October 12, 2006

HBO's "The Wire" Embraces Consumer Generated Media

To promote the fourth season of HBO's "The Wire," a consumer generated media (CGM) competition was created to encourage viewers to submit their own video stories about their early education experiences. You can visit the "Spoken Word Battle" site to watch the uploaded videos.

Here's a good overview of this participatory promotional project from ClickZ:

The campaign, created by Deep Focus, captures a gritty, honest and real mode of expression that's in line with the show's setting in inner city Baltimore. "The biggest thing for us in developing this campaign was trying to be true to the spirit of the show," Sabrina Caluori, account director at Deep Focus, told ClickZ News. "We were trying to come up with a way to approach it that was new and interesting."

The result is "The Wire Spoken Word Battle," a competition for slam poets and hip-hop and freestyle artists hosted on Blastro.com. Users were asked to submit their experiences and views about how they were educated in a three-minute video. The theme of education is consistent with the emphasis of the current season.

I'm very intrigued by this project that develops an innovative way to get viewers and potential viewers of this HBO series to get involved directly with the themes of the show in an emotionally compelling way. It would be great to see a similar type of CGM program created for dance performances or TV shows.

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