In a story that Ad Age broke on Friday, Spike revealed that it had enlisted Burger King to provide live online streaming of Saturday night s 2009 Vide Game Awards.
Ad Age calls the feat a rarity when compared to how even the biggest award shows such as the Oscars, Emmy s or MTV’s Video Music Awards have never attempted to stream their broadcasts online. Burger King was an integrated sponsor for the online portion of Spike’s awards show, with a branded video player fed through Spike s web site and its MTV sister site GameTrailers.com. Burger King worked its Have It Your Way slogan into the sponsorship, not only feeding live camera streams but also letting users pick different cameras all the way from the red carpet entries to green room waits and backstage at the show.
Spike’s marketing head Dario Spina said the partnership with Burger King helped offset the cost of production needed to stream the show online as well as helped limit the number of pre-roll ads viewers would have to sit through. Burger King had also sponsored the online broadcast for last year’s Video Game Awards but only as a delayed feed. Ad Age says that last year Burger King had accounted for 71 percent of the traffic to the awards show site.
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