Publicis Closes Droga5's Honeyshed -- and Nobody Is Surprised

Publicis is to shutter Honeyshed, its online shopping experiment via agency Droga5, Adweek reports. Ten employees are to be laid off.

The move was completely predictable, as everyone who watched Honeyshed — an online video site that hoped to make home-shopping trendy and ironic — hated it.

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 (see screengrab).

It was difficult to navigate, featuring a series of animated menu buttons that never seemed to hold still long enough for you to click on them.

And because the site was driven by video, surfing quickly for items (which online shoppers like to do), was impossible.

In business terms, the proposition of the site was questionable from the start: Could the audience it appeared to be addressing possibly be large enough to sustain the revenues required to make it a going venture?

As the site never attracted products from the kinds of brands that people actually like to buy — Abercrombie & Fitch, for instance — the answer appeared to be no. Typical example: On the day of Adweek’s report, HoneyShed’s main offer was the “Don’t Cramp My Style Tampon Case.”

Here’s CEO Steve Greifer’s take:

“The reception we got in terms of the insights of marketing to Generation Y and the combination of entertainment and commerce and social networking was good,” Griefer said. “All the themes behind Honeyshed were well received. The issues we ran into were budget issues, timing issues and to some degree cost issues.”

So … wouldn’t the budget and cost issues be the kind of thing you’d want to check on before you started something like this?

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