Hey USA Still - H 2014
Maddie CordobaYouTube stars Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart are taking their travels to Conde Nast Entertainment.
The comedians’ road trip web series, HeyUSA, will premiere exclusively on CNE’s The Scene on Oct. 15 and will then be distributed across the digital network’s partners, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Dailymotion and Roku.
HeyUSA is the latest in a series of projects for the two women. Helbig, named to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Silicon Beach Power 25 in May, operates a YouTube channel with more than 1.8 million subscribers and is also working on a hybrid comedy/talk show pilot for the E! network. Hart, whose You Deserve A Drink YouTube channel has nearly 600,000 subscribers, inked a book deal in January.
HeyUSA was created by Billy Parks and Nick Shore of former MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath‘s Astronauts Wanted. The series, which was filmed over eight weeks, follows Helbig and Hart as they travel across the country.
Announced at VidCon in June, HeyUSA asked fans to help decide which towns Helbig and Hart would visit and what activities they would do at each stop. Astronauts Wanted also teased fans with behind-the-scenes videos and bloopers each week during the trip. Those videos generated more than 6 million views on YouTube across several channels.
Parks says the goal of the shorts was to build an audience, but he admits that this strategy worked as well as it did mostly because of Helbig and Hart’s online fame. “You can’t do a show like this without people who already have a tremendous relationship with their audience like Grace and Mamrie do.”
Astronauts Wanted will use additional footage to create full-length episodes for The Scene, which will also provide marketing for the project.
HeyUSA will be the first exclusive series to debut on The Scene, which launched July 16. The digital platform is part of CNE’s effort to build out a video business centered on the publisher’s brands.
“Partnering with Grace and Mamrie is a massive win for us,” says Whitney Howard, senior vp business development and strategy at CNE. “We’re targeting the influential millennial on The Scene, and we think Grace and Mamrie are the perfect talent to reach that demo.”
Parks and Shore are executive producing the series with Bleecker Street Entertainment’s Ken Treusch.
Email: Natalie.Jarvey@THR.com
Twitter: @NatJarv
