Publicis Shuts Down Honeyshed - Agency News - Advertising Age

We covered Honeyshed back in 2007 and we weren't that impressed with it then (see Experience Manifesto: HoneyShed) and now it seems that it's been shut down. They kept talking about it like it was something new & bold and it just never seemed to be much of either. And given most of the comments I've seen about it's closing, I'm not sure how much it's going to be missed.

The BNET Advertising Blog had this to say in their posting yesterday:

The site was hosted by painfully trendy presenters with amateurish presentation skills, making viewers wonder whether they were watching a satire of something they were too old or square to understand. There also seemed to be a high level of dependency upon girls in short-shorts.

It's another great example of people getting all caught up in cool words and shiny baubles (and, of course, scantily glad girls) and no one looking at the real value of what they're doing. I was surprised that there was no mention of any revenues in the articles I saw, but lots of talk about traffic and unique viewers and the like. But, it was supposed to be a retail site. They could've looked at Zappos or Amazon and looked at what made them work so well and then added the unique content elements that they tried.

And I know that I'm almost twice the target age, but I hated the content. Didn't find it compelling at all. I didn't get was so new and exciting about it. Even the folks at Honeyshed liked to call themselves a cross between QVC and MTV. Maybe they forgot to notice that QVC actually sells products. Maybe they spent so much working on their witty scripts that they didn't have time to work on figuring out how to actually sell products.

And given the success of Zappos, QVC, Amazon and others, I don't really see how this was the future of advertising either. Folks, it was funky infomercials! We've had those few years. Does no one remember that the commercials were actually done by the casts of radio shows and they seemed to be more a part of the show. It was only the effort to create a standard advertising buy that made us come up with the advertising world we know today.

But, I'm sure there'll be another shiny bauble that people are willing to christen the next big thing and we'll all forget about Honeyshed.

Publicis Groupe, citing economic pressures, has decided to shutter its much-watched online-shopping venture Honeyshed just months after it finally got up and running.

The ill-fated creative experiment was the brainchild of David Droga but was birthed through a partnership between Mr. Droga's agency, Droga5, hotshot production house Smuggler and funding from Publicis, which published reports put at about $25 million. Its aim was to reinvent the online-shopping experience to make it more entertaining and engaging for the 18- to 35-year-old-set. Users could digitally "window shop" brands via vignettes in which attractive youngsters peddle products on channels dubbed "Fun Shit" and "Kicks to Lids" before making online purchases.

"It's fine to be optimistic and bold about something that's new in this space, but given the economic climate, the promise of certainty is more responsible than the allure of massive potential," said Mr. Droga.

Publicis Shuts Down Honeyshed - Agency News - Advertising Age.

Publicis Closes Droga5’s Honeyshed — and Nobody Is Surprised | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET.