THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!
From the 11th Annual Shorty Awards

Wild 'N Out

Finalist in YouTube Presence

Objectives

During the 10th season of Wild 'N Out we took an active approach to re-vamping our social channels. Because of our research, change in strategy and newfound knowledge, we saw ample growth for the brand across various social channels. During this time, WNO accounted for some of the top-performing content on the MTV Brand YouTube channel. As these numbers continued to grow, we concluded that it was time to give Wild 'N Out its very own channel.

Strategy and Execution

As MTV2 no longer airs original programming, and given Wild 'N Out spent its first few seasons on that network, it only made sense to tap into the MTV2 YouTube page and convert it to one dedicated to WNO. And since the WNO videos on MTV's YouTube page were going viral daily, we didn't plan to put much marketing or promotion around this launch. Instead, it would be a soft launch with the help of WNO cast members. Similar to how we had been using our other social networks, our plan was to launch this page with various forms of video content in an effort to see which type the audience gravitated towards. Quickly we learned this audience was no different than that of our other social platforms – show or show-related content is key. Soon we started putting together creative and grabbing the cast for shoots specifically designed to generate ample YouTube content. We also started investing in the existing IP as we created long mashups and best-of compilations.

In July, one week before the premiere of Season 11, we officially converted the MTV2 YouTube page into the Wild 'N Out YouTube page, working with YouTube to move old WNO videos from the MTV page to the WNO one. Once the page was live, we drove fans there via WNO social platforms and those of our cast. From there we started testing all of our content to help dictate our future.

Results

Within three days of launching, our videos had an average of 1M views, and within a month we gained over 1M subscribers, bringing us over 2M. We now have over 3M. The Wild 'N Out YouTube channel has contributed 292M views, 27% of all MTV YouTube views to date. It's also amassed 1.4B minutes, 45% of all MTV YouTube watch time to date, with an average watch time of over 4:30, higher than any other MTV account by almost 2 minutes

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

MTV

Links

Entry Credits