For the 2011 Media Vanguard Awards introduction and directory of awards by division, click here.
Unclassified Topic
Media Vanguard Awards: Digital Natives
TVGuide.com, Slate, Get Glue Among the Winners
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A 'Walking Dead' sticker for GetGlue users to unlock
DIGITAL NATIVE/BEST SECOND-SCREEN PLATFORM
GetGlue
getglue.com; apps available on iTunes and in the Android Market
GetGlue has nearly 2 million registered users who check in more than 16 million times a month (via GetGlue.com and its mobile apps) as a way of sharing their pop-cultural passions. As check-ins ricochet across Twitter and Facebook, the result is the formation of real-time communities of fans who are all loving the same thing at the same time -- a marvel in our time-shifted, disintermediated age, and the reason why GetGlue now has partnerships with 35 TV networks, 10 movie studios and five major record labels.
DIGITAL NATIVE/BEST HOPE FOR LONG-FORM JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF TWITTER
Longreads
longreads.com; #longreads on Twitter
In the two years since Longreads founder Mark Armstrong first started tweeting links to his favorite in-depth reading material, the hashtag #longreads has been used by thousands of readers and publishers in a collective act of "community-powered curation," and has spawned a website that lets users search by topic and reading time. Former McCann Erickson creative chief Joyce King Thomas recently joined forces with Longreads to formalize brand partnerships and to help build out Longreads as the web's leading portal for discovering quality long-form journalism.
DIGITAL NATIVE/BEST SOCIAL-TV PLANNER
TVGuide.com Watchlist
The team at TVGuide.com closely monitors the social-media chatter about TV on Twitter and across the web, but they saw room for creating their own social-TV platform, called Watchlist. Users add their favorite shows, actors and teams; TVGuide.com tells them where (on TV, on demand, online, etc.) and when to watch. Since the official launch in August, more than 425,000 users have created Watchlists, and TVGuide.com has gained plenty of proprietary insights -- including learning in advance from Watchlist activity which fall TV shows would end up as hits.
VTour lets you explore Mammoth Mountain
DIGITAL NATIVE/BEST VIRTUAL-REALITY
INNOVATION
VTour
VTour builds groundbreaking multimedia virtual tours, using HTML 5, that allow potential visitors to "visit" destinations -- including the Mammoth Mountain ski area and the Nike U.S. Open of Surfing -- in self-selected 360-degree views that include integrated audio, video, maps, live webcam feeds, e-commerce functionality and social-media links. A VTour can be so immersive that it feels like a gaming experience (as opposed to a sales pitch), which is why clients like Mammoth are seeing visitors spend an average of nearly 12 minutes engaging with VTours.
DIGITAL NATIVE/BEST PODCAST SERIES
Slate's Gabfests
Remember the podcast craze? It faded in part because most podcasts weren't very good. But Slate's -- particularly its Culture Gabfest, Political Gabfest, Hang Up and Listen (a sports roundtable), and Manners for the Digital Age -- are awesome enough to collectively attract more than a million downloads a month. And an ongoing series of TIAA-CREF-sponsored live Gabfests has packed venues at colleges around the country.
