The Web is still a murky area for some advertisers, and many seem unsure about how exactly it can be of benefit. If they are to follow the example of Nike, Molson, Roots and others, and contact Vancouver’s noisemedia – a three-year-old digital entertainment company – they may be pleasantly surprised, if not overwhelmed, by the options open to them.

Andrew Graham, noisemedia’s director of business development for film and television, says the company’s early forays into the ad market have succeeded. On paper, the company specializes in providing animated, cross-media content, with distribution channels that include broadcast, the Internet and wireless technologies. Sounds pretty impressive, but what does it mean to advertisers?

‘The service we are providing to the advertising community is a value-add proposition,’ says Graham. ‘An advertising agency has a host of clients who come to them regularly for traditional TV and print advertising campaigns. What noisemedia can do is offer the ability to produce an animated television commercial that can then be used cross-medium and cross-platform to both the Web and wireless devices, all within the one production pass.’

Plus, Graham says, the assets from the animated spot can be used for print and other traditional media as well. ‘The cost benefit and a value proposition is that we offer more than one service within one production pass, so it is a savings to the agencies and ultimately to their clients,’ he says.

The shop has been able to successfully develop its own process for creating spots utilizing its in-house talent, and that, says Graham, is what makes noisemedia unique. ‘We don’t have to just be an animation company whereby we sit on our hands and wait for production service work to come in,’ he says.

The company’s higher-profile gigs include online ad campaigns for Molson Export and Michelin. The Export work was attached to the successful ‘Had Ex Today’campaign, whereby noisemedia developed a series of animated e-cards through Molson’s interactive agency.

‘I think in the first week or so we had more than 55,000 sends, which is an Internet term describing how someone comes onto the site, sees and reads the card, views the ad and then sends it on to someone else,’ he says.

The Michelin work involved noisemedia acting as the third party contracted company to reproduce an animated version of the company mascot Bibendum (aka The Michelin Man – news to us, too), for a TV series pilot being pitched to the company. Noisemedia has also done interactive work for Roots and Nike.

Recently the company took its first steps into the music video realm, producing an animated clip for Turkish recording artist Mahir. Graham says the job was rewarding despite (or perhaps because of) the incredibly quick turnaround.

‘Inside about a four-week timeline we came up with the creative from scratch and went on to the character design of the Mahir figure. Then we put together what I think is one of the most entertaining animated music videos out there,’ he says. ‘This is more classical animation in its style, but all digital animation in its creation.’

Having been part of the noisemedia team that returned recently from the American Film Market in Santa Monica, CA, Graham says some other long-form TV projects are in the works at the shop. Noisemedia was at AFM to speak with domestic and foreign distributors about a number of its original animated properties.

During the market, noisemedia negotiated to produce an animated series called The Therapist, which will feature the voice of Andrew Dice Clay. Graham says the company has also set an ambitious goal to produce an animated film completely in Flash by the end of the year. *

-www.noisemedia.com