While the upfront is chugging along and advertisers continue to flock to the golden goose called TV, news broke yesterday that the average broadcast network viewer median age was 50. (Not including DVR users.) As Variety put it: “…if they were a person, they wouldn’t even be a part of TV’s target demo anymore.”
While the video viewing experience will become more and more important, the traditional TV experience is dying a slow death. This doesn’t mean above 50 aren’t desirable audiences and shouldn’t be addressed in your communcation strategy. But it means that younger generations have changed their behavior for good and won’t return. It happened with radio, newspapers and TV. And it will continue to happen with the online and mobile experience. Technology doesn’t drive revolutions. Changes in basic behavior drive societal changes. And we’re in the middle of one.
No, it’s not the artificial dialogue. Not the predictable story lines. Or the lame special effects. The main reason why I don’t like old movies is being confronted with a linear story in a non-linear world.
And, as you can imagine, these linear story lines are not limited to movies: Almost all campaigns are linear, same is true for books, magazines, radio programs. The majority of our entertainment industrial complex is based on linear storytelling.
In the new marketing reality, good advertising is non-linear: It’s relevant, personal, exploratory, weird, interesting, bizarre, different. Budweiser UK gets it in above commercial: Building an emotional environment, an intellectual platform to communicate to people is all they were looking for. A story that starts to build, a story intriguing enough to make me look again for the next storyline
Providing a non-linear storytelling experience will satisfy the desires of people (who hunger for these kinds of stories) by connecting their actions, channel choices and media snacking to the unfolding story directly. Game developers have understood the potential of non-linear stories a long time ago and the IGDA offers a few good pointers to make the complexity work.
Since our lives are increasingly non-linear, the stories that surround us need to adjust: When TV started to develop programs, they showed mostly theatrical plays because they didn’t know what to do with the medium. It took a long time to develop soaps, sitcoms, etc. We still try to transfer the TV format to the digital medium. That’s not a solution. It’s a pity.
In 20 years, we’ll look back at these stone-age attempts to digital storytelling and in our memories will be black and white. And grainy.
The one thing that kept TV vital and as the premium communication channel was the promise of live TV: People will watch live TV, such as sporting events, and they will consume commercials just to see the live action again.
This theory was always faulty: Besides the fact that people might not leave the room but focus their attention on their family and friends during commercial break, a majority of people have their laptop handy and will focus their attention on productive work before refocusing their attention on TV again. But, more importantly, people are getting sick of the time tyranny of live TV.
A Global Broadcast Consumer Survey conducted by Accenture shows that people are getting used to an on-demand lifestyle: they want to pick and choose when they consume any form of media. The numbers are astounding: 83% of of people are unhappy with the inflexibility of live TV, mostly based on their complaints about commercials (64 percent) and not being able to rewind (40%).
Media consumption habits are changing so rapidly, businesses and agencies have problems keeping up. Even worse, media consumption habits are not even studied closely enough. An impression makes no impression anymore. When you have a magazine next to you on the couch, the TV blaring and the NY Times homepage on your computer, what do you count as an impression? We all know that people can’t consume three different medium at once, so how do you count these three impressions? And how shall publishers be reimbursed for part-attention impressions?
Add to the mix the advent of Social Networks, the move from top-down to bottom-up entertainment and you have a pretty confusing picture and even more confused brands. Agencies need to help businesses to clear up that confusion. Unless they are even more foggy.
A few weeks ago, the NY Times discussed the failure of ‘Friday Night Lights’, one of best reviewed TV shows, to attract a larger audience. Virginia Heffernan explained its failure with the lack of online extensions and discusses how TV shows can’t survive without franchising:
“…in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots - as many entry and exit points as fans devise.”
She explains further:
“Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art - at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the show fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life.
As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.”
Conversational Marketing is often misunderstood as just an opportunity to initiate conversations between people and brands. It is so much more.
Conversational Marketing can help brands to tell their stories better. Through various platforms, innovative storylines, transmedia storytelling. Trans…what?
“Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.”
People can handle more than one idea. It’s not enough to interrupt people for seconds on TV or 5 seconds as a roadblock on a site and hoping to be able to sell your product. We need to offer more than an idea.
We have to change the paradigm from individuals reacting to the world to adopting ideas and transferring them into communities. These communities will happen around inspiring storylines: They invite you to discuss, explore, exchange, interact, engage. Yes, we want engagement. But engagement without any value for people falls flat.
‘Friday Night Lights’ developed numerous loving relationships with people. But they had nowhere to go to express their love. And so everybody moved on.
