HP & MTV “The Engine Room”
Posted by Steffen Stäuber
“We don’t want it to be advertising; we want it to be real,” said David Roman, vice president for worldwide marketing communications H.P.
And thats a really good approach for a “Branded Entertainment Campaign”. HP and MTV brought together 16 youthful creative types in a loft in Brooklyn for a contest that can be watched on TV or online – the new series is called “The Engine Room”.
They are visited during the competition by guests like the musician Moby; Kevin Smith, the movie director; and the British pop band the Ting Tings.
The digital creations of the teams were judged by a diverse panel that included musicians, filmmakers, museum curators, a physicist, a tattoo artist, critics and Pete Connolly, an art director from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the Hewlett-Packard creative agency.
They started months ago to recruit contestants on a Web site and almost 2,000 people from 122 countries submitted more than 20,000 original artworks.
And they did a great job by using all the content- and social-platforms for their campaign. You can find a lot of the audition videos on Youtube and they have their own Blog and a group on Facebook.
Videos like this one:
“We’re learning as we go not to do so much talking about what we do but rather let people do things with the product,” Mr. Roman said.
“That’s where the ‘wow factor’ comes from.”
And I believe that´s a great insight: “Let people do things with the product…”. Because the best storys are coming from the people that are actually using it.
“The idea of giving these kids who are creating amazing things with computers a stage, a global stage, to show off their work seemed like a natural fit,” Nancy Reyes,account director at Goodby, Silverstein.
And MTV is a pretty good place to show your work to a broad audience. Viewers will be able to watch the episodes of “Engine Room” on mtvU in the United States, on various MTV channels in other countries and online — in nine languages.
A cool project that will generate a lot of buzz. But it´s gonna be interesting to see if MTV and HP will succeed because they have to walk a fine line between entertaining audiences and pitching to them.
VIA. NY Times
Tags: advertising, approach, branded entertainment, contest, david roman, digital creations, facebook, Goodby Silverstein, HP, Kevin Smith, MTV, MTV "The Engine Room", mtvu, museum curators, original artworks, social, The Engine Room, ting tings