Jumat, 29 Juni 2012
Kamis, 19 April 2012
Rabu, 28 September 2011
Chicks Flick/Flick Chicks
by Mindy Kaling
A few years ago, I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out several of my favorite movies, and they wanted to see if I had any feature ideas. I was very excited. I have a great job writing for “The Office,” but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean. It’s snobby and grossly aspirational, but it’s true.
The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”
For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.
I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised at how often they are correct. Based on what I’ve learned from my time in Hollywood, the following titles are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theatre near you:
“Bananagrams 3D”
“Apples to Apples 4D” (The audience is pummelled with apples at the end of the movie.)
“Crest Whitestrips”
“Sharks vs. Volcanoes”
“King Tut vs. King Kong”
“Streptococcus vs. Candidiasis” (Strep Throat vs. Yeast Infection)
“The Do-Over”
“The Switcheroo”
“Street Smart”
“Street Stupid” (“Street Smart” sequel)
“Fat Astronaut”
“The Untitled Liam Neeson Vendetta Project”
“Human Quilt” (horror movie)
“The Cute Bear from Those Toilet-Paper Ads Movie”
Those movies all sound great to me, and, incidentally, I am prepared to write any of them, if there is interest. But what I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from enjoying them.
I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.
FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life. Here are some examples:
The Klutz
When a beautiful actress is cast in a movie, executives rack their brains to find some kind of flaw in the character she plays that will still allow her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would pay to see that? A female who is not one hundred per cent perfect-looking in every way? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours.
So they make her a Klutz.
The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it’s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it’s Fred Tom). The Klutz clangs into stop signs while riding her bike and knocks over giant displays of fine china in department stores. Despite being five feet nine and weighing a hundred and ten pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.
The Ethereal Weirdo
The smart and funny writer Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe this archetype after seeing Kirsten Dunst in the movie “Elizabethtown.” This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans with her. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She likes to dance in the rain and she weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She might spin a globe, place her finger on a random spot, and decide to move there. The Ethereal Weirdo appears a lot in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her. But she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.
The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All
I regularly work sixteen hours a day. Yet, like most people I know who are similarly busy, I’m a pleasant, pretty normal person. But that’s not how working women are depicted in movies. I’m not always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and yelling, “I have no time for this!” Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to “relearn” how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something. And since when does holding a job necessitate that a woman pull her hair back in a severe, tight bun? Do screenwriters think that loose hair makes it hard to concentrate?
The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead
If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man. I am fascinated by Mom’s sordid early life. I would rather see this movie than the one I bought a ticket for.
I am so brainwashed by the young-mom phenomenon that when I saw the poster for “The Proposal” I wondered for a second if the proposal in the movie was Ryan Reynolds’ suggesting that he send his mother, Sandra Bullock, to an old-age home.
The Sassy Best Friend
You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.
The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting
Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like “It’s Complicated” compensates for five scenes of Diane Keaton being caught half naked in a topiary. But I can’t suspend disbelief enough, for instance, if the gorgeous and skinny heroine is also a ravenous pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie—her parents, her friends, her boss—are all complicit in this huge lie. They constantly tell her to stop eating. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who obviously lost weight to play the likable lead character, has to say things like “Shut up, you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!” If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.
The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery
How many freakin’ art galleries are out there? Are people buying visual art on a daily basis? This posh/smart/classy profession is a favorite in movies. It’s in the same realm as kindergarten teacher or children’s-book illustrator in terms of accessibility: guys don’t really get it, but it is likable and nonthreatening.
Art Gallery Woman: “Dust off the Warhol. You know, that Campbell’s Soup one in the crazy color! We have an important buyer coming into town, and this is a really big deal for my career. I have no time for this!”
The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: “He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!”
There are, like, nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad. None of them look like Patrick Dempsey. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/10/03/111003sh_shouts_kaling#ixzz1ZFEd3YGl
Rabu, 13 Juli 2011
Senin, 23 Mei 2011
on taste
Sabtu, 14 Mei 2011
The Reality of Principle
by Kelefa SannehMAY 9, 2011
On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide. Her contribution, which wasn’t mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. Mead’s subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called “An American Family,” about the Louds, a middle-class California household. “Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public figures,” Mead wrote; rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, “members of a real family.” Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat’s marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead’s view, “a new kind of art form”—an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”
“An American Family” was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world’s first openly gay TV star. But for decades “An American Family” looked like an anomaly; by 1983, when HBO broadcast a follow-up documentary on the Louds, Mead’s “new kind of art form” seemed more like an artifact of an older America. Worthy heirs to the Louds arrived in 1992, with the début of the MTV series “The Real World,” which updated the formula by adding a dash of artifice: each season, a handful of young adults were thrown together in a house, and viewers got to know them as they got to know one another. It wasn’t until 2000, though, that Mead’s grand claim started to look prescient. That year, a pair of high-profile, high-concept summer series nudged the format into American prime time: “Big Brother,” a Dutch import, was built around surveillance-style footage of competitors locked in a house; “Survivor,” a Swedish import, isolated its stars by shipping them somewhere warm and distant, where they participated in faux tribal competitions. Both of these were essentially game shows, but they doubled as earthy anthropological experiments, and they convinced viewers and executives alike that television could provide action without actors.
We are now more than a decade into the era that Mead, who died in 1978, saw coming. “I think we need a new name for it,” she wrote, and in the past decade we have mainly settled on “reality television,” although not without trepidation. “Reality” is, if not quite a misnomer, a provocation—a reminder of the various constraints and compromises that define the form. Certainly, “reality television” is an amorphous category; Mark Andrejevic, a cultural theorist, notes that “there isn’t any one definition that would both capture all the existing genres and exclude other forms of programming such as the nightly news or daytime game shows.” If Mead were alive today, she might be surprised at the diversity of the form, which has proved equally hospitable to glamorous competitions, like “American Idol,” and to homely documentaries, like “Pawn Stars,” which depicts the staff and clientele of a Las Vegas pawnshop. But she might also be surprised to see how many programs hew to the “American Family” formula: one of MTV’s biggest current hits is the riveting “Teen Mom” franchise, which follows a handful of young mothers as they negotiate shifting cultural realities and stubborn biological ones, building American families of their own. This season, one of the stars, Chelsea, unloaded the dishwasher in her new house, watched closely by her father, who had agreed to pay the rent.
“I’m just standing here, watching you pretend like you’re a little housewife,” he said, fondly.
“I am,” she said, and then she drew a fine distinction that any scholar of kinship structures would appreciate. “A housemom.”
One of the biggest differences between today’s reality television and its 1973 antecedent is the genre’s status. Having outgrown PBS, it has inherited the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium itself. In an era of televised precocity—ambitious HBO dramas, cunningly self-aware sitcoms—reality shows still provide a fat target for anyone seeking symptoms or causes of American idiocy; the popularity of unscripted programming has had the unexpected effect of ennobling its scripted counterpart. The same people who brag about having seen every episode of “Friday Night Lights” will brag, too, that they have never laid eyes on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Reality television is the television of television.
No surprise, then, that a counter-movement has arisen, in the form of books that urge us to take these shows more seriously. Jennifer L. Pozner is a journalist and activist, and in the past decade she has watched, by her count, “more than a thousand hours of unscripted programming,” which is a lot if you think of it as work, but not much—two hours per week, which may be less than the average American watches—if you don’t. For Pozner, it certainly was work. The book she wrote about her experiment is “Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV” (Seal; $16.95), and, halfway through, she sums up her verdict: “I’ve found most of it painful (‘Dr. 90210’), aggravating (‘The Bachelor’), or mind-numbingly boring (‘The Hills’).” Still, her target audience is her fellow-viewers, not her fellow-activists, which lends the book a pleasingly unpretentious attitude: readers unfamiliar with Schadenfreude can find a definition in the footnotes, but readers unfamiliar with “Paradise Hotel” are on their own. (For the record, it was a complicated 2003 show, on Fox, in which the evolving cohabitational arrangements of dozens of bronzed young people helped determine which one would be expelled next.)
Having logged those thousand hours, Pozner can attest that reality shows have a tendency to blur together into a single orgy of joy and disappointment and recrimination. In her view, this is no coincidence: the shows are constructed to reinforce particular social norms, she argues, and she finds examples from across the reality spectrum. There is an expectedly acerbic analysis of “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire,” one of the first shots fired in the current reality revolution (it aired on Fox, as a one-time special, in February, 2000), in which the winner of a televised beauty pageant agreed to marry, sight unseen, a “multimillionaire”—who, it later emerged, was possibly a thousandaire, and definitely the target of a restraining order filed by a former girlfriend. That show was a gleeful train wreck, powered by its female contestants’ desperation to be picked, which is to say, married. Pozner detects a similar anxiety in a more venerable show, “The Bachelor,” which recently ended its fifteenth season on ABC. Although the producers pile on signifiers of romance—ball gowns, candles, roses, breathy declarations—the weekly eliminations are what give the show its cruel but satisfying rhythm. Pozner zeroes in on a contestant who, despite having been a vegetarian for twelve years, accepted a piece of lamb from the man she was trying to impress:
“My stomach will probably never be the same, but at least I touched his hand,” she said, grateful for crumbs. After she got the heave-ho, she batted her big brown eyes at the camera and moaned: “You wanna see a girl that’s crushed, you got her.”
For Pozner, this figure—the woman “crushed” for our amusement—is the driving force behind much reality television. She charts the various programs that punish women for their alleged greed, like “Joe Millionaire,” in which the titular millionaire finally reveals himself to be more or less broke, and “Charm School,” which promised to “tear down and rebuild” its female participants. She is aghast at the cosmetic-surgery makeover show “The Swan,” which she calls “the most sadistic reality series of the decade.” (The second and final season was broadcast in 2004, so Pozner’s superlative arrives too late to be of any use to the show’s publicists.) And she is scarcely kinder to “What Not to Wear,” a nonsurgical makeover show in which, she writes, “an ethnically and economically diverse string of women are ridiculed for failing to conform to a single upper-middle-class, mainstream-to-conservative, traditionally feminine standard of fashion and beauty.” For Pozner, the ridicule is more vivid, and therefore more effective, than whatever rote transformation comes next.
This idea—that pernicious images and ideas are more powerful than benign ones—shapes Pozner’s analysis in every case, and explains how she manages to extract clear messages from messy exchanges. To demonstrate that reality television promotes the idea of female incompetence, she mentions a particularly stubborn and notably unsympathetic man from “Wife Swap,” who informed his temporary wife, a police detective, that gender-integrated police departments “put people’s lives at risk.” But she doesn’t mention that the man recanted a few scenes later, after a vigorous training session with some female officers.
In the same vein, Pozner tells the story of Toccara Jones, a curvilinear model—she describes herself as “vivacious and voluptuous”—who was the sixth runner-up on the third season of “America’s Next Top Model.” In a pitch-perfect impression of a “Top Model” partisan, Pozner derides the verdict of Tyra Banks, the show’s materfamilias (who declared Jones to have “lost her drive” and “checked out”), and lists various post-show successes: “To the rest of the mainstream media, Toccara is recognized as one of the most successful African-American plus-size models working today. To reality TV producers, she’s just a fat Black girl who needs to lose weight.” But isn’t she pointing to one of the form’s greatest strengths? Reality stars, unlike their scripted counterparts, outlive their shows, and sometimes find ways to defy them. For millions of viewers, the story of Lance Loud began in 1973, but it didn’t really end until his death, from hepatitis C and H.I.V., in 2001, at the dawn of the reality-television era that he helped inspire.
There is a taboo that left-leaning critics of popular culture are obliged to observe: never criticize the populace. Pozner tries her best to honor this proscription, following the trail blazed, half a century ago, by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who lamented that “the deceived masses” were easy marks for a cynical and self-perpetuating “culture industry.” Because she writes about reality television, Pozner must observe this taboo twice over—the deceived masses are represented by the people onscreen, too. Starting in 2004, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African-American contestant on Donald Trump’s business competition show, “The Apprentice,” became reality television’s preëminent villain, possessed of an impressive ability to enrage the people around her; Pozner scrambles to explain this phenomenon without casting aspersions on either the antiheroine or her legions of detractors. First, she assures us that, whatever inspired Manigault-Stallworth’s “Black villainess diva” reputation, “it wasn’t her behavior.” Then, two pages later, she allows that “Omarosa has capitalized on a virulent stereotype about Black women, a path ‘Apprentice’ producers laid out for her.” She is eager to let audiences off the hook: in her account, “American Idol” (which she finds mean-spirited) was a success because energetic cross-promotion “guaranteed ratings gold,” and “Survivor” was a success “largely because the endless, from-all-corners buzz made viewership seem almost like a cultural imperative.
Because Pozner isn’t really interested in viewers, she doesn’t have much to say about why they reject some reality shows while embracing others. And she doesn’t distinguish among passing fads, like “Joe Millionaire” (which lost eighty per cent of its audience between its first season finale and its second—also its last); hardy perennials, like “The Bachelor”; and obscurities, like “When Women Rule the World” (which was scrapped by Fox months in advance of its scheduled première, though the series was eventually broadcast in the U.K.). She isn’t really interested in the shows’ participants, either, and, despite her attempts to shield them, sometimes they become collateral damage in her assaults on greedy executives. “Producers build on our derision by carefully casting women who are, let’s just say, in no danger of being recruited to join Mensa,” she writes. This judgment, at least, has the virtue of clarity: producers are bad, though probably smart; participants are dumb, though possibly good.
Viewers wanting a subtler verdict should seek out “Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity” (Duke; $23.95), Brenda R. Weber’s strange and thoughtful survey of makeover shows. Defined loosely, this category, built around twinned narratives of physical and spiritual transformation, includes a wide range of reality programming: not only “The Swan” and “What Not to Wear” but also “Dog Whisperer,” which tames rowdy pets; “The Biggest Loser,” a weight-loss competition; and “American Idol,” which is, after all, about the transformation of amateurs into pop stars. (Even “The Real World” is, in some sense, a makeover show, precisely because of its artificiality: having been thrown together in a strange house with strange people, the participants generally assume that the experience will be educational, or even therapeutic.) Weber, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University, takes care to avoid snap judgments. Her approach is informed by the work of the feminist scholar Kathy Davis, who has rejected the idea that cosmetic surgery and other aesthetic interventions are inherently or purely oppressive. Weber quotes one of Davis’s insights with approval: “Women are not merely the victims of the terrors visited upon them by the beauty system. On the contrary, they partake in its delights as well.” The thought of women renovating their wardrobes or their faces inspires in Weber not horror but a tantalizing question: “Why shouldn’t the painful vestiges of class and circumstance that write themselves on the body be not only overwritten but erased altogether?”
Weber sees in these makeover programs a strange new world—or, more accurately, a strange new nation, one where citizenship is available only to those who have made the transition “from Before to After.” Weber notices that, on scripted television, makeovers are usually revealed to be temporary or unnecessary: “characters often learn that though a makeover is nice, they were really just fine in their Before states.” On reality television, by contrast, makeovers are urgent and permanent; “the After-body, narratively speaking, stands as the moment of greatest authenticity.” We have moved from the regressive logic of the sitcom, in which nothing really happens, to the recursive logic of the police procedural, in which the same thing keeps happening—the same detectives, solving and re-solving the same crimes. In fact, Weber points out that a number of makeover shows present their subjects as crimes to be solved: in the British version of “What Not to Wear,” makeover candidates line up in front of a one-way mirror, like perpetrators awaiting identification; “Style by Jury,” a Canadian show, begins and ends with the target facing a jury of her peers.
The transformation, however partial, of a Before into an After usually requires accomplices, who may go through their own transformation during the show, “from cranky witches to good friends to benevolent fairy godmothers (or superheroes),” as Weber puts it. Often, these accomplices, like their fairy-tale counterparts, live outside the social worlds of the people they help. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which began its run in 2003, epitomized this tendency: the title implied (and the show seemed to confirm) that the makeover targets needed a kind of help that no member of their tribe—the “straight guy” tribe—could provide. Weber argues that the “Queer Eye” experts, like other gay makeover agents, “function as a foil against which to read the emerging hegemonic masculinity of the made-over man.” But, surely, their marked difference is often related to the authority they project. (Think of Simon Cowell, for years the toughest “American Idol” judge: his British accent and his status as a lifelong non-singer made his judgments seem all the more definitive.) “Mostly male doctors on plastic surgery shows are relentless about the horrors of looking masculine,” Weber writes, and yet some of the same doctors who upbraid “masculine” women playfully defy gender norms: Robert Rey, the celebrity-obsessed star of “Dr. 90210,” is known for his smooth skin, and for the sleeveless scrub shirts he prefers, many of which are equipped with plunging V-necks, the better to display his pectoral cleavage.
Sometimes these agents of change seem purposely to sabotage their own messages. In her book, Pozner reserves special condemnation for “Charm School,” the VH1 program that purported to offer social rehabilitation to ill-mannered dating-show veterans; she protests that the “smug, white, wealthy ‘dean,’ Keith Lewis”—a modelling agent and pageant judge—“offered only condescension.” Weber, more astutely, argues that arbiters like Lewis function effectively as parodies of authority: “the lessons are so shallow, the uptight behavior of the experts so much less engaging than the ebullience of the subjects, that these ‘learn to be proper’ shows in many ways rebuke the very transformations they portray.” A show like “Charm School” is, at heart, an expression of the audience’s strong but mixed feelings about makeovers in general: we like the idea of melioration, but how much change do we really want? Weber returns to this question at the end of her book, when, in an autobiographical turn, she describes a visit to an orthodontist, who offers to straighten her teeth for five thousand dollars. She declines, but finds herself tempted—and she can’t help but notice that the orthodontist might benefit from otoplasty to pin back his ears. And so she returns, implicitly, to the question of whether the body’s “painful vestiges of class and circumstance” can be overwritten or erased. The answer is yes—but not for free and not for good.
In Weber’s estimation, the most successful makeover show of all time has been off the air for almost half a century. It was called “Queen for a Day,” and during its long run—from 1945 to 1957, on the radio, and from 1956 to 1964, on television—it gave hundreds of women the chance to testify to the arduousness of their lives; the woman whose tale of perseverance earned the most applause was awarded a ceremonial enthronement and an assortment of prizes. Weber renders this plot in economic terms, writing that the show “established a mediated affective economy where miserable subjects trade stories of abjection for the bounty promised through televisual benevolence.” The terms have barely changed in fifty years: this kind of exchange still forms the basis of the reality-television economy. In the view of Mark Andrejevic, the cultural theorist, basic models of economic exchange can help explain not only how the form works but why it emerged with such force when it did.
Andrejevic’s contribution to the field, “Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched,” arrived in 2004, relatively early in the reality boom, by the slow-motion standards of academe. For Andrejevic, reality television is a logical outgrowth of the rise, in the nineteen-nineties, of “interactive media,” which made it easier for consumers to provide instant and constant feedback to corporations. In this way, commercial advertising was joined with its obverse, commercial surveillance: in one, companies pay to have you watch; in the other, companies pay to have you watched. The reality era began in earnest just as the dot-com boom peaked, and if the shows felt uncannily “real,” Andrejevic says, it was not because they depicted behavior that was somehow authentic but because they were structured in a way that mirrored viewers’ lives:
The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange for access to a free e-mail account.
Although reality television is often mocked for its frivolity, Andrejevic argues that its success is symptomatic of an age in which labor and leisure are growing ever harder to separate. He tells the tale of DotComGuy, a briefly popular Internet celebrity, who planned to live his life online, funded by corporate sponsors. “To the extent that his life is the show, he is working all the time,” Andrejevic writes, and the same could be said of anyone who appears on any reality show. Pozner asserts that “on series from the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise to MTV’s ‘Paris Hilton’s My New BFF,’ ‘real life’ is all about leisure.” In fact, Hilton’s show, in which she claimed to be searching for a B.F.F. (best friend forever), was an example of how reality television turns social activities into professional ones. Similarly, the “Real Housewives” shows, despite the name, feature very few actual housewives and lots of working women (not all wives or mothers), every one of them eager to sacrifice time, not to mention privacy, for a small payment and a less small portion of notoriety. This is the opposite of leisure, and it may also be a sign of the end of leisure—the end, that is, of our ability to spend long stretches happily engaged in non-work. If this possibility makes us anxious, we’re not alone: judging from their frequent and intricate disagreements, the various “real housewives” are feeling a little anxious, too.
Andrejevic quotes Walter Benjamin, who, in 1935, distilled from his wanderings in the Paris arcades an axiom: “The utopian images that accompany the emergence of the new always concurrently reach back to the ur-past.” For Andrejevic, this is key to an understanding of the strong sense of nostalgia that pervades reality television, which often promises to give us glimpses of the way things might once have been. Hence the pseudo-tribal imagery of “Survivor,” which transports participants to an ersatz village, far from home, where the logic of the surveillance economy becomes harder to distinguish from the law of the jungle. In “Big Brother,” the contestants share a house that is modern except for the general absence of digital screens; it is, as Andrejevic says, “a mass media experiment in watching people deprived of the mass media.” Shows like “The Bachelor” revive old-fashioned ideas of courtship and marriage, just as “American Idol” validates an earlier generation’s idea of pop stardom.
In 2004, when Andrejevic’s book was published, the conventions of reality television were still being codified. Some early scholars emphasized the form’s debt to “Cops,” the longest-running reality show of all. It is now in its twenty-third season, on Fox, and the format has barely budged: viewers ride with police officers as they drive around, in search of perpetrators. “Cops” makes it easy to think of a video camera as a weapon, there to keep the peace and to discipline violators. “Big Brother,” with its winking title, also emphasized the regulatory power of surveillance: there were low-resolution cameras hidden in the walls and tucked behind the plants, offering nearly total scrutiny of the house and its residents; fans could watch footage online, in real time. It’s now clear, though, that the surveillance model was overblown; the future of reality television didn’t belong to hidden cameras and fugitive subjects. “Big Brother,” though it lumbers on, has never been very popular in America, and its grainy video and relaxed pace—the housemates, like inmates, are always searching for ways to kill time—seem more dated with every year. “Cops” has been succeeded by shows like “Police Women of Cincinnati,” on TLC, which shunts aside the shadowy perpetrators to zoom in on the telegenic women who pursue them.
There is no longer any need for surveillance. The nightly schedules are full of brightly lit reality dramas and comedies, driven by participants eager for screen time, and increasingly good at justifying their share. Andrejevic was amused by our eagerness to “hand over airtime to the real people,” even though putting them on the air makes them celebrities, which is to say, unreal. The various “Real Housewives” shows have gradually revealed themselves to be makeover shows, too, transforming the most popular cast members into self-sufficient celebrities. (Bethenny Frankel, from the New York cast, has branched out with a series of books, a low-calorie margarita drink, and a couple of spinoffs.) The celebrification of the genre has weakened the participants’ link to the viewers, while underscoring their similarity to other famous people. The celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly recently ran a cover depicting three of the young women from “Teen Mom,” accompanied by a headline in caution-sign yellow: “DESTROYED BY FAME.” The article quotes an unnamed “insider,” who offers a barbed opinion of one of the moms: “Jenelle acts like she’s a star.” Even the Loud family eventually received a glamorous makeover: HBO has just broadcast “Cinema Verite,” a feature film based on “An American Family,” starring Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, and James Gandolfini. Margaret Mead was right, in the end: reality television was—is—a new kind of art form. What she couldn’t have predicted was that, as it aged, it would come to look more and more like the old ones. ♦
Jumat, 13 Mei 2011
Brand-ing Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media
Below is a very good essay written by Eleanor Baird (original source www.henryjenkins.org):
In the June 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen asks the provocative question, "Are you killing TV?" The article starts with a discussion of how Heroes returned from a seven week hiatus to find that they had lost roughly 20 percent of their viewership, a jaw-breaking drop of 2.6 million viewers, from its September debut to its final few episodes of the season. Many other popular and cult series have experienced similar drops this season, including Jericho (as a result, the show was canceled), The Sopranos, Lost, The Shield, Desperate Housewives, and 24.
The magazine offers a range of theories about why the networks are experiencing such dramatic drops in viewership including:
The competition of American Idol which whips out pretty much all other competition.
Creatively uneven seasons, which resulted in mis-steps and lulls in the dramatic pacing of some key series.
The shift towards daylight savings time three weeks earlier this year.
A loss of interest and attention due to the extended hiatuses (an experiment in having continuous blocks of programming followed by periods of downtime). The result of this factor has been the fact that Heroes is actually producing a second spin-off series, Heroes: Origins, which will be a placeholder or miniseries during the downtime between episodes of the original series.
Shifts in the mechanisms by which fans access television series, ranging from timeshifting to downloads and waiting for the boxed sets. EW reports that 1.7 million viwers of Heroes do not watch it during its regularly scheduled time and an additional 2 million viewers watch Lost on DVR within seven days of its original airing. These numbers do not include those watching legal or illegal downloads of the series. About a third of the viewers of Lost don't watch during the regular series but catch up with it on DVD exclusively. Major shifts are occurring in how networks measure their audiences in response to these shifts in when and how we are accessing their content but in the short term, these shifts may leave some cult shows vulnerable.
This debate about the viewership of cult television programs is part of a larger discussion about the fate of the networks in an era where methods of content distribution and access are shifting dramatically. Eleanor C. Baird, a Sloan MBA student, took my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods this term. She wrote a very solid analysis of the future of network television for the course, one which mixes modes of analysis common to business schools with those we teach through our media studies classes.
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media
by Eleanor C. Baird
No matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise, the big four U.S. broadcast networks are, at their core, a mass medium that fits awkwardly into our newly democratic and participatory media ecosystem. Their marketing strategy follows the widely outmoded "push" model of consumer promotions and advertising to draw viewers. Even as they become increasingly integrated into the media industry's value chain, broadcasters are challenged by new cultural norms of consumption and engagement that are combining with technological change to create a "perfect storm", an environment where they are creating more value, but scrambling to capture it.
What is happening? It is not that people are not watching network television or becoming engaged with the content anymore. New ways of consuming television content are challenging the old revenue generation models. Consumers are turning to DVDs, DVR, and digital alternatives on the web to fit more television viewing into their lives. Advertisers, enticed by the prospect of more affluent and targeted audiences on cable and online, are beginning to spend their budgets on content sponsorship along the long tail. Broadcast networks are consequently in the strange position of having a strong collection of sub-brands - the individual programs - under a relatively weak primary brand - the network itself.
TV and the big four may not be going anywhere for now, but the future is becoming less and less certain.
In this essay, I will explore how broadcast networks can respond to this changing and converging media environment by promoting themselves as distinct brands of television. To do so, I will address three questions. The first question is one of focus, if the primary role for a broadcast network in this environment is content production or advertising aggregation channel. The second question is one of consumer loyalties and identification, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel through which they receive it. The third question is, can a channel such as a network be branded, and how can that be done successfully.
In order to answer these questions, I will begin by defining the broadcast networks and then analyze the major issues at play for them today - advertisers and audiences, content, channels, metrics, and digital distribution. Then, using Raymond Williams' concept of flow, as well as the writing of John Caldwell as a framework, I will address the macro issues of the role of the medium and the impact of branding, and then proceed to an analysis of the strategies of the four networks. The paper will conclude with some preliminary answers to the three questions based on my analysis.
What is a network?
Networks can refer to cable and broadcast channels, however, in this paper, the term is used to refer to the four major U.S. broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. These four properties are linked by their intended mass appeal and accessibility, their advertising-based revenue model, "push" programming and promotion, center-affiliate operational model and reliance on the network-mediated model of content delivery, based on a set flow of programming. Another key commonality is their lack of a clear and consistent brand identity, in contrast to many of the more popular cable networks - including CNN, A&E, MTV, Discovery Channel - which have very clear value propositions.
With what I am calling the network-mediated flow model, there is an implicit contract between the consumer and the network to provide some editorial control over the content, to choose which programs to broadcast, when, and in what order to provide a unified viewing experience. This experience can stem from engagement with the brand, but also with a need for a completely passive viewing experience, something that sets this medium apart from the Internet, which is intrinsically interactive. Networks, with a relatively wide variety of programs airing on a particular night, are uniquely suited to appeal to those habitual and/or passive viewers.
Another defining feature of the network is that it uses a "hub-and-spoke" model of distribution; most content developed and chosen at the center then distributed by local affiliates. Although the interaction in the consumer's mind between the identity of the affiliate and the larger network are not heavily studied, keeping strong affiliates in major markets is a key priority for networks to secure viewers. A recent study also found that there was no evidence that a more media-rich environment weakened the branding of a network affiliate to the parent, meaning that the common use of new media did not affect the television stations association to the network.
Yet another shared characteristic among the networks is their strong reliance on metrics, particularly some form of the Nielsen ratings, to entice advertisers to purchase time on air.
Audiences and Advertisers - No more "monolithic blocks of eyeballs"
Audience attrition is not a new problem for the broadcast networks, but it is still worrying for net executives, advertisers, and media buyers. Five percent of the share of the lucrative adult 18-49 demographic has slipped away from the broadcast networks in the last year (from 15. to 14.3). FOX leads the broadcast networks in ratings for this demographic with just fewer than 5 million viewers, ahead of ABC and CBS. NBC is by far the weakest in this demographic, with just under three million viewers.
At the same time, ad-supported cable's share of advertising spend grew by 3% and continued to garner a higher rating (from 15.5 to 15.9). As early as 2004, Nielsen Media reported that cable owned a 52% share of the market in contrast to broadcast's 44%.
In other words, there is a discernable trend away from mass media advertising. Part of the problem is that advertisers are seeking out more specific demographics, diverting advertising budgets to more specialized and targeted media channels. According to Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research, "[m]onolithic blocks of eyeballs are gone...in their place is a perpetually shifting mosaic of audience micro-segments that forces marketers to play an endless game of audience hide-and-seek."
From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, advertisers spent more than $10B a year on cable advertising, which has drained an estimated $1B a year from network prime time. Looking forward, a recent study projects the trend to continue, with ad revenues growing more than 13% per year for "narrowcast" media and only three and a half percent per year for the mass media from 2003 to 2010. The same study estimates that, by 2010, marketers will spend 41% more on cable and nearly 18% more on Internet advertising than on network TV ads.
At the same time, advertisers are demanding more flexible and non-traditional options from networks in order to get their messages across in the era of TiVo and free content online. Options sought from the networks include a range of embedded devices, including onscreen banner ads, product placement, single-sponsor infomercials, entertainment programming, and virtual product placement to achieve product "presence" in the content, not just "placement". In the new terrain of interactive television, the players also are optimistic for making up some lost advertising revenue through e-commerce applications that enable viewers to buy products that, in the vein of The Truman Show, are featured in the television show, reducing the need for traditional 30-second spots.
Content, Channel and Keeping Score
VCRs and cable television began to appear in American households in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, networks have faced the disturbing realities of both competitive channels for advertising and opportunities for consumers to effectively remove and view TV texts from the channel altogether alongside opportunities to make money by selling content as a stand-alone product. Taken together, these developments set the stage for weaker identification with networks and the TV flow and stronger identification with self-directed content consumption that paved the way for TV on DVD and digital distribution.
Content ownership is part of the story; the more content the networks own, the more tempting the prospects of finding alternate ways of connecting viewers directly to content. Relaxation of the so-called fin-syn laws in the mid-1990s also led to a number of content deals between the conglomerates (AOL Time Warner-NBC, Disney-ABC, Fox, Viacom-CBS) and competing studios to capture as much value as possible. In 1995, networks owned the first-run and syndication rights for an average of 40% of their schedules, by 2000, 6 major networks owned or co-owned more than 50% of their new shows, while 3 had stake in more than 75% of them. This trend seems to have remained constant; for the 2007 season, the four broadcast networks, at least 42% of the new programs are produced in house or with a partner (see Appendix A).
In writing about the changing role of television and convergence, John Caldwell argues that the "real issue" has been syndication revenue, from cable in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s, and that shows have consequently been designed with re-release in syndication in mind. Syndication is a lucrative way for producers to keep revenue flowing from older properties over time, similar to DVD, but still within the context of the television viewing experience.
TV is taken out of television with an affordable technology complimented by changing consumer expectations and viewing patterns. Digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo are becoming increasingly popular, and bringing a new and interesting twist to the question of network branding by splitting of content and channel. The frustrating issue for broadcast networks is that people with DVRs watch more of their programming, building a strong or at least passing affiliation with the sub-brands of individual shows, but they skip advertising. Research reported in BusinessWeek showed that DVR owners watch 20-30% more television, but bypass 70% of the advertising. NBC currently has two of the top five shows in the Nielsen rating "live-plus-seven" group of 18 to 49 year olds, the group that either watches the program live on television or uses a PVR to record and watch it within seven days of the broadcast. However, if live broadcast viewers only are included, the NBC shows barely make the top ten. Convincing advertisers to look beyond the traditional ratings is an upward struggle for any network, especially when those ratings are in decline across the board.
How big an issue is DVR adoption and use? One network executive estimated that time shifting viewers are resulting in lost revenue of as much as $600 million a year for a single broadcast network, or about $2.4 billion for all of them. On the plus side for the networks, these devices do enable some tracking of post-broadcast viewing, unlike playback using a VCR, which was almost impossible to measure. Adoption of DVRs has already lagged expectations reported in 2004 , however estimates for percentage of American households with a DVR by 2010 ranges from about half to about a third, up from only 16% in 2006.
Finally, taking the spilt of content and context even further, producers have also chosen to repackage television content completely distinctly from the format of television itself. Writing about the advent of television programming becoming commonly available on DVD, beginning with the X-Files in 2000, Derek Kompare argues that divorcing the content from the advertising enabled the content to "'transcend' television" and become a "multilayered textual experience" distinct from the medium. Although this generates revenue for the networks, it does little to strengthen their brand or capitalize on the strength of one show's sub-brand to promote another, potentially increasing profits.
Yesterday, we ran the first part of an essay written by Sloan MBA candidate Eleanor Baird about the current fate and future branding of network television. Baird's work calls attention to shifts in the ways that networks measure their audiences, shifts which are going to be played out in dramatic ways as the networks launch their new season this fall. A team of MIT students -- graduate and undergraduate -- will be monitoring closely the week by week fluctuations in viewership figures and the ways that the networks are adjusting their programming strategies and branding practices in response. Here's the description of the course, which would be open to students from MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, thanks to our various exchange programs. I hope to report on some of their findings here throughout the term.
Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the Fall 2007 Television EcosystemAlex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman
As creative development and business models change for television and cable networks making the transition from broadcasting to a mass market to immersing viewers in content across digital platforms, new opportunities to engage audiences in more meaningful ways are emerging as quickly as the underlying businesses that support production and distribution are outgrowing traditional valuation metrics and advertising currencies. There is a significant disconnect between what we know and can price versus what we're learning and where businesses are headed in the years to come.
Using the Fall 2007 television season as a basis for discussion and exploration, this seminar and lab course are designed to introduce students to the research metrics and business issues associated with broadcast and cable television, as well is with a variety of digital content extensions across web, mobile, and other platforms, all intended to create additional revenue streams while engaging audiences. In the lab, students will apply their learning to an analysis and revenue forecasting exercise for the television season as it unfolds in real time. The goal of the course will be to enable students to explore new ways of thinking quantitatively as we attempt to bridge the gap that currently exists between the known and unknown.
Our aim will be to begin the course with summaries of the networks' annual "upfront" presentations and programming strategies, immersing students in the creative and strategic pitches of the four major networks and explaining the corresponding business/programming rationale behind the new fall TV season. Then, in subsequent weeks, students will be introduced and become fluent in the mechanics and intricacies of rating points, Nielsen ratings, and other data to help understand the programming and business (e.g., marketing, advertising pricing inventories, sweeps strategies and case students, etc.) of the season as it progresses through the fall. Students will also be introduced to emerging strategies and tools to analyze "buzz" and other online behaviors -- such as online video viewing, iTunes purchases, etc. -- that now enable networks to better understand the "total" audience for their shows. While the course will focus on quantitative research methods and analysis, connections will be made to some new qualitative strategies and methods. Guest speakers from the major television networks, production companies, and advertising agencies will complement seminar discussions and readings.
As part of the weekly lab, students will work in teams representing the major television networks to "forecast" what the networks might and should do to revise their programming strategies and re-price their advertising inventories over the course of the fall season. The lab is supplemented by an online discussion/wiki where student teams will collaborate and collect data.
Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. Through January 2007, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice, which advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape. Widely respected in the industry, she is an award-winning professional who is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, including appearances on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends.
Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Now for Part Two of Baird's essay:
Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media
by Eleanor Baird
Digital downstream
Even if audiences are not planning to sit in front of a network television affiliate for hours on end, networks hope, as they probably always have, that the consumer will be at least be engaged with the some of the content and keep coming back for more. The interactive, on-demand nature of the Internet seems to make it a natural medium for audience engagement for a consumer who could access the content from a wide variety of channels at a variety of times. Network executives and programmers hope that enhanced and more interactive experiences through the "ancillary channel" of the Internet will increase retention, engagement and, time spent viewing the show and related content and ultimately, revenue going back to the original program source. With a network branded site, this strategy is another opportunity to have consumers interact with the meta brand
Caldwell argues that television styled itself a "pull" medium, while bidding to make the Internet a "viable 'push' medium" . The relationship between television and Internet may seem natural and complimentary in this way, but it is problematic in others, requiring the interaction of content created by a few and consumed by many to adapt to a medium where greater participation in consumption and production of the content and flow are the norm. Moreover, this relationship has implications for a network trying to maintain a clear brand identity in an environment where users expect to be able to repurpose content in ways that the producers may never have intended. In contrast to television, this medium gives the network far less control of the image of both the sub-brand (the content) but also the meta brand, then context in which the sub-brand is experienced (the network).
So, although consumption of digital content may engage the viewer more, there is no guarantee, given the nature of the technology and the norms surrounding it, that the engagement will be with the network brand, the show's sub-brand, a combination of the two, or other factors entirely. That said, a recent study suggest that, if presented through a number of media channels, network affiliation awareness seems to grow stronger, echoing multiple studies on marketing messages and consumer retention.
Although there is certainly potential for branding and revenue generation online, interactivity is not the silver bullet that will save the networks from a consumer standpoint either. Various companies have tried to launch costly interactive television initiatives since the 1970s, all of which failed because they overestimated the audience interest in the service.
The public's interest in interactivity does not seem to be much better for network websites. Even though the vast majority of homes have a television and Internet penetration in U.S. households is quite high, there are estimates that as little as 5% of broadcast networks' viewers actually watch streaming video, in contrast to the 15% of cable channel viewers who do. A recent study of cable network website users found that they enjoyed using the website, but did not see it as the "Internet brand of the network" or as a "functional alternative to television". In fact, the usage of the cable television websites was heavily dependent on if they had been mentioned on air - a factor that accounted for about two thirds of visitors - and, not surprisingly, the popularity of a cable network's website mirrors the popularity of the network's broadcasts.
This raises the question of the utility of focusing branding efforts on these channels at all. If the users are highly engaged "content junkies" who usually learn about the site through watching television anyway, is network brand development online a worthwhile area to explore?
Re-run or Pitch: Anything new?
One could argue that the current challenges facing the networks are nothing new. Viewership and ratings of network television have been in decline since the introduction of cable television channels and the VCR; network primetime share of the TV audience Network prime time viewing shares have dropped from over 90% in 1979 to about 50% in 1998, the same year the four networks' season rating slipped to 36%. The growing ubiquity of advertising in everyday western life and the issues that raises first drew comment in the mid-1800s, and many of the "new" advertising ideas, from the single sponsor to the commercial-program integration were used in TV's earlier days. Hand wringing about the propensity of consumers to skip advertisements on television began as early as the 1950s and 1960s when articles appeared in the popular press on how to "zap" commercials with a remote.
Going with the flow
If we take the opposite view, that these changes are significant and, as some have argued, we are living in a "post-network" or possibly even "post-television" era , where traditional channels will become obsolete and consumers will be left to their own devices in selecting the content they want to view. Although sensational and interesting to contemplate, these scenarios would not be consistent with the evolution of media where, as Henry Jenkins argues, "once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within a larger system of communication options". This outlook would also be inconsistent with the current and historical behaviors of "mass" audiences who have been known to vary widely in their adoption of new technology and consumption habits, as we have seen.
If the latter case is true, how can television, and more specifically the networks, adapt to a brave new world that includes not only cable, and DVRs but digital distribution channels and an audience that wants more and more control over what it watches and when. If content is indeed king, where do broadcast networks fit in, and how do they keep their advertisers happy and revenue streams flowing?
The answer seems to be in stealthy advertising and broad diversification. John Caldwell argues that television is going through a rhetorical shift that directly reflects the industrial context and reality in which producers and distributors now find themselves. Productions are "content", not "programs", that media companies are now "repurpose[ing] and "migrating" to "platform[s]". As Sumner Redstone, Chairman of Viacom, a media conglomerate explained the company's philosophy in 2004: "What advertisers buy is platforms to get their brand promoted, and we've got four platforms for them [broadcast TV, cable TV, billboards, and radio]...[w]e're everywhere, because in this day and age you have to be where the advertisers need to be."
Unfortunately for the broadcast networks, the shocks of industry deregulation in the 1980s allowed "emerging media conglomerate were reaping the benefits of vertical integration in the cable landscape, but the broadcast networks were precluded from doing the same thing." When regulations changed again in the mid-1990s, a there was a "phase of frenzied merger and acquisitions activity characterized by an unprecedented commitment to vertical integration and 'synergy'" for broadcast networks, including extensive re-branding campaigns when the quality and familiarity message did not seem to help get an audience.
The new multi-platform, on-demand universe of repurposed channels and content disrupts Raymond William's concept that flow, sequences of items in a programming lineup, is a defining characteristic of television as a medium. Without the ability to control flow, broadcast networks - lacking the strong viewer identification and brand strength common to cable - seem to be in danger of loosing relevance as a medium or distribution channel and moving further and further into content production and promotion of engagement with a stable of content sub-brands.
Much has been written about brand extension and dilution. Most relevant for networks, however, are the risks and benefits associated with having a strong meta brand. Consumers like consistency and predictability. The more consistent, predictable and good a sub-brand, the more it would benefit from a strong meta-brand, and vice versa. If the meta-brand is weak, there is much more latitude to experiment, but no chance to benefit from a strong meta brand and market reputation for a certain competency or style. One 1993 study found that "when a firm systematically introduces brand extensions consistent with a broader, more superordinate product category, it not only modifies the brand's core business definition but also enhances the brand's ability to accommodated more and diverse extensions." Therefore, a strong network brand could actually help a broadcaster expand and diversify its offerings and protect it from some of the risk associated with new shows in an inherently risky industry.
As we have seen, advertising revenue and audiences have fallen, despite the desire to consume network television programming. New technologies for circumventing the push towards traditional network television "appointment viewing" are clearly causing some loss of revenue. However, even though lost revenue from piracy and illegal downloads online is difficult to estimate, these new technologies do not seem to have as great an impact on the networks as the advent of cable, still their main competitor, or industry consolidation in the 1990s.
If this is indeed the case, this moment in time may be a key opportunity for networks to establish themselves as meta brands and ensure that viewers identify with the channel and the product before cultural practice aligns itself more with the available technology.
Hustle and Flow - Network branding analysis
As the stage has now been set, and the larger issues in network branding addressed, this part of the paper will be devoted to an analysis of branding practices of the four U.S. networks from the mid-nineties until the 2007 upfront presentations.
Essentially, there are two models of network branding in use by these four players: the flow, or push, method and the hustle, or pull, method.
The first method of network branding, used by ABC, and NBC and FOX to a lesser extent, is what I would call the flow model. It relies on the traditional channel, the broadcast network to push content to the viewer, but uses a branded online presence as a secondary opportunity to engage the viewer in the content, but with the ongoing presence of the network brand in the virtual space. This approach is not about holding back content, but retaining control over how it is accessed by users outside of the television medium.
TV Week reports that ABC and NBC have worked aggressively to drive visits to their branded websites, largely by providing high volumes of content quickly in a single place. From September 2006 through February 2007, ABC.com and NBC.com were almost tied in first place with about 9 million unique visitors each per month, trailed by CBS.com with 5.5 and Fox.com with just 3.7 million, according to Nielsen Net Ratings. NBC and FOX have announced that they will collaborate to launch a yet unnamed content delivery site this year.
Where the three networks diverge is in their emphasis on event programming versus branding campaigns to encourage "appointment viewing". For example, FOX has relied on long-running programs American Idol to fuel some of its rating power. A true event program, Idol has been able to command huge premiums on advertising time for six seasons. FOX has released its content gradually relative to competitors, and has fewer 'high concept" programs like Heroes orLost, which tend to drive online ratings by virtue of their complex story lines and serial narratives that prompt viewers to seek out information outside of their regular TV viewing time. FOX is the top ranked network in the lucrative 18-49 demographic, with a brand that has been described by one executive in as "noisy, inventive, [and] talk[s] with viewers not at them", which "transferred into Fox's new on-air look, characterized by bold type, kinetic footage and distinctive color palette."
ABC and NBC have also both created flow-based marketing campaigns to brand their content on television.
Perhaps the more well known was NBC's "Must-See TV" campaign that made the network's Thursday "clearly the most watched and most profitable night in network television during the 10-year use of the line". It was flow-based because it promoted a sequence of shows rather than a single piece of content as a weekly event. This enabled the network to leverage its own meta brand and program in a rerun and sometimes new or weaker shows with the support of proven hits.
Nancy San Martin also argued that the line-up had an internal logic, that "naturalizes and reinforces a traditional narrative order- providing a readily discernible beginning, middle and end" and thus encouraged viewers to stay tuned for the entire programming set. In the midst of the "Must-See-TV" era, the network launched the NBC-2000 campaign to bring errant affiliates, and their viewers, into the fold by presenting the organization as one big family. Although the network is lagging in the ratings, Mike Pilot, President of Ad Sales, recently said in an interview that "[y]ou have to believe in our heritage [brand] and that programming success is cyclical and we'll get back to a great place", adding that the Thursday night slot was (still) the one they would focus on. The network, perhaps to hedge against its aforementioned DVR woes, has invested in both TiVo and ReplayTV.
ABC has employed a similar logic to promoting its whole lineup, although it takes a much broader, less time-dependent approach and uses themes that are more abstract and popular music to create a meta brand. The "Yellow" campaign to promote the network's entire fall lineup several years ago, using the color, a set of clever taglines and a popular coldplay song to promote itself, the channel, as a sense of irony and ultimately a fun destination rather than just a position on the dial. This season, the network has been promoting their lineup under the title "One", using a Mary J. Blige song by the same name in spots, this time emphasizing "[t]he idea...that our shows bring people together, so the network brings people together." Mentions were made in the press of ABC's core demographics in articles about the 2007 upfront presentations, with one writer atVariety referring to them as "the most upscale-skewing of all broadcasters" and a writer for theLA Times blog referring to ABC's colorful and female skewing brand .
If the "flow" approach employed by ABC, NBC and FOX is a push strategy that involves a branded digital content experience, a branded look and feel and an emphasis on events or flow programming, the "hustle" approach of CBS is almost the opposite. Unlike the other three networks, CBS has not had a recent clear brand-building campaign for its flow on the air or huge content successes. What is interesting about CBS, and why I called this the "hustle" model, is that it has been relatively aggressive in shopping out its content using a much more scattershot approach and without the anchoring site employed by ABC and NBC.
Whereas ABC and NBC have very strongly network branded sites to distribute its content for free online, CBS has taken a much different, two pronged approach more geared to distributing pieces of content along the lines of Bernard Miége's publishing model of cultural production, not Williams' concept of flow.
CBS does manage a content site where full episodes can be viewed free, but the site, Innertube, makes only passing reference to the network. The conundrum was well-described by brandchannel.com: " [w]hile the official Innertube URL is filed under the CBS brand (cbs.com/innertube) rather than its own URL (like cbsinnertube.com), the rest of the site experience actually promotes Innertube as the primary brand, with the CBS parent brand having more of a secondary role." Meanwhile, CBS recently announced a series of agreements to distribute its programming online with portals like MSN and AOL; it was also the first network to sign with the Internet TV site Joost, and is in talks with the NBC-FOX content distribution site. This scope would give CBS more internet distribution partners than any other major media company , yet the exact benefits of this strategy are still unclear, beyond its content becoming a semi-ubiquitous feature of legal video viewing sites.
CBS also garnered a great deal of attention at this year's upfront presentation from bloggers in particular when it announced that the complexly-plotted show Jericho was to be replaced with a reality program called 40 Kids. Although the network was almost universally maligned for taking this step, given its limited web presence as a content provider online, it may not be able to support a more complexly plotted show like this and fully engage the audience. CBS' model seems to be about producing content that is good for television but with limited potential for brand extension online (like CSI) , and capitalizing on it relatively quickly with on air ad revenues and multiple deals with third party content sites.
Conclusion: Three questions revisited
At the beginning of this essay, I posed three questions: is the primary role for a broadcast network as a content producer or advertising aggregation channel, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel, and if a network can be branded, how can it be done successfully. I would like to conclude by attempting to answer each of these.
On the first question, a network can (and they are) both, but fundamentally a network is a communication mechanism, a mass medium. Advertising aggregation is the motor that runs both the production and broadcasting machines. Even if media is now "mass-less", the networks are the closest thing we now have to a common media experience across the United States, and maintaining that broad, general reach is its raison d'etre. Perhaps it is not the content but the selection and programming of content that networks can market and sell to advertisers.
On the second question, I would argue that consumers currently have a stronger relationship overall with network content than the network channel, but it does not have to be that way. I would point to the BBC, PBS, CityTv in Canada, and the Discovery Channel as examples of networks (albeit some on cable) that have managed to create a distinctive relationship with the people that watch them through advocacy, higher perceived quality, local involvement, and/or merchandizing and retail.
Both of these questions lead, of course into the final question: can and should a network be branded and if so, how? Based on the research, I believe that the first two parts of the answer are yes it can and yes it should. Developing a clear identity and meta-brand has several important advantages in today's market. It helps define the audience for advertisers, which helps bring in revenue, as well as setting the stage for developing a set of clear marketing messages to draw those viewers to a variety of media properties where they can engage with both the network meta brand and the content sub-brand. It also helps set the stage for loyal viewership that will bear with the network while it experiments with the occasional incongruent sub-brand to look for new revenue opportunities. True, the networks need to stay national, but that is not to say that they could not pursue a certain niche with broad appeal, somewhat like FOX's emphasis on reality programming.
The final question of how, is somewhat more difficult to answer. I would argue that, in the case of television networks, DVRs and content online are important considerations but that the vast majority of people gravitate back, or can be convinced to gravitate back to, live broadcast TV. True, the Nielsen ratings can be changed, but less ambiguity will help to capture more advertisers. The live broadcast TV "product" should be the core of any successful TV branding, not content or websites. In my mind, the flow strategy still works best; television is a live, audio and visual community experience that the web or DVR cannot duplicate, and networks offer familiarity and editorial know-how in the clutter of the "mass media" - even if it is not so "mass" anymore.
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