If Madonna herself asked you to go to a Web site and buy her latest CD, would you do it?
A local television producer and distributor is betting you will.
CF Entertainment Inc., which makes late-night syndicated TV shows like “Entertainers with Byron Allen” and “The American Athlete” is featuring celebrities on its programs to hawk its new EntertainmentStudios.com e-commerce and entertainment content site.
CF Entertainment’s television programs are an odd combination of talk show and infomercial; celebrities appear to tout their latest projects just as they do on conventional TV yakkers, but they hawk their wares in a much more aggressive way than they would with Letterman or Rosie, showing clips from their latest films or even giving out 800 numbers so people can buy their latest album. Now, the company is simply creating synergy between its TV shows and its Web site.
As most sites spend phenomenal amounts of money on promotion, CF Entertainment has found a way around buying expensive advertising time.
“A lot of dot-coms are burning through a great deal of capital unnecessarily, throwing elaborate parties and buying advertising time that won’t make a dent in consumer awareness,” said Byron Allen, founder of CF Entertainment and EntertainmentStudios.com. “I’m not going to make those mistakes.”
CF Entertainment is using the celebrities that appear on the seven hours of original programming it broadcasts each week as spokespeople. For example, Stephen Baldwin appeared on “Entertainers” to talk about his upcoming film “The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas,” and told viewers they could go to EntertainmentStudios.com to bid on autographed pictures from the movie. Madonna directed viewers to the site to pick up a copy of “The Next Best Thing” soundtrack while talking about the film. Allen himself now sits in front of a screen showing the site, and the name of his “Entertainers” show will be changed to “EntertainmentStudios.com” in the fall.
“So much of entertainment is an impulse buy; we’ve created a business model where people can act on it immediately,” Allen said.
The site, which is set to officially launch on April 22, will offer some content, including short celebrity interviews taken from CF Entertainment’s shows. But the main purpose is the site’s active e-commerce element.
All things entertainment will be available through the site, including movie tickets, CDs, videos, DVDs, memorabilia, movie posters and toys.
Like so many other sites these days, EntertainmentStudios.com is also building a business-to-business element. The company has already sealed deals with nearly 20 local broadcasters that will link those stations’ sites to EntertainmentStudios. As an incentive, each station will receive 5 percent of every sale that stems from its site.
Real Estate Online
Southern California certainly isn’t lacking in real estate-related Web sites.
From industry giant Homestore.com, a Thousand Oaks-based site offering access to residential listings and pages on moving advice, to TowerAuction.com, an L.A.-based residential real estate auction site, there’s a wide array of forums to suit every homebuyer’s needs.
But a new site, RealtyCity.net, will take Internet real estate to the next level by running an online brokerage.
“We are the first Internet real estate brokerage where our client is the real estate agent,” said Craig Washington, CEO of RealtyCity.net, which officially launched April 14.
On the site, independent real estate agents will have access to resources such as property searches, appraisals, arranging for home inspections, even ordering for-sale signs which are readily available to agents working out of brick-and-mortar brokerage firms.
Real estate agents are independent contractors. Those who sign on with a big-name firm, such as giant Coldwell Banker, must split their sales commissions with the firm. Working for a big-name business has its advantages, including the marketing power of the name-brand broker, but most agents working at such firms are under pressure to generate a large number sales every year.
Washington pointed to one example of a female agent who had a child and wanted to cut back her sales goal at a major brokerage. The brokerage asked her to maintain the same level of work she had been generating before she had her baby, which the agent was unwilling to do, so she left the firm.
RealtyCity.net is targeting part-time real estate agents like that new mother, those agents who make a smaller number of sales, perhaps less than 10 per year. As an added incentive, RealtyCity.net will allow agents to keep 100 percent of their commissions.
Because RealtyCity.net will not collect commissions, the company plans to generate its revenues through a $100 monthly membership fee. A flat fee of $350 will be also charged for each sales transaction conducted through the site, far less than the hefty commissions an agent might have to pay his or her brokerage firm per sale.
Staff reporter Laura Dunphy can be reached at [email protected].
Site of the Week
www.iBoost.com
It’s not flashy or sexy, like so many content sites based in Los Angeles. Instead, iBoost.com is a Web site jam-packed with information about, well, Web sites.
The iBoost Network, located at www.iBoost.com, offers users a series of no-cost or low-cost tools to build and promote Web sites, and targets IT and Internet marketing companies and other small businesses looking to improve their Web sites and increase productivity.
Want your site listed on major search engines? Want to swank up your site with new fonts, graphics, or traffic analysis? Have some domain names to register? You can do it all at iBoost, after registering for free by filling out a short survey.
There are also informational articles and a question-and-answer segment tackling HTML issues and other Webmaster-minded matters.
iBoost offers Web tools for every step of the way, from the site’s beginnings, to design, to promotion, to advertising, to personalizing. IBoost serves a very specific purpose, but it seems to be a solid one-stop-shopping source for a small company’s Web-site launching needs.
