MTV taps influencers to announce VMA nominations on Instagram's IGTV

Brief:

MTV announced nominations for this year’s Video Music Awards on IGTV, Instagram’s long-form video hub that launched last month. The channel partnered with social influencers on Instagram to reveal the award show’s nominees in original videos, according to Adweek.
Nyle DiMarco, Tessa Brooks, Bretman Rock, Scotty Sire and Toddy Smith are among the popular Instagram influencers who created the videos to reach their combined audience of more than 22 million followers. MTV, the U.S. cable and satellite TV channel owned by Viacom, has 18.5 million followers on brand and social accounts.
MTV also will let Twitter users vote on "best new artist" by sending direct messages to its account on the social network. The 2018 MTV VMAs are scheduled to air live from Radio City Music Hall on August 20.

Insight:

MTV’s choice of IGTV to announce the VMA nominees is a coup for a fledgling video hub that’s only a few weeks old. But IGTV stands on the shoulders of social media giant Facebook, giving the new app a tremendous opportunity to grow among the social network’s 2.2 billion users and Instagram’s 1 billion members worldwide. Kim Kardashian West, Selena Gomez and Kevin Hart are among the celebrities that are creating content for IGTV, while brands like Bacardi, Chipotle and Louis Vuitton have experimented with the video app, which currently doesn’t sell ad insertions. Instagram also released a 48-page guide of tips and products for creating videos for IGTV.

MTV’s collaboration with Instagram influencers to announce nominations for the VMAs is another sign of how much the media landscape has shifted in the past 10 years as younger audiences have changed their viewing habits to mobile devices from household TVs with a cable connection. The number of U.S. households that have canceled cable service and rely only on streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Video has tripled since 2013, according to a March report from the Video Advertising Bureau.

The introduction of IGTV is the latest sign that Instagram's parent company Facebook is supporting the creation of video content on its social media platforms and is seeking to lure creators and audiences from Google’s YouTube, which has more than 1.8 billion users a month. IGTV may eventually give advertisers a stronger alternative to YouTube.

Video dominated global Facebook ad spend for the first time in Q2 2018, rising to 51% of total ad spend from 46% in the prior three-month period, according to a study by cross-channel buying platform Nanigans. Facebook ad spend across among e-commerce advertisers was rose 60% in Q2 from a year earlier, indicating Facebook’s value in reaching shoppers and generating incremental sales.