed planes, the sunken statuary of the ancient world) being purged from the ocean floor and dumped on dry land. Smirnoff, you see, is purified to distilled perfection.

This is a classic commercial. It's the sort of ad that you stop your PVR fast-forwarding to watch, over and over. And when you're done with that you can go online and play with the Smirnoff Purifier cannon that fires detritus from the seabed to the shore. More like this, please.

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign' clairebeale@haynet.com