AOL Sponsors HuffPo Film Contest
- by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, February 16, 2006
The site several weeks ago began soliciting entries for the competition, "Contagious Festival," which officially began on Feb. 1. More than 100 users so far have uploaded a clip to the site. Each month, the HuffingtonPost will bestow a "People's Choice" award on the spot that garners the most traffic, and another "Jury Prize" to the film deemed best by a panel of judges--including Huffington, AOL's Jim Bankoff, director Noah Baumbach, writer Nora Ephron, and actor John Cusack.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the most popular video was an animated spot, "Quail Hunting with Dick Cheney," that mocked the vice-president's accidental shooting this weekend of 78-year-old Harry Whittington. By Wednesday evening, the spot had garnered more than 225,000 hits.
AOL is running ads on the contest page directing visitors to a Moviefone short film site. Additionally, AOL Wednesday posted "Quail Hunting" on its own comedy section, comedy.aol.com.
Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products, said the company hoped to ferret out new talent through the contest. "It's a good way for us to keep our finger on the pulse of new creative talent that is emerging on the Web," he said. "AOL.com is always looking for innovative programming ideas--whether they come from Hollywood, or whether they come from a garage in a small town, or whether they come from New York."
Huffington said the AOL sponsorship deal represents an expansion of the site's partnership with the Internet company, which has syndicated blog posts from HuffingtonPost.com since last year; AOL rival Yahoo also syndicates blog posts from the Huffington Post. "We're constantly looking at new ways to expand our relationship," Huffington said. She added that the Contagious Film contest represents "a great opportunity to stay connected with young talent."
Last year, the New York non-profit Eyebeam ran a similar competition, the Contagious Media Showdown. Jonah Peretti, director of research and development at Eyebeam, currently is an equity partner at the Huffington Post.
Although AOL wasn't involved in last year's Eyebeam contest, the competition caught the company's attention. "We saw it from a distance last year," Bankoff said. "We admired a lot of the creative talent that was discovered, or at least promoted, via the festival."
AOL and other Internet media companies are trying to make inroads in Hollywood. Recently, AOL announced separate production deals with "Survivor" mastermind Mark Burnett, and "Beauty and the Geek" architects Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg.
Yahoo also has made forays into original programming. Recently, it launched "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," which features war correspondent Sites as he travels to various centers of conflict around the globe, and travel show "Richard Bangs' Adventures." Yahoo also plans to soon launch "Wow House," a home improvement-style reality show created for the Web.
