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?