Andrew Marks Meow Mix House, New York City, June 10, 2006. Viewers can see 10 cats' antics at MeowMixHouse.com.

By Teresa F. Lindeman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "American Idol" has anointed the latest potential pop star, there's yet another "Apprentice" ready to go to work for Mr. Trump, and the biggest challenge for "The Biggest Loser" winners will be keeping the pounds off. Time for a summer lull in network programming.

But two new reality shows launched last week hope to capture viewers' imagination with dramas of a different sort. Which cat will get voted out of Meow Mix House? Will Brawny Man whip eight slobs into manly men worthy of their women? How many Americans will seek out these commercial-entertainment hybrids, e-mail them to their friends and buy the products?

Advertisers have long had a cozy relationship with reality TV shows, but the next generation of the genre -- or at least a second cousin -- may be the commercial as reality show. Instead of inserting sponsors into the story line, sponsors are the story, the producers, the directors, the editors -- in short, the whole kit and caboodle.

Last Monday, the first episode of "Brawny Academy" went up on the Web. New episodes should arrive every two weeks as the cameras follow eight men who spent several days at a Northern California lodge in the woods learning useful skills such as how not to live like pigs and how to be more romantic.

The guys aren't actors, but their mentor is. Original Brawny Man John Brennan brings to life the iconic role that's been used to sell paper towels since the 1970s. The tone of the first episode is earnest but humorous: "I'm the Brawny Man, but my friends just call me ... 'Brawny Man'," says the flannel-shirt clad woodsman as he looks over his new charges.

The tongue-in-cheek sensibility also comes through at MeowMixHouse.com, where the cat food makers have trained Webcams on 10 feline contestants that last Tuesday were moved into a specially designed place on Madison Avenue in New York. They'll be staying until this Friday.

In addition to the opportunity to watch cats doing whatever it is cats do all day (sleeping seems popular), people can watch three-minute episodes Friday nights at 9 p.m. on the Animal Planet channel. The TV programs, complete with a human host and voice-overs for the felines, began last week and are scheduled to run for 10 weeks.

Both ventures have scored public relations points for the brands and their parent companies -- Del Monte Foods (Meow Mix) and Georgia-Pacific (Brawny). Meow Mix marketing director Ira Cohen stayed busy last week doing interviews with media outlets, including live radio chats and TV appearances. Brawny Man has not been lacking for attention either.

Classes have begun at the Brawny Academy, where Brawny Man attempts to whip girly men into manly men. Check it out at www.brawnyacademy.com. Click photo for larger image.

It will take longer to determine whether these so-called long-form commercials will sell more cat food and paper towels -- and how the rest of the advertising industry will respond.

Clearly, agency executives and creative teams will watch and learn from the latest experiments in blending entertainment and commercial messages through a mix of traditional and new mediums.

"The whole industry is moving towards a convergence," said Peter Rush, director of interactive marketing for Station Square ad agency Marc USA/Pittsburgh.

Consumers who once faithfully watched three major TV networks and read a newspaper are splitting their attention between many different forms of entertainment, from cable channels to Web sites to video games and more. Even if viewers of a particular TV show are perfect for an advertiser, those people may be Tivo-ing out the commercials.

If advertisers can't chase consumers the old-fashioned way, they hope they can persuade consumers to chase them instead. To be sure, nobody will see Brawny Academy without going on the Web to look for it, but the company is trying to herd consumers there through traditional TV commercials (and stories such as this about the unique approach).

If a Web site's message is funny enough or touching or useful, consumers may do even more of the marketing work by e-mailing links to their friends. This advertiser's dream scenario falls under the category of viral marketing.

Burger King had a viral success with subservientchicken.com, a Web site where a person in a chicken suit responds to typed requests from Internet users. Professional marketers came up with that idea, but a mention on a teenager's MySpace.com space that is passed along to friends can be just as contagious.

"The whole Internet space offers a completely different way for a brand to interact," said Steven Sage, vice president of marketing for Georgia-Pacific's towel business, which includes the Brawny line.

Five or 10 years ago, it would have been hard to justify the expense of producing a show for Web users with slow dial-up connections. Now, more than half of the nation's online population has broadband Internet access at home, according to Nielsen//Net Ratings.

In 2004, Ford Motor Co. commissioned a Web project to attract younger consumers to its Mercury line. In its "Meet The Lucky Ones" episodes, a story about what the company described as a quirky, slightly dysfunctional family played out over five weeks. The cars weren't the story, just a presence in it.

Similarly, in both the Meow Mix and Brawny projects, the products are present but not the focus of the story. Brawny Man pulls names out of a hat in the first episode and the names are written on paper towels. A Webcam shot of the Meow Mix House shows a bowl of what's probably the company's cat food on a table.

The cats, all from shelters around the country, will be adopted after the show and the winner will get a "job" with the company. In both projects, viewers can vote on the Web for characters they like.

Two weeks into its project, Ford claimed it had collected 23,000 e-mail addresses from people who wanted more information about it and 825,000 unique visitors had gone to the project's Web site.

Meow Mix, acquired last month by San Francisco-based Del Monte Foods, has pulled other unusual stunts to get attention, including a restaurant serving cats and a TV show for cats. A sort of "halo" effect of raised consumer awareness after each of those has lasted more than a year, said Mr. Cohen.

Not every product is suited for these kind of projects and not every company can afford to do them, said Mr. Rush, of Marc USA. Making a film of any kind takes money and some expertise, and there's no guarantee the critics and consumers won't hate it.

"Can advertisers, and in this case advertising agencies, produce long form [spots]?" he asked. "We're the master of the 15-second and the 30-second."

The Brawny concept was developed by Fallon Worldwide, a Minneapolis ad agency, but a producer with experience on TV reality shows was brought in to make it.

Mr. Rush, who watched the 13-minute piece, thought it might test consumers' attention spans by running so long, although he thought the producers nailed the reality show genre.

If the women who tend to be the buyers of paper towels do respond well, it will likely be because the company managed to align a rather boring household product with that age-old theme, the battle of the sexes.

Mr. Sage, at Georgia-Pacific, said 80 percent of the callers to the company's hot line have been positive and most are from women who want to nominate their own men. He said the company has not decided yet whether there will be a second season of Brawny Academy.

Andrew Marks A cat cavorts at a feline domicile in New York City. Viewers can see 10 cats' antics at MeowMixHouse.com.