MTV and Yahoo Movies teamed to bring the first-ever user-generated content category to the MTV Movie Awards.
Beginning April 23, users can create comedic shorts -- spoofs of feature films up to five minutes in length -- and submit them to Yahoo.com, where they will soon be available for viewing and voting.
“I think what initially attracted [MTV] to Yahoo, No. 1, was the breadth and depth of the audience, and then No. 2, specifically some of the gains we’ve made in the movie space this year,” said Karin Gilford, general manager of Yahoo Entertainment.
After users whittle down the submissions via Yahoo, a smaller pool will be sent to MTV.com, where users can vote on five finalists for the MTV Movie Awards, to be held Sunday, June 3 at the Gibson Theater in Universal City, Calif. The winner will be announced among the other award recipients at the event and receive the Golden Popcorn award for the category of Best Movie Spoof.
“What’s happening in the marketplace, a lot of folks have launched these user-generated-content contests, but it’s hard to get real volume flowing through there,” Gilford said. “You get anecdotes of submissions in the hundreds, or even less than the hundreds in some cases, and that’s deemed as success."
She continued, “I think people are realizing that to really make these things take off and to get a critical mass flowing through, you kind of need the power of a large brand online, and then when you amplify that with a brand like MTV and the Movie Awards and can do offline promotion on MTV, online promotion on Yahoo, have a really cool distinct payoff for the user, we think we’re just going to have huge results.”
Yahoo is using the same platform for this contest that it used for its Internet-streamed Talent Show.
“Where Yahoo heads with these things is to take all this user-generated content that’s flowing out there and everybody’s so excited about and actually harness it and put it into contextually relevant containers, in this case movies and movie spoofs,” Gilford said.
Whether this opens the door for similar partnerships between Yahoo and MTV on user-generated content remains to be seen, but Gilford added, “I think we are definitely going to come back to the table and look for other ways to find synergy and win-wins like we did with this one.”
