Former Bebo CEO Joanna Shields and Shine Group Chairman and CEO Elisabeth Murdoch have formed a content start-up to produce across media platforms, both online and offline, with a focus on social engagement, according to sources.

The new venture, which does not have a name, is being financially backed both by Shine and by Shields, who left AOL this summer after running its community and communications division.

Shields engineered the sale of social networking site Bebo to the Time Warner (TWX) online unit for $850 million in early 2008.

Sources said this new company, based in London, will invest, develop and partner to create a variety of content offerings that also incorporate interactive and social networking elements. It will also help the vast array of Shine content in interactive efforts.

Shields will be CEO of the start-up, which will operate under Shine, an independent and private television production company with programming in 24 countries.

In the U.S., for example, its Reveille unit is responsible for such shows as “Ugly Betty” and “The Biggest Loser.” (Both of which are BoomTown faves.)

Shine’s fast growth has been spearheaded by Murdoch, who is the daughter of News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch.

But Elisabeth Murdoch has struck out on her own in forming Shine, which already has shown a strong interactive bent for a television company.

The combination of television and Web content is an arena that many are once again jumping into, aiming at creating branded interactive content, fueled by advertising.

Former NBC Universal exec Ben Silverman–who sold Reveille to Murdoch, in fact–has recently left his programming job at the television network to start a similar kind of company with longtime entertainment and Internet kingpin Barry Diller of IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI).

And former ABC programming and Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun also runs a television and Internet production company with longtime Hollywood player Gail Berman, including recently creating the Wonderwall celebrity news site for Microsoft (MSFT).

In addition, Yahoo (YHOO) and a spate of small content start-ups, as well as big media companies, are all trying to figure out how to create and monetize content online in a multimedia effort that bridges all kinds of distribution vehicles and more deeply involves viewers.

Bebo was actually trying to do that too. Under Shields, it had been a pioneer in creating a variety of innovative online original content, including “KateModern” and “Sofia’s Diary.”

But new management at AOL, now headed by former Google (GOOG) exec Tim Armstrong, has sidelined Bebo to its new ventures division and is likely to try to sell it. Company execs at both Time Warner and AOL now say the purchase was a costly mistake.

That might be true, but it was clearly a financial coup for Shields–who has worked at both Google and RealNetworks (RNWK)–and Bebo investors.

And, given the track record of both Shields and Murdoch, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

In an interesting and innovative move compared to what has typically been less-than-hip online programming over the years, Microsoft’s MSN service is debuting a slick new celebrity site called Wonderwall today–created, designed and produced by a Hollywood company run by former Yahoo media chief and well-known television exec Lloyd Braun.

Using an unusual horizontal design with a scrolling “wall,” a plethora of pictures and a deeply visual sensibility, it’s definitely a laudable risk for Microsoft as the company seeks to continue to push itself into the online content business, despite a lackluster record.

The site, by BermanBraun Interactive, which is being launched right before the Grammy Awards, will aggregate content from a variety of partners, but also use a small staff of editors to differentiate it and give it “voice.” BermanBraun will operate Wonderwall for MSN.

Last week, in yet another sign that it is upping the content ante at MSN, Microsoft hired Yahoo’s most recent media head Scott Moore, who used to work at Microsoft (MSFT).

“We are investing more than ever in content,” said MSN GM Rob Bennett. “With Wonderwall, we are creating an offering to attract and retain new audiences, using content that is already at the core of MSN.”

But unlike other MSN sites, there is more subtle MSN branding on Wonderwall, although Microsoft’s search will be an important part of the site. MSN will promote Wonderwall across the service and will also give it an external marketing push.

To make money, Microsoft and BermanBraun are jointly selling the advertising for Wonderwall, which also has a partnership with MediaVest, to bring major brands to the site.

One obstacle is the huge amount of competition in the Internet space, from AOL-backed TMZ to Perez Hilton to omg! from Yahoo (YHOO), which is currently the most-trafficked celebrity site (and, ironically, was pushed through Yahoo by Braun and Moore).

But the interest in this pop culture category is obvious–celeb-focused online programming has grown strongly.

Celeb news-obsessed BoomTown accounts for much of that traffic (How much do we love following the hijinks of Britney? Much!).

So, I hightailed it to the Santa Monica offices of BermanBraun yesterday to have a look-see at Wonderwall and do some video interviews.

Overall, I was struck by the site’s arresting visual design, particularly the easily interactive wall, which has what I can only call an “iPhone” feel combined with a flipping-through-a-magazine tone (see above; click on image to make it larger).

With more touchscreen technology moving to personal computers, you can easily see Wonderwall being manipulated by hand.

And it makes great use of linking out, another plus, without excessively pointing to only Microsoft sites.

One problem: No true ability for users to interact on Wonderwall, via comments or other social-networking tools, which Braun said are coming soon, along with videos being able to be played in the main wall.

But overall, it raises the stakes in the celeb market and gives users a new interface without straying too far.

Here’s my video interview with Braun, along with another below it with his partner, former Fox and Paramount exec Gail Berman, and also Wonderwall’s top creators–all talking about Wonderwall.

(And, as an added bonus at the bottom, Oasis singing their hit, “Wonderwall.”)

Lloyd Braun:

Gail Berman and Wonderwall Staff:

Oasis:

There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore.

The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post on how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” with–egads–no more reserved parking spaces for top execs at its Santa Monica offices.

The Times said the new rule “signals a stark new era of austerity that overshadows the elimination of the last vestiges of the corporate culture war spurred by the hiring of former Warner Bros. chieftain Terry Semel and ABC’s Braun.”

Knock, knock, L.A. Times! Because that war is actually still raging at Yahoo (YHOO)–although the parking spaces carry little symbolic weight anymore at the company, which has much bigger problems to solve these days.

But even more unusually, the piece also abruptly dropped in old allegations the newspaper had included in a devastating story in November of 2005 by Chris Gaither about Braun and Yahoo’s media push at the time, titled “Can Yahoo Sign on to Hollywood?”

It was noted in the post as an aside:

(Braun also converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office and requested a corporate jet for the Santa Monica office. Oh, and there was the time he reportedly took an umbrella without paying for it from the Yahoo store on a rainy day and then asked the clerk who requested payment: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He later explained that he just wanted to make sure the clerk knew he was good for it. But we digress).”

Digress is right, because it turns out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him in the new blog post and the old story actually don’t check out, after extensive reporting BoomTown had done previously and this week too, talking to a range of key execs at the company at the time.

Thus, when I saw the Times post this week, I contacted Braun (pictured here) and sent him the link. He quickly responded via email:

“I am not an umbrella thief–and I promise I never will be. I never once asked for a corporate jet. I was and continue to be a big fan of Southwest Airlines. And I certainly never engaged in any kind of office construction while at Yahoo.”

Braun–who now runs his own online and traditional media production company called BermanBraun in L.A. with Gail Berman–also said he had immediately asked the Times for a correction of the blog post, as he says he did three years ago when the original story ran.

Times Business editor Sallie Hofmeister, whom I also contacted (but who was not in charge at the time of the 2005 piece), said the Times was looking into the situation and wrote in an email to me:

“The story we published in 2005 was a reflection of the sentiments within Yahoo at the time. We worked very closely with Yahoo on the story, so the company’s top management had every opportunity to challenge our reporting. After the story ran three years ago, neither Yahoo nor Lloyd requested a correction and no correction ran. What you hear from people today probably would be different than what they would have said three years ago. Lloyd is long gone and so are the tensions of entertainment’s invasion at Yahoo. People’s recollections also change. Enemies then are friends today.

“As for blog post, we strive for accuracy and when people in our stories take issue with our coverage, we take them very seriously.”

So do I.

Thus, it is long past time to set the record straight and put to bed a fable of raging Hollywood high-handedness–with too-good-to-be-true-because-they’re-not, clichéd lines like, “Do you know who I am?” and filched umbrellas.

Why bother looking into it at all these years hence? Well, for one, it is just not fair for inaccuracies about Braun to remain, complete with a never-die life on the Web and a nagging perception that he was some digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.”

But, more importantly, the struggles at Yahoo back then have everything to do with what is going on now. And that is a company culture at war with itself about what it is and should be.

I have, in fact, been collecting string on Braun’s alleged escapades for years, mostly from Yahoos. I was fascinated since, like a game of telephone gone awry, those who worked with Braun closely and would know, told a different story from some of those in Sunnyvale, who might not.

That did not stop many there from telling various stories about Braun, almost none of which were accurate when I actually followed up.

Because of that, I started to look very closely at Yahoo to figure out why such fallacies went unchecked about him and later, about an ever longer string of departed execs.

But let’s start with what was clearly true in that 2005 piece, which began with another parking kerfuffle and a hissy-fit email from a new Yahoo exec, recruited from Fox, threatening to tow “someone” who parked in his assigned place.

It was a classic opening, trying to show in an anecdote the clash that was going on at Yahoo at the time.

And it was an apt one. There was indeed a lot of resistance to the decision by then-CEO Terry Semel, who was pushing Yahoo as a media company.

To do it, Semel hired Braun–a highly successful Hollywood figure (think being key to initiating and developing “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and you have a good idea of his stature)–to pull it off at a big new and splashy office complex in Santa Monica.

Thus, the lines were drawn by some at Yahoo HQ, where execs mostly work in cubicles and where a we’re-all-equal ethos prevailed among some of the techie old guard especially, at least in their skewed perceptions of themselves.

(Guess what? They do work in cubicles, but some Yahoos in Sunnyvale are more equal than others.)

Still, back in 2005, it was easy to make an ebullient, brash and sometimes abrasive entertainment exec like Braun into a tidy little caricature and mock the idea of his task.

And who was hired to make new and innovative kinds of online programming hits, much as Braun had on television so well.

There is no doubt there were tensions. The Times story began focusing on the level of distrust, which in my estimation–I also was watching Yahoo closely at the time–was mostly from the tech side and mostly without interface with those in Los Angeles.

But, as Gaither noted correctly:

Yahoo’s ability to blend the cultures, milking each for what it does best, will be key to reaching its ultimate goal: to build on its success as the most visited destination on the Web by leveraging the links between content and the technology used to create and deliver it.”

Unfortunately, the Times story then launched into a series of really broad clichés about Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, using the typical “conspicuously expensive car” in LaLaLand versus the “energy-saving” one in Geekville.

(Again, my experience is that the tech folks always seem to have Porsches too, much as many Hollywood slickies drive Prius hybrids.)

The story went on to talk about the arrival of Semel, whom Gaither reported was seen as not as Hollywood at first as was expected by some wary Yahoos. He then got to Braun, who apparently was.

That’s where the problems come in, first by making it seem as if Braun was responsible for the pricey lease for the new Santa Monica offices at the Colorado Center.

Actually, according to top execs like Dan Rosensweig–Braun’s direct boss–as well as sources close to Semel and many other execs involved, that facility’s planning was directed largely from Sunnyvale, as most such projects are.

Braun did give an interview when the lease was announced, but was in no way the driver of the building’s renovation, which was actually being done by the company Yahoo rented the space from.

Next, came an assertion that the execs in Santa Monica got “Hollywood-style perks,” pointing out that Braun had “converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office. He also reserved a parking space close to the elevators for his car.”

Well, Braun did have a reserved space, which was no real crime to my mind, and which was actually not particularly close to the elevators.

How do I know? I have walked Braun to his car in the parking garage, which is about as nonluxurious as it gets, as opposed to Yahoo HQ, which used valets.

More importantly, Braun converted no office space and was assigned a temporary office elsewhere during the renovation, according to a panoply of execs and workers at Yahoo, such as Rosensweig, Jeff Weiner, Scott Moore and sources close to Semel.

It was a good office–after all, Braun was the boss of the Media Group.

And while both offices did have patios, the large outdoor spaces were also kind of dingy, especially compared to the manicured lawns of Yahoo HQ. And the patios were accessible to many parts of the floors, as I noticed on my many visits.

(As an added note, after the renovations were complete, Braun’s official office was not by any means fancy and was very standard in its drone-like look.)

The worst part was the next line: “Yahoo’s top executives drew the line when Braun asked for a corporate jet,” which was followed by a stunning quote by Semel.

It read:

The reaction was basically, ‘No,’ said Semel, who does not ask Yahoo to foot the bill when he flies to Northern California in his own private plane. ‘A lot of the more traditional media companies are doing their best to scale back on some of the perks and put the investment into the products and the consumers.’”

But, top Yahoo execs have uniformly told me over the years and this week that such a request from Braun never happened.

What was actually occurring, again directed by Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ, was an analysis about whether the company should start a charter air shuttle for the many engineers in its Burbank facility, working on its then-Panama search project, and employees at its growing Santa Monica facility.

There could be up to 20 workers going back and forth north daily, and the Southwest Airline bills were getting high.

Thus, a look-see to determine if an L.A.-Sunnyvale shuttle for everyone was needed. But it was conceived as a less-than-high-end plane, essentially a puddle-jumper that left at 7 a.m. and came back at 7 p.m.

Braun thought it was a good idea to examine and told Rosensweig, who was in charge of looking at the charter idea. But Braun was not part of the consideration of it.

Ultimately, Semel nixed the idea as too costly, and Braun did not object.

Why Semel seemed to tell Gaither that is curious. But a person familiar with Semel’s thinking said he was only referring to an company shuttle for everyone and not a corporate jet just for Braun and his minions, as the story opaquely implied.

“The discussions over the charter had nothing to do with Lloyd,” said the person. “And he did not ever ask for a corporate jet ever.”

Rosensweig, Weiner and several other top execs at the highest echelons–many of whom did not get along with Braun–support this version, on the record.

“I never saw anything out of the ordinary or Lloyd playing by Hollywood standards,” said Vince Broady, who worked for Braun, after being brought to Yahoo by Rosensweig. “I mean, Lloyd is a colorful character, which makes people notice him, but the idea that he was more difficult than anyone else was overblown.”

There is no doubt why Braun would attract attention–he is very noticeable and had a long and bruising career in Hollywood, with lots of stories of his dishing it out. He’s a genuine character, indeed, but not really that unusual compared to others in the entertainment sector, except perhaps to some at Yahoo.

Thus, I have no doubt, though, that such a story went around that Braun did desire a jet of his own and that Gaither heard it told, just like this most incredible of anecdotes in the piece.

The infamous umbrella!

Here is what Gaither wrote:

Braun’s long career in Hollywood has led to some awkward moments and misunderstandings inside Yahoo–and provided gossipy fodder for critics eager to cast him as a technically illiterate egomaniac.

According to one widely recounted tale, on a rainy day Braun took an umbrella from the Yahoo merchandise store without paying for it. Then, when asked for payment, he reportedly berated the store clerk, asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’ In fact, Braun’s representatives say, it was an innocent question to ensure that the clerk knew he was good for the money.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the umbrella ultimately ended up in a pool of umbrellas available to all employees.”

I could not, obviously, find the clerk to whom Braun allegedly said this. But I can say that there are free baskets of umbrellas for staffers all over Yahoo, and top execs like Braun can also buy them at company stores and just use their names as part of an account system.

And while I have no proof, the use of such a clearly hoary Hollywood phrase–“Do you know who I am?”–seems like it was simply made up to me by critics bent on making it a much better story than it was.

To be fair, Gaither does portray it as a “tale” that was circulating around Yahoo. But that probably should have alerted him that it was a very tall one indeed and not very reliable–a kind of digital urban legend rather than an actual event.

That’s why I would not have used it, without a much more explicit explanation that it was more an example of the tensions at Yahoo between the media and tech units than it was reality.

Perhaps worst of all was the impact of the piece, which forever cemented Braun’s reputation as a Hollywood-gone-wild exec.

Most interesting was that, according to both the Times and Yahoo sources, the company complained about the tone of the piece, but never asked for a correction.

Why? Sources familiar with Semel’s thinking said that he and PR execs thought it would cause more attention to focus on Braun, if they contested the piece, and it was better to just let it go.

It was probably a bad decision, given it was in the L.A. Times, which had a lot of credibility.

And, indeed, the high-profile Braun was later slapped silly by Valleywag, as the Times piece kept circulating within Yahoo. By the next year, Braun became one of the gossip blog’s first targets.

Valley–which knows a good character when it sees one and likes to poke and prod many, many such Silicon Valley-linked figures in mocking glee (with varying levels of accuracy)–even had a countdown to when Braun would be fired.

Because of this kind of thing, Braun said he tried to get Gaither to take another look at the stories about him, and met with Times editors to get them to make corrections.

The Times said Braun never formally asked for a correction and instead just complained about the story. To me, that is the same thing, but I am not privy to the Times’s internal corrections process, and Hofmeister declined to elaborate.

In any case, looking back, Braun told me this week the lack of support from Semel and Yahoo to fight the story was hugely disappointing and was the moment he realized he felt he would probably have to leave Yahoo.

Eventually, the feeling was mutual, as tensions escalated even further after the article appeared.

Braun–who had a particularly rocky relationship with Rosensweig, which is now patched up–was eventually pushed out in late 2006, after Yahoo moved away from its media focus to drill down in search.

That turned out to be a bad move, as Yahoo got its head handed to it by Google in search efforts. And it has since seriously been in tailspin in the wake of a series of jarring events.

Those include: the sudden departure of Semel mid-2007; the appointment of Co-Founder Jerry Yang as CEO; a painful public struggle to redefine Yahoo; a botched takeover fight with Microsoft (MSFT); a messy proxy battle with Carl Icahn; a collapsed search partnership with Google (GOOG); a decimated stock price; a scarily declining graphical advertising market; wrenching layoffs; and the stepping down of Yang and the thus-far uncompleted search for a new CEO.

You get the idea.

More importantly, with the cutting off of its more vaunted media aspirations, Yahoo closed the door on possible innovative directions that could have made it more competitive now, as it continues to struggle to define itself.

One of Yahoo’s great strengths–and it still is–has been its content properties, which are the most popular, by and large, on the Web. Instead, stinging from the article and the fallout of it, the company retreated from pushing forward aggressively in media.

Had it not, I can imagine a host of stuff it might have done.

And, ironically, Braun is now working on an online project with Microsoft, a celebrity site that will debut early next year and use a lots of the concepts he worked on at Yahoo.

In the 2005 piece, Gaither quoted Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner as saying, in a Yin-Yang concept: “We’re often asked, “Is Yahoo a media company or a tech company?”

Sadly, that question never got resolved then and still has not today.

It almost makes one nostalgic for stolen umbrellas, controversial parking places, questionable patios and wrangling over corporate jets.

Almost.

Lloyd Braun–the former Hollywood super-programmer turned Yahoo entertainment czar turned Hollywood and online programmer–has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to make an original destination site for Microsoft’s MSN portal, aimed at aggregating celebrity, entertainment and pop culture news, according to several sources.

With the still-unnamed site, MSN plants its own Paris Hilton flag in a very crowded field, which has numerous competitors such as People.com, PerezHilton.com, AOL’s TMZ.com, PopSugar.com and Yahoo’s OMG.

It is also interesting that Microsoft (MSFT), which has focused its efforts of late on its technology, especially related to online advertising and search, is making another foray into the content arena via MSN, where it has had mixed results in the past.

Ironically, Braun (pictured here) was the exec who green-lighted the OMG site, which aggregates celebrity-oriented content and has since become a big traffic success for Yahoo (YHOO).

The deal, which will be announced tomorrow, will be a joint venture with Microsoft and BermanBraun Media–an independent multimedia production company headed by Braun and also former Hollywood studio exec Gail Berman.

Braun left Yahoo under a cloud, after clashing with his superiors who had brought him in to make new online programming, as he is doing now.

But that has not stopped Yahoo from making its own deal with Braun, sources said, a much smaller effort to produce a daily “Lunacy Report.” The deal has not yet been announced, although it has been signed.

That online project will be focused on “weird news,” which is an amazingly huge driver of page views on Yahoo’s news site–almost 7%–featuring stories like one today about a man who was jailed for faking his own death.

The video-heavy “Lunacy Report” will have Vance DeGeneres, who is the executive producer of the HardlyNews online parody site and also brother of Ellen DeGeneres, as its host.

But the MSN deal is a much larger one, requiring BermanBraun to staff up, and it already has many former Yahoo employees involved in the project, sources said.

That’s because, akin to a regular Hollywood production studio, BermanBraun will be building both the front and back end using Microsoft technology. Both BermanBraun and Microsoft will be selling ads for the site.

But it is Microsoft that will be footing much of the multimillion budget for the site–to launch in early 2009–and will own it outright. It will get support on the main MSN page and also throughout the service.

Advertisers briefed on the project said the site is aiming for higher integration of branding than just simple display ads, looking for innovative ways in which marketing messages are integrated into content.

And it will be designed to be much more interactive to spur more engagement. In fact, the new site does not look like a typical MSN site, said sources who have seen it, with a highly stylized design and a wide range of applications.

Braun was reportedly pitching advertisers last week in New York, who said he described it as focused on the wider pop culture scene and not just on celebrities, which is an area of much user interest online.

It is not clear if PepsiCo (PEP) will be a major advertiser yet. BermanBraun announced a deal last July with Pepsi to support original entertainment content developed for online platforms.

The entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant has a “first-look” at BermanBraun online projects and has a chance to fund and sponsor original online content it produces.

What will be most interesting will be what happens to the new MSN site and OMG, if Microsoft and Yahoo do manage to strike a merger deal at some point, despite a failure to do so thus far.

The video card is part of a recent deal the online video creators just inked with BermanBraun Media–an independent production company headed by Hollywood players Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman–to make personalized ads using JibJab’s comic head-cut digital short technology.

The videos, which users can create for free with an ad at the start from Diet Pepsi Max, is the first major initiative for BermanBraun’s online division using Pepsi-sponsored online content.

BermanBraun announced a deal last July with PepsiCo to support original entertainment content developed for online platforms.

You can see one with a 10-second pre-roll ad embedded here, as well as another one here called “Menorah Hora,” which stars Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Page’s soon-to-be wife Lucy Southworth (Happy wedding this weekend!), as well as YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Is there a trend in my post yesterday about the deal former Hollywood execs Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman struck with Pepsi to make original online content that the entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant will have a chance to fund and sponsor?

“We want to create great online content … and also something that is more than a glorified Internet ad at the same time,” said Braun to me yesterday. “So we’ll work with Pepsi hand-in-hand to bake new kinds of ad solutions right in organically at the earliest possible moment.”

What struck me was that this was also the same line being touted by Facebook ad sales majordomo Mike Murphy, whom I interviewed Tuesday about what it will take to make the popular social-network site as popular with advertisers. (See video below again.)

Bandying about the phrase, “return on involvement,” he noted that it was his job to show marketers that becoming part of the conversation could be as important as much-measured click-through rates.

“Banners are great for branding, but this is a more relevant message that leverages social media,” said Murphy. “If we can help you make your idea or product relevant to a consumer and get the best involvement rate … it’s a different game.”

And then last month Valleywag posted here on an amazingly idiotic roundelay about a group of bloggers associated with John Battelle’s Federated Media being part of a Microsoft ad campaign, by weighing in on what the software giant’s “people ready” catchphrase meant to them.

I was going to write about it, and even talked to Om Malik (he was sorry and withdrew from the campaign) and Battelle (not so sorry, noting to me that how we all look at marketing has changed in the new paradigm).

But the prospect of headache-inducing debates about it that would go precisely nowhere stopped me cold. I come from an Italian family and I know from pointless arguments.

My own conclusion was that, even with all the disclosure, which could have been a lot better, it was probably a dicey and even flat-out wrong thing for most bloggers to do.

Except apparently for Michael “Pound Sand” Arrington, who doesn’t appear to care what most anyone thinks anyway. (Are you looking at me?)

But Battelle has kept bringing up another interesting phrase called “conversational marketing”–which again refers to engaging audiences more deeply with advertisers. Federated, in fact, is having a “Conversational Marketing Summit” in mid-September, with a laundry list of Web marketing honchos.

It apparently “brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons and opportunities of this emerging medium.”

I, for one, am looking forward to understanding what it all means, despite the fact my initial reaction is suspicious, as a reporter who naturally worries about the sidling up of ad-sales people to the editorial process.

That feeling of distaste was articulated by Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee, who wrote that the Pepsi deal “sounds kind of sleazy, honestly.”

Well, we shall see, of course, and this is just entertainment we’re talking about. And, perhaps more important, it seems to be an inevitable drift, given trends toward increased interactivity by consumers, especially younger ones.

“A lot of online content is already developed and ads and marketing are slapped on afterward,” Russell Weiner, vice president of marketing for colas at Pepsi-Cola North America told me yesterday. “We want to be part of the DNA of a show from the very beginning.”

And that, I think, is what they call the origin of the species. What species that might be, we shall all see soon enough.

That Hollywood term refers to giving Pepsi Entertainment the first opportunity to be part of any idea the pair develops. Pepsi could then pass on whatever concept it wants to, even though it might still have a financial interest in the content.

Berman, Braun and Pepsi executives would not be specific about the financing agreements between them or other details about the type of content they will be creating, although such material is likely to cost well under a million dollars per project, relatively inexpensive by old-media standards.

But both sides touted the arrangement as a new kind of marketing and entertainment partnership designed to take advantage of trends toward increased interactivity by consumers, especially younger ones.

“We want to create great online content … and also something that is more than a glorified Internet ad at the same time,” said Braun today. “So we’ll work with Pepsi hand-in-hand to bake new kinds of ad solutions right in organically at the earliest possible moment.”

Pepsi officials said the more interactive nature of sites like Facebook and MySpace meant it needed to look for all sorts of different ways to touch consumers, well beyond techniques in place now that still center on click-through banner ads.

“A lot of online content is already developed and ads and marketing are slapped on afterward,” said Russell Weiner, vice president of marketing for colas at Pepsi-Cola North America, whose brands include the flagship Pepsi, as well as Mountain Dew, Aquafina and Sierra Mist. “We want to be part of the DNA of a show from the very beginning.”

What that means is unclear, and both sides said that just creating too-obvious Pepsi tie-ins would not work.

While a lot of other independent producers like Mark Burnett work closely with advertisers from the start, which essentially results in a lot of product placement, Berman and Braun hope to change the way marketing messages are integrated into content and, perhaps more important, how content online will be funded.

So far, that part of the equation has been a vexing one, with no clear “hits” on the Web as yet, except for viral user-generated content on sites like YouTube.

Although many sites pull in big traffic, like the AOL-owned celebrity site TMZ.com, most professionally produced content has had less success. There have been a lot of single successes, like the popular JibJab cartoon satires.

Braun said he had hoped to change that at Yahoo, which once had big plans to enter this arena, capped by Braun’s hiring by former CEO Terry Semel. It did not work out that way for a variety of reasons, including a pullback by Yahoo and shift of resources to search products.

But he did have a good experience with Pepsi with the creation of one popular property on Yahoo, “The 9,” a daily online show about hot entertainment and digital trends. Pepsi is still the site’s sponsor; the 10th link of the day is called the Pepsi 10 and is selected by a user.

Braun said he went right to the beverage company after he left Yahoo and he and Berman formed their Los Angeles-based production company BermanBraun.

While they have both called it a “multiplatform” company and said they wanted to include Internet and film elements, its first deal was with NBC Universal, giving it a first look at content they produce for television.

Berman has long been considered one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, but left her job as president of Paramount in January after a corporate shake-up.

And Braun’s rocky tenure as head of Yahoo’s Media Group ended in February, with Braun leaving the Internet giant without completing the ambitious online entertainment plans he was brought in to shepherd.

Both Berman and Braun, close personal friends, were also longtime competitors–she ran the entertainment arm of the Fox network for five years starting in 2000, while Braun headed ABC’s entertainment efforts until he went to Yahoo in 2004.

Both are longtime hit-makers: Berman is credited with green-lighting shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “24,” while Braun is credited with pushing “Lost” onto the air.

After all this big-company experience, both were looking for a new setup, based on the indie-model with a twist.

“We have always seen this as a cross-platform company,” said Berman. “It is sort of a mini-studio, thinking about all the different mediums to create in.”

Berman and Braun said a head of its Internet group will soon be appointed and a digital content studio will be established in Santa Monica, Calif.

Pepsi’s Weiner said he thought Internet content creation and new ad solutions were still in their formative stages, even though his company thinks the Web will increasingly become a way for products to be marketed, well beyond simple ad placement.

He noted he had a good experience with Facebook, for example, when Pepsi did a campaign to let users design can logos, but he cannot yet imagine how it might all develop.

“I don’t even know if there will be ads attached to this content, especially if our brand is integrated well into the show,” he said. “It is so early, no one has really taken a peel off the onion yet.”

An interesting metaphor, given that Braun’s first experience with Yahoo might have been said to produce tears.

He would not comment on his tenure at Yahoo and its inability to leverage its power more effectively in the entertainment space. But he also said that he thinks it is still early in the game for the medium.

“We want to be Internet-centric, but it also has to be good from a pure entertainment perspective, while offering up something fresh to both consumers and advertisers,” he said. “This is not yesterday’s Internet.”

Are you listening, Yahoo?