We're always looking for new, innovative opportunities to engage with the MTV Video Music Awards audience. Outside of host and performer announcements, voting is our biggest driver for engagement in the weeks leading up to the show – and subsequently, a great way to drive awareness and excitement to tune-in to the broadcast! We wanted a way to keep users highly engaged and maintain momentum and excitement about the show in the weeks-long window leading up to the live broadcast while traditional voting is closed. In addition, we are always looking for great content that provides natural opportunities for sponsors.
Goals:
For our 2018 MTV Video Music Awards social voting campaign, we reinvented our popular Song of Summer category and brought it to a platform our fans love and highly engage with: Instagram Stories.
Each of our eight nominees went head-to-head on @MTV's Instagram Stories in a bracket-style tournament throughout the week leading up to the show. MTV's own Erik Zachary kicked off the competition with a short explainer on how it would work: Fans could vote using native features like polling stickers and "swipe up" to vote functionality. End slides encouraged users to come back the next day to vote for the next round, and finally to tune in to the broadcast to find out who wins. Our sponsor, Truth, received Branded Content Tool attribution and logo placements within the experience.
Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin's "I Like It" was revealed as the Song of Summer winner as chosen by fans, making it her second-ever VMA win.
The fans went wild for Song of Summer! The campaign generated 3.2M impressions and 660k engagements from Instagram Story voting.
