MaDD Blogger

My dirty little secret...

Something I haven't mentioned before is that I'm a member of MTV's National Video Academy. The NVA casts the votes for the Video Music Awards and consists of 900 members, 400 from the music industry and 500 members from the general viewing audience. I was watching TRL 4 years ago and Carson Daly came on the screen and announced that MTV after all these years would finally allow the fans to help pick the winners at the VMAs. There would only be 500 slots available and the signup form would only be available for a few hours after the show so I needed to act fast. I went straight to the website and tried to sign up but the site was overloaded with people trying to signup so the form crashed and I thought it was over. I waited about 15 minutes and tried again and this time the form loaded. The questions were extremely precise. They wanted to know my age,race,occupation, and what genre of music I liked and of course my contact info.

I filled it out hit send and said fuck it. After all, I never win anything so there's like no chance that I'll be picked right? The next day they announce all the thousands of people that entered and that they will contact the new members in a few weeks. About 3 weeks later I got a message that someone from MTV was trying to contact me. They had called twice and left a number. I was about to try to call them back and the phone rang. It was them. It's kinda weird seeing MTV on your caller ID but you get used to it. I have always assumed based on the questions that the form asked that I got picked because I was a black male in the key 18 to 35 demographic. If they didn't care about what race I was they wouldn't have asked right? They wanted to pick voters that reflected their audience so you would automatically need a few minorities to keep things honest. This might also explain why everytime I've voted I vote in both phases where some members only vote in phase 2.

The voting consists of 2 phases. Phase 1 is the nomination phase and consists of 325 of the 400 industry members and 300 of the 500 viewer members. They send out a list of several hundred videos each with a code beside it and then you vote and send it off to Price Waterhouse Coopers. I thought last year was the best because they let us vote online at a secret website. Something must have went wrong with that system because a few months ago I got an email from an MTV intern telling me that we were going back to the paper this year but whatever, I'm on board.

They pick the phase 1 members based on...whatever but since they don't use every member for phase 1 I have to assume that they have to break it down by demos again and being a minority it bumps me up the list again. I've voted in both phases every time over the last 4 years. The law of averages suggests that I would vote only in phase 2 at least once right? Trust me I'm not that lucky. Phase 2 is a lot simpler. They send the now final nominees to you for each categories and then you rank vote 1 through 5 in each category on which videos you like the most. You have to rank each nominee or your vote in the category is counted as a no vote.

I actually do try to follow the guidelines as far as voting for the video itself instead of whether or not I liked the song. So a video like Hollaback Girl from Gwen Stefani where I didn't really like the song that much would get votes because I liked the video. In case you're wondering I don't get shit for voting, not even a fruit basket but it is nice to watch the VMAs and see people that I voted for win the awards. I thought Green Day had some great videos this year with Boulevard Of Broken Dreams being the best and I love Ordinary People by John Legend and Mr.Brightside from The Killers but my favorite was probably Drop it Like it's Hot from Snoop Dogg.

Before posting this I re-read all the info MTV sent over and while I didn't see anything about revealing yourself to be a voting member I totally understand that they don't want the process to be tainted and they don't ask every member to come back every year so I guess I've been lucky over the last 4. I certainly didn't want to reveal anything until I was completely done voting and while I'd love to believe that no one is reading this thing I am continually surprised with who is so god forbid I post that I'm picking the VMA nominees 2 months ago and the wrong person reads it and raises a stink. I mailed my final ballot in yesterday so they're done with me unless they need me to vote again next year which I hope they do. It's a lot of fun and it's not something that everybody gets to do.