'Drive with MTV' on crowdsourced route in second season

Tata Nano continues to be the title sponsor of the show that premieres first on the web and has completely crowd-sourced the routes this year

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | May 21, 2013

MTV is all set to launch second season of 'Drive with MTV' this June on the web first while it will go on-air early July. The show remains the ultimate social road trip like the first season but with double the fun, double the adventure, packed with experiences that'll get your pulse racing.

Tata Nano continues to be the title sponsor of the show that has completely crowd-sourced the routes this year. The channel crowd-sourced the route on Twitter and #drivewithmtv was trending all day on May 9.

Ekalavya Bhattacharya

Speaking on the innovations introduced this season, Ekalavya Bhattacharya, Head - Digital, MTV India, said, “We are ramping up the audience-inclusive quotient of the show this year by selecting only three people per team. There will be a fourth person in each team, but this will be a floating member.”

“Imagine I'm in the West team and our route is Mumbai – Ahmedabad – Jaipur. So we'll do a tweet-up in Mumbai – and select one person to be our fourth member. He participates in all the tasks, just like the rest of the team. The twist in the tale is that the person leaves the team in Ahmedabad and a new member joins in. The new member will be there with us till Jaipur. So each team will have to pick eight new members during the journey. That's a total of 32 in the overall show who qualify to win a Nano each,” explained Bhattacharya.

When asked why is this audience-inclusive show, Bhattacharya said, “If you are following the show and want to be part of a team during the journey – simply reach out to them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. – convince them and join them! Anyone can become part of the show. It's live! We are also going to have Pinterest and Instagram play key roles this year.”

Speaking on the objective behind taking the show to the web, Bhattacharya said, “Drive with MTV was conceptualised as a web show. Without the social element of the show, it would have been yet another travel show. We wanted to change the way people consumed travel shows. We wanted the audience to fuel the show. We wanted to make it audience inclusive. If you as an individual are following the show, you can actually have an effect on the content being shot. You can suggest places to see in a particular city, you can help the contestants with food and shelter, etc. This wouldn't have been possible if it was limited to TV. Additionally, the entire thing is a consume-it-as-it-happens-format. It's not limited to the format of a weekly episode. There are daily webisodes, but there is content coming in 24/7 in the form of pictures, text updates, etc.”

With the fact that almost every reality or adventure based content is being integrated or extended to the web platform now, MTV claims that the web and social media integration for 'Drive with MTV' is different in many ways. As Bhattacharya said, “You know a lot of people have asked me – is it a Social road trip because everything goes up on social media? Well, that's one of the reasons and not the only reason. The main reason is that we managed to tap into the social graphs of our contestants and they were the primary catalyst of content consumption. Teams were given a meagre amount of Rs 4,000 per day. Four thousand between the four of them for fuel, stay, food, toll, water and every expense you can imagine. It usually doesn't turn out to be enough. Hence, you need to involve your friends. You can use their help for anything, like if you know someone in a particular city, stay with them. Save money. What one also realised during the first season was that a lot of strangers readily opened up their hearts and houses for the contestants. So the true meaning of 'social' was being seen and that's what was truly unique about the show.”

MTV has experimented releasing content on the web before it hits the TV and it had good results in the past. The top songs of Coke Studio and Unplugged were 'officially' leaked on their YouTube channels before the show and this often acted as a great ad for people to tune it to watch the show on TV. “The storytelling is going to be different on both the platforms. We studied content consumption habits last season and we noticed that most people were constantly tracking the progress of one team – rather than consuming all the content of all the teams. Webisodes are separate for each team during the 21 days of the show. On-air the episodes will have the stories of all the teams woven together. This will allow the viewers to consume the entire journey as it unfolded in the different zones,” concluded Bhattacharya.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com