"Bud.TV represents Anheuser-Busch’s search
for a toehold in a world where the traditional advertising model revolving around
30-second ads has been sideswiped by technological change and the proliferation
of entertainment choices. The company, like almost every big marketer, is also
trying to seize on the video-sharing democratization of YouTube, albeit on its
own controlling terms."
BrewTube
By LORNE MANLY | The New York Times | February 4, 2007
For the past 26 years, Jim Schumacker has toiled for the marketing machine that
is the Anheuser-Busch Companies, doing his part to stoke Americans’ cravings
for a cool Bud, or a Michelob, or a Bud Light. Eight of those years were spent
overseeing the beer maker’s creation of 30-second commercials, those gently
mocking vignettes whose characters and catch-phrases often burrowed their ways
into the nation’s consciousness.
But lately, the man everyone calls Schu has been working on a different sort of
content, programming for a new online entertainment network called Bud.TV. The
network, which will make its debut on Monday at www.bud.tv, is the most ambitious
and costly effort to date of a marketer creating Web content tailored to its own
specifications. And Schumacker, a 54-year-old avuncular sort partial to earth-tone
suede sandals and with a soul patch that sets off his thatch of wavy salt-and-pepper
hair, is the project’s creative shepherd.
One of the first shows that will appear on Bud.TV is called “Finish Our Film,”
a mash-up of reality show and making-of-a-film documentary that will be produced
by LivePlanet, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company, best known
for “Project Greenlight.” LivePlanet will shoot the first and last minutes
of a short film and ask hopeful auteurs to plot out the middle. The person with
the best treatment will be invited to Los Angeles, and every last moment of the
moviemaking process (or ordeal) will be captured on digital tape.
The concept as concocted by the writers, who have done their time at the likes
of “The Howard Stern Show,” “The Man Show” and “Da Ali
G Show,” would at first glance be perfectly suited for a beer commercial.
The film opens in a strip club during a raucous bachelor party, where a groom-to-be
named Steve suffers through a lap dance. But the party-hearty tone swiftly changes
when the flirtatious dancer turns deadly serious, urgently warning her abashed
customer that if he desires to live past the night, he’d better grab the
note nestled in her cleavage. Steve does as he’s told, and when the film
resumes, he is seen beaten, blindfolded and bound to a chair, a firing squad taking
aim.
Strippers notwithstanding, much of the pitch for “Finish Our Film” subverts
the expectations of a beer company — it’s closer to the mind games of
the David Fincher movie “The Game” than the bacchanal of “Bachelor
Party.” And Schumacker, whose official title is vice president of digital
marketing and branded entertainment, and other executives at Anheuser-Busch want
the rest of Bud.TV to do the same. Yes, the site will carry the high-concept comedy
of “Replaced by a Chimp,” in which a great ape tries to do the job of
its evolutionary betters, including dentist, car mechanic and ad executive.
But Bud.TV is striving to be more than a repository for Budweiser ads and lighthearted,
slightly mocking beer-commercial humor; Schumacker and his team are aiming to
redefine what an online entertainment network and marketer-created content can
mean in a short-attention-span world.
Performers and writers from “Saturday Night Live” have signed on to
create and star in recurring series. Kevin Spacey’s production company, Trigger
Street Films, has agreed to supply short movies. Satirical shows about celebrity
entitlement and the news are on the schedule. The sports announcer Joe Buck may
do a talk show from the back of a New York cab. And Schumacker has acquired a
slickly produced science-fiction series, made in conjunction with the leading
video-game maker Electronic Arts. Most of the shows will run from one to eight
minutes, but some will be as long as a half-hour.
Bud.TV may be a marketing venture at heart, but it is marketing sotto voce. The
shows’ plots won’t revolve around the quest for the perfect beer and
a beautiful woman to share it with. Characters won’t declaim the virtues
of Budweiser’s freshness at every opportunity. The site won’t be
cluttered with banner ads. Anheuser-Busch executives are banking on a more subtle
connection. Attach a brand name to something cool, something entertaining, and
that elusive young man (and to a lesser extent, young woman) may check out Bud.TV’s
offerings again and again, send them along to friends, even take a stab at creating
his own minifilm for the site. Cultivate that warm, fuzzy feeling about Budweiser,
and the company may cement the loyalty of the existing customer, or better, woo
the uncommitted or hard-to-reach drinker to a Bud Light or a Michelob or a Peels
malt-liquor beverage.
Bud.TV represents Anheuser-Busch’s search for a toehold in a world where
the traditional advertising model revolving around 30-second ads has been sideswiped
by technological change and the proliferation of entertainment choices. The company,
like almost every big marketer, is also trying to seize on the video-sharing democratization
of YouTube, albeit on its own controlling terms.
It’s an expensive undertaking — it’s expected to cost more than
$30 million in its first year — and one that could be mistaken for creative
hubris. Anheuser-Busch has created some of the more memorable 30-second ads, like
the wisecracking lizards Frank and Louie, the “I Love You, Man” Man,
the “Whassup?” guys and Ted Ferguson, the Bud Light daredevil who attempts
feats of amazing inconsequentiality. But full-fledged original programming is
something else entirely. Ultimately, Anheuser-Busch executives told me, they believe
they have no choice but to take this leap of faith. “If we don’t start
playing in this digital game now,” said Tony Ponturo, Anheuser-Busch’s
vice president of global media and sports marketing and Schumacker’s boss,
“we’re going to be playing catch-up for a long time. And this is an
industry that can’t afford catch-up.”
On the Tuesday before Christmas, Anheuser-Busch’s digital adventure took
Schumacker and his colleagues to the Venice Center for Peace With Justice and
the Arts, a squat, faded yellow building bordering a skateboard park a few miles
from the Pacific Ocean. During the day, the community center holds programs for
special-needs kids. It also contains, on the second floor, the achingly hip office
of Matt Piedmont.
Piedmont has never worked for an advertiser before. A former writer for “Saturday
Night Live” and a consulting producer for David Spade’s “Showbiz
Show” on Comedy Central, he spends most of his days creating TV pilots and
movie projects, like the film with Spade and Ice Cube, tentatively titled “Someone
Stole My Weed.” But Anheuser-Busch has brought him aboard to serve as executive
producer over what will be one of Bud.TV’s signature shows, “Happy Hour.”
Each weekday, at 4:55, “Happy Hour” will feature a new one- to four-minute
episode of a rotating group of comic series. That week in December, Piedmont wrote
eight episodes for most of the series, with help from Matt Murray, a current “Saturday
Night Live” writer who gave up a chunk of his holiday hiatus to work on “Happy
Hour.”
Describing the tone and image he was shooting for in these shows, Piedmont tossed
out admiring references to the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” and
the absurdist oeuvre of Wes Anderson (“Rushmore” and “The Royal
Tenenbaums”). He plans for the silly/smart mix to have plenty of deadpan
and observational humor, and he hopes to inject a visual sense a cut above typical
Web programming, thanks to the use of two high-definition cameras (one a Steadicam)
and high-end post-production. But these shows are still being done quick and on
the cheap; the budget for all six of the “Happy Hour” shows comes in
well under $1 million.
As “The Beat Goes On” by the Young-Holt Unlimited played on the turntable,
Piedmont ran through the concepts. “Ice Vision and Chef” follows in
mockumentary style the comeback attempt of a defrocked superhero, Ice Vision,
whose special powers went to his head and got him booted out of the Elite League.
In “Futureman,” a technician at the Institute for Science and Research
Institutional Institute makes contact with a man from the future who’d like
to benefit today’s world with his knowledge, only to display an appalling
ignorance of anything important.
Piedmont’s comedy connections have paid off in casting. During his six years
on “Saturday Night Live,” he wrote often for and with Tim Meadows, and
the actor has agreed to play Ice Vision. “I can relate to the character,”
Meadows said with a laugh when he dropped by the office for a meeting later that
day. “He once had it all and lost it.” Chris Parnell and Kevin Farley,
brother of the late Chris Farley, have filmed their “Futureman” episodes.
Comic short-form videos are a staple of the Web these days, particularly at sites
like Heavy.com, which cater to young men, and the rest of Bud.TV’s lineup
will be filled with such offerings, some with the requisite audience participation.
“Blow Stuff Up” (although the actual title uses a more profane noun)
allows the public to submit videos showing the objects they detest most and why
they’d like to see those objects destroyed. And just as John Candy and Joe
Flaherty did on SCTV’s “Farm Film Report,” the show’s professional
pyrotechnicians will blow up those hated possessions “real good.”
Bud.TV’s parody of reality competition shows, “Fool’s Gold,”
follows 12 contestants on a search for buried treasure in Death Valley, Calif.
They’ll quickly find millions of dollars in gold nuggets, but the bonanza
comes with a catch: they can keep only what they can carry out of the desert,
and they have to survive the physical and mental challenges set to them by a crusty
old miner named Pick Ax Pete. “Every day is a wacky death march,” said
Alex Keledjian of Omelet, the Los-Angeles-based agency that came up with the idea.
But Schumacker insists that he doesn’t want Bud.TV to be pigeonholed, and
if one program demonstrates his ambitions for Bud.TV, it’s the science-fiction
series “Afterworld.” The series tracks an advertising executive on a
business trip who wakes up in a country where hundreds of millions of people have
suddenly gone missing; he then tries to make his way home to see if his wife and
child are still alive. The mix of live action and animation (from Electronic Arts)
runs 130 episodes; a new one will be doled out each weekday.
“People aren’t expecting that from Bud.TV,” Schumacker said. “Which
I think also is a benefit for us, long-term, to balance out that whole ‘Oh,
those guys are going to give us the comedy act’ to ‘Wow, they’re
going to have a broad range of programming.’ ”
The idea for Bud.TV came to Schumacker about two years ago, when he confronted
at least 300 commissioned scripts for commercials piled on his office conference
table. “This is insane what we’re doing,” he told his colleagues.
Only a handful would make it on to television. And some of these scripts, he saw,
could be better if the characters were developed and the story lines were extended,
perhaps on the Web, which a younger generation was increasingly turning to not
only for information or blabbing with friends but also as an entertainment option.
“And I said, ‘Let’s start Bud.TV,’ ” he recalled. “We
all laughed about it. And then I got up and went and got a soda, and when I came
back I said, ‘I’m serious.’ ” His colleagues were skeptical.
“They’re like, ‘Good luck selling that,’ ” he said.
But Schumacker, who at the time was the head of creative development for the company,
was not the only executive there thinking along those lines. Tim Murphy, the senior
director of digital marketing, was hatching his own idea for an online network.
And persuading their bosses was surprisingly easy. What drove Anheuser-Busch
to build a site that will dwarf every corporate foray into digital entertainment
that has come before was a combination of changing drinking and media habits.
Not only is beer losing ground to wine and liquor, Anheuser-Busch’s market
share has slipped, and its flagship brand, Budweiser, saw its dollar sales tumble
7.5 percent in the 52 weeks ending Dec. 3, 2006, according to Information Resources
Inc., which tracks supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandise outlets (excluding
Wal-Mart.) No turnaround will be possible without capturing the impressionable
taste buds of people entering their prime drinking years. But that potential Bud
lover is a particularly devilish person to reach and a difficult one to talk to,
particularly these days, and particularly through traditional 30-second commercials.
The TiVo generation revels in its newfound power to control the television-viewing
experience, dictating the terms of how and when to watch their favorites in ways
unfathomable only a decade ago. And increasingly, that means skipping right past
the ads that marketers spend billions on every year to produce and put on the
air.
Anheuser-Busch’s 30-second spots still work better than many, largely because
of their crowd-pleasing humor. (Last year, in the three days after the Super Bowl,
the beer maker’s ads were viewed more than 21 million times on the Web.)
But no advertiser is immune to the shifting media landscape, and connecting with
tomorrow’s beer drinker will become only tougher in the years ahead. Already
Anheuser-Busch has slashed the percentage of its advertising budget devoted to
network television, from 53.5 percent ($292.8 million of the total $547.1 million)
in 2004 to 47.3 percent ($287.2 of $606.7 million) in 2005, according to TNS Media
Intelligence, which tracks advertising spending. The company told investors in
November that 2007 will see network television play an even smaller part in the
beer maker’s marketing. But shoving those ads to the Web, where the multitasking,
short-attention-span crowd spends hours and hours, won’t suffice.
Even though Anheuser-Busch has no track record in the dicey world of content creation,
TV networks in the past expressed interest in making some of the company’s
most popular characters — Leon, the me-first athlete; the “I Love You,
Man” Man, who would do and promise anything for a Bud Light; the talking
lizards — into sitcom stars. And while none of those flirtations with prime
time led to anything, “All those things start to click in your head,”
Ponturo, Schumacker’s boss, told me. “I guess we’re sort of hoping
that we catch a little bit of that magic with the stuff we’re doing on Bud.TV.”
Anheuser-Busch’s desire to call the creative shots evokes the early days
of television and radio. Marketers did not pay merely to have their products plugged
relentlessly on the likes of “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,”
during which Gracie would extol Carnation condensed milk while pouring herself
a cup of coffee. They often owned the shows themselves and directed their ad agencies
to produce them. Colgate had its “Comedy Hour” and Texaco its “Star
Theater” (and a cross-dressing Milton Berle). But a burgeoning star structure
and a unionizing industry jacked up production costs, and companies began souring
on the joys of ownership. The quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s extinguished
any lingering infatuation, with the exception of soap operas and a straggler or
two. It was more economical for advertisers to buy time for their messages, and
it proved to be a great business for the networks too.
But those once-clear-cut divisions between network and marketer, between creator
and financial backer, have begun to blur. As digital video recorders become a
staple of the home-entertainment center, advertisers are embracing product placement
to a degree they never did before, working their products into reality shows and,
more recently, into the scripts of dramas and comedies. Every self-respecting
advertising agency has started a division devoted to what is euphemistically called
“brand integration,” the better to display their clients’ wares
and buff their images in projects they can exert more control over or own outright.
And studios, like the television group at Warner Brothers, have begun divisions
to develop Web, wireless and other programming with advertisers.
Office Max created a reality show about preteens preparing for high school that
was shown on ABC Family. Unilever turned its Axe body spray into a special for
MTV called “Game Killers.” PepsiCo financed “First Descent,”
a documentary about snowboarders (produced by LivePlanet), convinced that Mountain
Dew embodies the live-life-to-the-fullest ethos of the featured snowboarders.
And the Crispin, Porter & Bogusky ad agency is shopping a movie treatment
based on the big-headed King mascot it created for Burger King, the one that pops
up in the most unsettling places (like someone’s bed) to serve a piping-hot
sandwich.
Anheuser-Busch has plastered its products into shows like “Entourage”
and developed elaborate marketing tie-ins with movies like “Wedding Crashers.”
Like most marketers, however, it has so far refrained from jumping into the television-
or movie-production business (except for its sports-production unit, which televises
events like St. Louis Cardinals baseball games), dissuaded by the cost and the
craziness of Hollywood.
Web content, however, is not as expensive to assemble as television shows or movies,
making it an attractive place to experiment. And viewers’ acceptance of the
rawness of Web video, in contrast to expectations of perfectly executed television
programming, gives Bud.TV executives room to tinker that network executives don’t
enjoy. The promise of control, a concept woven into the company’s culture,
was also deeply appealing and is something Anheuser-Busch would not have if it
followed the more traditional route of running its online programs on third-party
Web sites or working its products into someone else’s creation.
“It’s their own sandbox,” says Joseph Jaffe, the author of “Life
After the 30-Second Spot.” “And because it’s their own sandbox,
they can make their own rules.”
In an Anheuser-Busch conference room in St. Louis at the end of last November,
Ponturo placed a DVD into the player, and the first episode of “Truly Famous”
began to unfold. The show, a satirical look at celebrity culture, tags along reality-style
with its faux Spanish star, dubbed Crisanto, who comes complete with agent, publicist,
personal assistant and bodyguard. The entourage sweeps into Los Angeles establishments
catering to the rich and pampered and proceeds to see how much swag and sycophantic
behavior they can attract. Hilarity, and crowds, ensue. “We actually had
real paparazzi chasing the fake paparazzi,” said Todd Brandes, a DDB Chicago
executive who has worked with Anheuser-Busch for nearly a decade.
In this episode, Crisanto and company arrive at a hair salon on Rodeo Drive in
Beverly Hills. The staff scurries to pay homage to the celebrity among them, even
though they’re clueless about who he is. Crisanto receives not only a free
haircut (worth hundreds of dollars), but his posse gets lunch ($28 tuna-fish sandwiches)
and wine on the house.
“Would it be too crass to have them ask for Bud or Bud Light?” Ponturo
asked.
Schumacker pondered the question. “In Beverly Hills, that probably wouldn’t
work.” He added, “We have to be careful we’re not promoting other
alcoholic drinks.” Perhaps a request for Peels, the fruit-flavored malt beverage
aimed at a more upscale audience, would make creative sense.
“Is that going to hurt us?” asked David Rolfe, the lead DDB Chicago
executive on the Bud.TV account, before answering the question himself. “As
long as the entertainment value is there, customers won’t mind.”
The philosophical argument continued, as the same team members often took both
sides of the debate as they struggled to make policy. “We want to make sure
we’re not forcing the product,” Schumacker said.
“But the same time not be scared to promote it,” Rolfe added.
Ponturo then issued his edict. “Shoot the blatant but well-done product shot,”
he said. “But if it doesn’t work, leave it on the cutting-room floor.”
Both Ponturo and Schumacker understand that pounding Anheuser-Busch products into
programming could make Bud.TV seem like nothing more than a propaganda machine.
Traditional media is the place for obvious commercialization. “On the entertainment
side, you’re better to err on the side of subtlety,” Ponturo said. As
it turns out, the first four episodes of “Truly Famous” will carry no
product placement.
A similar restrained philosophy also holds for the style of humor — there
may be bleeped-out cursing, but no insulting, gratuitous or “Jackass”-style
humor will be tolerated. “We want to be edgy, we want to be fun and interesting,
but I really want some class to it,” Ponturo said. “At the end of the
day,” he added, “we’re a public company whose ultimate mission
is to sell a whole lot of beer. So we don’t want to put ourselves at risk
for the wrong reasons.”
Anheuser-Busch’s very entry into online entertainment, however, invites confrontations,
and some obvious adversaries have already made their displeasure known. In October,
60 health, safety and child-protection organizations urged the celebrities associated
with Bud.TV — Affleck, Damon, Spacey, Vince Vaughn, whose “Wild West
Comedy Tour” will be featured — to insist that Anheuser-Busch install
stringent age-verification measures. But that demand seemed almost beside the
point, as it was coupled with a plea for the stars to reconsider their participation
altogether.
Any utopian dreams for an Internet free of commercialization may have been dashed
years ago, but efforts by beer, wine and liquor companies still touch a raw nerve.
“It’s not as if Colgate-Palmolive is undertaking the initiative,”
says David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing
and Youth at Georgetown University. “We’re not talking dish soap. We’re
talking about the No. 1 drug problem of kids.”
The Internet, with no government oversight and leaky parental controls, only compounds
the problems. Self-imposed age-verification measures are almost laughable in their
naïveté. Most ask visitors if they are of age, or ratcheting up the
level of difficulty, request people to punch in their dates of birth to ensure
they meet the qualifications. All that’s needed to get around that more advanced
system are some basic math skills and a desire to sneak past the virtual bouncer.
Anheuser-Busch, to its credit, will have one of the smarter gatekeepers keeping
watch over Bud.TV. It has bought an identity-verification system used by casinos
and banks, Aristotle’s Integrity, which checks the names and Zip codes against
driver’s licenses and other public records.
Yet once vetted, there’s nothing to stop Bud.TV viewers from sharing the
goodies with under-age friends, relatives or complete strangers on YouTube. Anheuser-Busch
executives understand this viral loophole. With its inherent pass-it-on nature,
Web video demands to be shared. Not only does it provide street cred; it’s
also an inexpensive way to get the word out. And the Bud.TV logo will be emblazoned
on every shared video.
But the YouTube model has it limits as far as Bud.TV executives are concerned.
When it comes to the buzz phrase of the media moment — “user-generated
content” — they think they have crafted a strategy to rein in some of
the overexuberance that has frustrated and even embarrassed several advertisers.
Last spring, Chevrolet invited people to create their own video spots for its
Tahoe sport-utility vehicle. Thirty thousand people submitted entries during the
four-week contest, but the few ads that subverted Chevrolet’s intention by
linking the Tahoe to global warming and sexual inadequacy garnered the bulk of
the headlines. Marketing experts argue that it’s a small price to pay for
connecting with today’s more skeptical, harder-to-reach consumers, and they
urge companies to relinquish control and learn to love it. Anheuser-Busch executives
do not agree. “I think YouTube does what it does just fine,” Schumacker
said, adding, “I don’t want to be YouTube.”
So Anheuser-Busch will lend a guiding hand, offering freedom with a catch. For
its “Real Men of Genius” contest, which it is working on with JibJab,
an online video site lauded for its singing wrap-ups of the year in politics,
Bud.TV will provide plenty of components for people to build their ads around,
including audio tracks and filmed openings and endings. The ads, parodies of 1980s
advertising and power ballads (à la Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian”),
mock-salute the shlubs of America, like Mr. Underwear Inspector No. 12 and Mr.
Really Bad Toupee Wearer. The creator of the best ad will get to make an actual
Bud Light commercial.
“If 2006 was the year of user-generated content, in 2007 you’ll see
elevated production levels,” said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab.
“We call it the coloring book versus the canvas.”
Bud.TV still represents just a tiny fraction of Anheuser-Busch’s billion-dollar-plus
annual marketing budget, more than $600 million of which will be spent on traditional
advertising in 2007, but it’s likely to cost a lot more than anticipated,
and its benefits will be difficult to assess. Officially, Anheuser-Busch has budgeted
more than $30 million for the start-up costs and the first year of operations
of the site, but Ponturo told me that figure is likely to pass $40 million by
the time 2007 comes to a close.
The Web site’s technological demands have proved costlier than planned, and
Bud.TV’s voracious appetite for new content — at least 15 new segments
will be posted each week — has eaten through expectations and forced Schumacker
and his team to decide as they go just how much they are willing to spend on programming.
The development and production tally for the first three shows Bud.TV commissioned
(“Truly Famous,” “Replaced by a Chimp” and a makeover show
for clueless Casanovas called “What Girls Want”) came in around $2 million,
averaging between $20,000 and $25,000 a minute. At that rate, Ponturo told me,
the annual budget would be sapped in a matter of months. “You can let the
ball of yarn get away from you very fast,” Ponturo said. The later shows,
he added, are costing a more affordable $6,000 a minute.
Beyond keeping a lid on programming costs, Bud.TV executives will also deal with
some of the pit-of-the-stomach dread that comes with the job description of any
network executive: the tyranny of ratings. If after a year, between two million
and three million people between the ages of 21 and 34 are visiting each month,
“It would put us in high cotton,” Ponturo said. (An audience of that
size would tower over what sites like Heavy.com and Break.com see.) But if that
traffic figure is stalled in the mid-six-figures, “then I would think that
we’ve missed the mark,” he said.
A middling performance, however, and the question of failure or success becomes
a tougher call. Some positive publicity and a smattering of blog buzz may be all
that’s needed to keep Anheuser-Busch pouring tens of millions of dollars
a year into Bud.TV. Because ultimately, proving that an online entertainment network
helps the company sell more beer falls into the realm of the subjective.
“It’s tough to build a business plan,” Ponturo said with exquisite
understatement. “Marketers don’t always have to prove two plus two equals
four. You have to go sometimes with your instincts and your gut judgment and your
years of experience.”
And there’s even the hope that Bud.TV could create revenue streams of its
own. Ponturo, Schumacker and their colleagues talk about Bud.TV serving as an
incubator for television, DVD or perhaps film. While much won’t translate,
“Afterworld” and some of the “Happy Hour” shows just might
make the jump. And if the shows end up having a life outside of Bud.TV, whether
on Comedy Central, Spike TV or as DVD originals, Anheuser-Busch, playing the role
of producer, will get a cut of the back end.
In this topsy-turvy world of media and entertainment, where marketers play programmer,
studios play ad agency and viewers play possum when traditional ads come on television,
one other twist is in the offing. If Bud.TV becomes a virtual hangout for young
men, Anheuser-Busch may well start selling advertising to other companies who
crave pushing their marketing messages in front of this fickle audience. That
debate is already taking place within Anheuser-Busch. At first, Schumacker itched
to market Bud.TV. But on further reflection, he realized that that would negate
the streamlined, almost minimalist design of the site. After all, Schumacker told
me, he didn’t want Bud.TV to look like it was selling out.
Lorne Manly is the chief media writer for The New York Times
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
BF & italics added on this educational website for visual emphasis