Celebrity Constellations

A vast database of movie and TV show listings with cast credits and short actor biographies (in addition to photos and related news) fill the TVGuide.com website. Though many web-surfers turn to sites like IMDB for answers to their entertainment-oriented questions, TV Guide.com wanted to incite consumers to search within their specific show and talent web pages, plus raise awareness of TVGuide.com's strength and expertise in the field.

15 letters sought to demonstrate the utility of TVGuide.com's data and online content by developing an interactive application and online campaign inspired by the common pop culture theory "six degrees of Kevin Bacon." Using the TVGuide.com site as a guide, we took twelve stars from top TV shows and connected them to each other in less than six degrees to form "celebrity constellations" - proving that Hollywood is certainly closely connected and that TV Guide knows best.

The creative idea came to life as an interactive module that lived on the TVGuide.com website. Users could select two stars like Matthew Fox and Steve Carell and watch a swift animation pull away theatrical red velvet curtains to reveal how the two are connected. Each movie or TV show that linked the actors, clicked through to its own page on TVGuide.com as did each individual actor's name and photograph. Once visitors clicked through to a TV show or actor's page, they could continue to surf around the listings and explore the deep informational content available on TVGuide.com. They could also head back to the application to continue exploring other connections.

To drive traffic to and provide a sample of the whimsical spirit of the application on TVGuide.com, we developed several simplified banner versions of celebrity constellation. Some of banners teased consumers by posing an intriguing question like: "What do Ugly Betty and Superman have in common?" Regardless of the question posed, all of the banners clicked-through to the full application - automatically taking them to the landing page populated with the exact constellation that revealed the answer to the riddle. The banners appeared offsite on sites such as AOL's TV page and on a number of TV Guide web properties.