At MTV’s Video Music Awards, Advertisers Work to Strike Right Chord
Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor When advertisers take these days to MTV’s long-running “Video Music Awards,” they are hoping viewers will be as interested in what interrupts the action as they are in the trophy-winners themselves. Many of the show’s most intriguing commercials will seek to be as eye-popping as the program’s musical segments and celebrity appearances. Indeed, ad sales executives at Paramount Global, MTV’s corporate parent., say this year’s awards effort contains more in-program appearances by the advertisers’ wares than in any other years of the show, which debuted in 1984. Sponsors are “converting normal commercial time to branded content,” says Dario Spina, the chief marketing officer of Velocity, a Paramount unit that works to create specialized ad executions in the company’s content.