To promote its new racy teen drama, Skins, MTV has launched an entertainment checkin service that lets fans interact with each other, the show and even snag free tunes.
Partnering with social television startup Starling, MTV has created a co-viewing tool called MTV Skins Captionbomb. The premise is rather simple: Access the tool via Facebook, and then start chatting.
Users are presented with a card on which their Facebook picture appears, and then can start interacting with others in order to “unlock” new cards, which feature the faces of the Skins cast. Players can then “Play” those cards by commenting on them, thereby contributing to the general conversation about the show.
Perhaps the coolest aspect of the game is that you’re not just playing for virtual currency, you can also unlock free MP3 downloads from bands featured on the show — mostly indie acts like The Drums and The So So Glos.
“We were trying to figure out how we could get beyond a checkin and create more interesting engaging ways that users can interact around our shows,” says Suejin Yang, vice president of product development for MTV.
“Music is a big part of the show experience,” says Colin Helms, vice president of MTV Digital Media. “They’re putting a lot of new and indie music into the show. The theme song was even sourced from the audience,” he adds, citing 3D Friends, the band that provided the track.
In addition to crowdsourcing the theme song, MTV really took to the web to grow buzz for the show. Since Skins was originally a UK show, it was easier to grow a fanbase before the premiere.
“We usually build a community after the show has launched,” says Helms. “We did the opposite with Skins.”
In fact, MTV started ramping up online efforts three months before the show’s premiere last night, January 17. The network launched skins.tv, a community hub featuring show content and a variety of apps, including Where It Went Down, which lets users share where memorable moments “went down”; the Fast Society group-texting mobile app, which we covered in the past; and a Facebook app to determine your “party personality.”
According to MTV, this virtual pre-gaming, if you will, paid off — garnering more than 5 million video streams and 700,000 uniques on the skins.tv site, 9,000 followers on Twitter, 55,000 “Likes” on Facebook, and 2,500 followers on Tumblr. That’s all before the show launched.
Granted, Skins has the advantage of being a known entity with a pre-existing fanbase, but MTV and Starling’s efforts — particularly the addition of free music to the checkin game — certainly are innovative.
Yes, entertainment checkin services are a known entity — that’s basically the premise of GetGlue (who sometimes even doles out physical rewards rather than digital stickers), and WE tv has partnered with entertainment checkin service Miso to create a branded campaign around the show Bridezillas.
Still, the addition of music — including up-and-coming music — fits perfectly with the campaign. Viewers are not only exposed to new music, they’re also impelled to interact with the show in order to get it.
“The whole experience is going beyond the badge,” says Kenny Miller, co-founder of Starling.tv. “To give people things they can actually use.”
While it may be counterintuitive — and distracting — to actively engage with others while also watching a show, recent studies have shown that a goodly number of people watch TV and surf the web simultaneously, and given that this is a show geared toward 12- to 24-year-olds, we imagine most of the viewers are online anyway.
What do you think of this campaign? Will you play while tuning into Skins next week?
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