AT&T has revealed that they will do a special sponsorship with Doctor Who on BBC America. They will appear on a special motion comic that will appear during a commercial break for the show.
The season premiere has a chase sequence starring lead characters Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) that the show didn’t have the budget for. Producer and showrunner Steven Moffat who, along with the episode’s director Richard Senior, wanted something to bridge between commercials.
AT&T ponied up the money for what amounts to a 60 section motion comic. The vignette is the latest in so-called hybrid commercials, similar to ABC’s Desperate Housewives or NBC’s Heroes or AMC’s Mad Men that all of ran commercials that promoted the sponsor in addition to the show being supported by the commercial.
“The shots were either too impossible to capture or too expensive to create live, so doing it in a motion comic theme from different viewing angles made perfect sense,” said Mark Gall, BBC America’s exec VP-media sales. “It hits all those key things AT&T needs. You’ll even hear the Doctor say things like ‘Anything is possible’ on the series because it’s part of his character, part of how people talk about him during the episodes.”
Source: AdAge
