Looking Beyond The Box

First I would like to thank Tim for asking me to join in contributing to this blog; with that being said let’s quit dipping that toe in the water and jump in the darn pool.

Favorite TV shows are being canceled, negating the emotional bond built with beloved characters and leaving holes in weekday evenings. These gaping voids are then replaced with banal filler.  Fury over these cancellations has filled fan blog and forum alike and the plaintive cries of “Why!” echo through cyberspace for the good and bad of Prime Time.

Let’s be honest: who really understands the truth of cancellation?  Spend some time reading trade blogs and publications and you’ll find as many reasons as there are shows.  Basically it all relates to underperformance.   A lack of X where X equals advertising dollars or Nielsen stats.

Some shows, like Jericho, Moonlight, and October Road have developed a significant fan base over their limited runs.  Others, like Canterbury’s Law, Chuck, Life, or Men in Trees, didn’t have a chance to really get off the ground before being scrapped for the 2007-2008 Season.  Jericho specifically speaks directly to non-cable networks being out of touch with viewers, especially after the peanuts incident.  At least Chuck and Life will be back for the 2008-2009 season…we hope.

Why are shows with dedicated fans numbering in the millions being removed from the air for pilots that drive as much enthusiasm as a root canal?

The American Auto Industry had a lesson pounded into them in the late 90s: Adapt or lose the market.  If you think I’m incorrect I’d invite you to run down to your local Oldsmobile dealer and check out their 2008 line.”  Broadcast television, or The Big Four [and the CW], are learning that lesson now, but slowly.  I disagree with Tim in this being a case of the Writer’s Strike killing off our favorite shows: it is convergence.  Let me quantify that I loathe buzz-speak so we're not going to path walk a root cause analysis illustrating the paradigm shift between traditional and new entertainment technologies driven by a lack of synergy....blech.

Tim is correct in his postulate that October Road would be well suited for webisode life; but that doesn’t speak directly to how distributors gain ROI [return on investment] for funding these shows.

Using the aforementioned Electric Farm Entertainment property Afterworld as discussed by creator and executive producer Brent V. Friedman, we can see that even the bleeding edge is not without potential profit loss.  All advances usually have limited return on investment at inception, no matter what industry example is used: “Swiffer” didn’t take off until almost a year after product release and that puppy is now one of Proctor and Gamble's major revenue drivers. 

Convergence speaks to a coalescence of tools used to bring entertainment to viewers which drives potential revenue gain.  Anyone who has spent some time talking to oldsters raised in the Golden Days of Radio or has seen A Christmas Story should understand the basic concept of convergence. 

For those who haven’t seen this classic film: Ralphie eagerly awaits Little Orphan Annie’s secret decoding ring message to arrive in his mailbox.  Once the ring has been received he can barely contain himself as he sits through the next Little Orphan Annie radio episode waiting for the “secret decoder message”.  As the announcer reads the encrypted message our protagonist is quivering in excitement only to learn it’s an Ovaltine commercial:  The message reads, “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

First, disbelief, then dark anger cloud Ralphie’s face as he realizes that his secret decoder ring is nothing more than an advertising gimmick.  Having awaited similar items ordered from cereal boxes the disappointment shown in the film rang true to my childhood memories…one of many the things that makes this film a must see. You may be asking yourself, “where is the point?” 

Ralphie’s enthusiasm for that simple plastic decoder ring speaks volumes about the viewer’s emotional need to be a part of the story, no matter how small in part.  We have seen excellent illustrations of this as the internet made Alternate Reality Gaming [ARG] prevalent in the mid-nineties through today. Combined with ARG, viral marketing has become an invaluable tool when combined with television and film properties. So much so that it was a prevalent topic at the 2008 O’Reilly Conference.  Elan Lee’s (Fourth Wall Studios) presentation, “Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age” illustrated this with his “Push, Pull, and Charge, magnet theory.  [Unfortunately no online transcript of that talk exists, so no link folks.]

Combined with viral marketing, ARG has successfully promoted everything from Halo 3 to Year Zero from Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.  Traditional broadcasting has been slow off the mark in leveraging this new toolset to drive viewer participation and increase the marketability of properties.

One example of the impact of non-utilization is the CBS show Moonlight.  With the prolific amount of vampire ARG games Moonlight had the potential to vault to the Buffy or Angel of this decade yet CBS dropped the ball.  With no additional viral or ARG Moonlight has been taken off the schedule. Not to compare Moonlight directly with anything by Joss Whedon.  Whedon’s television vehicles are usually fan drivers, with the exception of Firefly.  An excellent show with a very loyal fan-base Firefly experienced the same lack of programming care from Sci-Fi that Moonlight received from CBS.

With that being stated we need to quantify that ARG/Viral isn’t a magic bullet.  Most organizations don’t dedicate adequate resources to the online experience which leads to failure. An excellent example of this is the CBS Jericho ARG launched in January of 2008.  Poor design and limited scope left more than the most dedicated fans with too-little-too-late. Bad Robot productions, has done a better job with the combination of entertainment, alternate reality, and viral with Cloverfield and Lost.  NBC Universal’s Heroes series also has a fairly convergent web/reality combination.

Electric Farms blew them out of the water with the ARG for the Webbie-nominated property Afterworld, which combined both real world and ARG as supplements to the daily webisodes.  Clicking through an AW site could lead you to either an ARG information set…or a real world website that was a red herring complimenting the overall storyline of the series.  It was pure genius that drove fans crazy…in a good way.

Modern entertainment requires active participation.  With 500 channels, 100 HD channels, a DVR, and the Web, formulaic sit-and-watch shows aren’t cutting it.  To truly drive return on investment shows have to be supplemented by additional content, be it ARG or real world, and be liquid in scalability.

Non-traditional forms of distribution allow for direct partnering with advertisers and more integrated communication with viewers.  Why just watch when you can participate.  Electric Farm Entertainment’s Afterworld demonstrated a uniqueness in that fan interactions were combined in to the story and ARG lines; something that causes all shows to thrive.  If networks are unable to adapt to the technology and synergy of multi-platform and scalable properties they will continue to lose market share.  In addition, if the Big Four [and the CW] continue to ignore viewers wishes, those viewers will migrate to media outlets that provide both entertainment and active participation instead of the customary couch-potato viewing Prime Time television drives today.

Recently I attended a conference where the Keynote Speaker illustrated the disconnect between ‘corporate think’ and the consumer that applies perfectly to the current environment.  Paraphrasing an excellent lesson, “We thought we knew what the consumer wanted so we stopped listening… [as a result] our market share plummeted in areas we had led the industry in for over twenty years.  Truly a case of believing we knew what was best for the consumer instead of using active listening”.



Networks have to look beyond the box, literally.  Television is now more than something that sits in your living room and it’s a prime time for change.