ViTrue, Inc., pioneer of the world’s first user-created advertising platform, today announced a partnership with VH1 to create branded, user-generated content sites for the VH1 television network. The first site, talentload.tv, is empowering viewers to create, produce and upload their own music videos using ViTrue’s easy-to-use platform and tools—and allowing VH1 to strengthen its promotional relationship with partner Warner Brothers.      

Using talentload.tv, VH1 and Warner Brothers successfully ran a songwriting contest to promote the film Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, which will be released on February 14.

Warner Brothers approached VH1 in mid-December to create the competition; working with ViTrue, the talentload.tv was up and running in a matter of weeks. Since inception, the contest has generated more than one million page views to the site, and aspiring artists submitted nearly 400 songs that are currently being rated by the talentload.tv audience.

“Through our partnership with ViTrue, we were able to quickly create a site that empowers us to collaborate with our audiences and have them contribute to our network and our partners’ properties in ways never before possible,” said VH1’s Fred Graver, “ViTrue was able to build a fast, flexible, stable user-generated video system backed by a remarkable level of service.  Through this partnership, in a matter of weeks we were able to quickly and efficiently launch a site that respects our brand while allowing our users to connect themselves more deeply with our programming.”

Departing from conventional user-generated content sites that require users to either visit a different site for each promotion or endure a heavily branded technology platform, talentload.tv clearly maintains an unobtrusive look-and-feel that seamlessly integrates with VH1’s branding. VH1’s parent company, Viacom, now has the capability to scale the user community on talentload.tv by implementing more competitions to the talentload.tv site that tie-in directly to all of its programming.

“ViTrue is providing VH1 with a single user-generated content site that tightly links to its properties and its partners’ content. Through this first promotion that has already served more than 400,000 video streams to date, the network has successfully created a critical mass that will provide a significant, self-sustaining audience for talentload.tv,” said Reggie Bradford, founder and CEO of ViTrue. “The rich and engaging user experience of talentload.tv will ultimately create a much stronger bond between audience and program, as is evident by the fact that nearly 40 percent of the visitors to the site came back to watch more.”

VH1’s “Your Music, Your Lyrics” contest ran from December 26, 2006 through January, 20, 2007, and asked contestants to write, record and upload an original love song.  The video entries can be rated by online users until February 2 at http://www.talentload.tv/musicandlyrics.  The top-rated videos will be judged by a panel of experts from VH1, Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore and the winning song will be selected on February 3, 2007.  The winning songwriter will being flown to Los Angeles for the red carpet premiere of Music and Lyrics and will have their song professionally produced for inclusion in the DVD release of the film.