CableFAXIES Awards—Viral Marketing Campaign: The Sportsman Channel for Cable Best Friends Fore

Speaker ribbons at conferences have a certain allure for some, so The Sportsman Channel played a variation on that theme during CTAM Summit ’08 — team members wore mysterious "CBFF" ribbons (cable best friends forever) in different colors on their Summit badges. Naturally, attendees inquired about the plumage. They were told of a viral campaign where the first 25 cable affiliates to collect 5 ribbons (one from each Sportsman rep) would win an iPod Touch. Some operators scouted restaurants and hid in hotel lobbies, er, hunting for Sportsman reps with the right color ribbons.

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Honorable Mentions:

BBC America for Skins: BBC America turned to YouTube, MySpace and Twitter for Skins, drumming up a 160-times + increase in searches for the series.

CMT for Gone Country 3: Viewers became the stars in an online campaign for Gone Country 3, personalizing their blogs and Facebook pages with videos of themselves.

Discovery Communications/Animal Planet for Groomer Has It Series Launch: To reach tech-savvy women, Animal Planet created viral videos dubbed "Cryer," "Shaver" and "Loser" and also promoted Groomer on pop culture sites such as Gawker and Jezebel.

A&E Network for What Happened in Piedmont? A&E tapped into the alternate reality game trend for its hit miniseries The Andromeda Strain by building story lines from the program into an online game and letting viewers interact virtually.

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