"House 2" for geeks

MTV has been conducting the “The Real World” show for many years, during which various young people live together in some kind of hangar. This time, with the filing of major manufacturers org. technology, the show will be attended by 16 creative individuals, who will live to compete with each other, creating works of art, with the help of electronics provided by expensive sponsors. The children will be settled in Brooklyn and will be broadcast on TV and online.

Starting next Monday, MTV, as well as its channel mtvU, which is intended for student audiences, will present a multi-part show “Engine Room”, during which 16 contestants divided into 4 teams will create the so-called digital art. ) using computers, scanners, and other monitors manufactured by Hewlett-Packard.

Each episode of “Engine Room” will last from five to seven minutes, and the entire series lasts for 7 weeks. As a result, one of the teams will be awarded a prize of $ 400,000 in cash and given the opportunity to program a giant MTV screen in Times Square in New York for one night.
')

“Engine Room” is one of several thematic series that HP sponsors for MTV - the previous was “Meet or Delete”, and before it was a series about the start of a new school year called “Dorm Storm”, which was also sponsored online video provider Broadband Enterprises.

The emergence of similar series, indicates a growing interest in video campaigns from large market players who are seeking to capture a young audience who is eager to watch videos on their computers, phones and other mobile devices.

“We don't want it to look like an advertisement. We are committed to ensuring that everything is real, ”says David Rowman, from the HP marketing communications office in California.

“We have seen in practice that we should talk less about the properties of our goods and to a greater extent strive to allow people to do something with it themselves,” reports Rouman. "In this way, we are trying to call the" wow factor "."

•

Rowman estimates that the “Engine Room” series will cost Hewlett-Packard “tens of millions of dollars”, including qualifying events that lasted during the previous month on mtvengineroom.com .

In order to take part in the series, about 2,000 people from 122 countries took part in the qualifying round, sending in their works and, according to Romain, about 20,000 works were received.

The teams of participants are formed according to the principle of the regions from which they came: Asia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, North America. During the competition, popular actors of show and film business will meet with participants.

Digital creations of the teams were evaluated by representatives of various fields, including musicians, filmmakers, museum curators, choreographers, tattoo artists, critics, as well as art director of the Hewlett-Packard creative agency Pete Conoli, the author of a series of commercials for HP, during which various pop - stars were shown at the time of using the Internet, captured, like a hidden camera.

“We spent 3-4 months on creating a commercial, and then we saw how children spread on YouTube parodies on them, created almost in a few hours,” says account manager from Sanfrancija Hewlett-Packard, Nancy Riyes.

“The desire to provide an international platform to these children who create such wonderful things with the help of a computer seems quite natural,” adds Nancy.

The decision to broadcast the series via MTV and mtvU was made thanks to the success that was achieved by the youth series “Meet or Delete” in 2006. Episodes of this show remain available on meetordelete.com .

Programs that, like “Meet or Delete” and “Engine Room”, are specially created by the order of large companies whose products are promoted during the plot, are becoming more common on TV. Similar shows, known on Madison Avenue as branded entertainment, have already crossed the line between entertaining the audience and throwing their messages into it.

"Our audience does not wait until the TV channel or website gives them what they expect," says Ros Martin from the New York branch of mtvU. “If they don’t like something, they just click off or delete.”

Consequently, “if we act to the detriment of the quality of our programs or their thematic correspondence, we will lose the trust of the public and leave the game.”

•

According to Martin, advertisers such as Ford Motor, General Electric, Microsoft and Yahoo also order brand entertainment from mtvU.

If you google “College 500” - a reality show commissioned by Ford, which was broadcast on mtvU, about a competition between two student teams racing to race across rough terrain - then the search server gives almost 2.8 million results.

Viewers in the United States will be able to watch the “Engine Room” series on mtvU, and in other countries on MTV channels and online - in nine languages ​​- on mtvengineroom.com.

Translation is made specifically for worldwebstudio