Television and New Media

Must-Click TV

Jennifer Gillan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135965662
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We watch TV on computers, phones, and other mobile devices; television is now online as much as it is "on air." Television and New Media introduces readers to the ways that new media technologies have transformed contemporary broadcast television production, scheduling, distribution, and reception practices. Drawing upon recent examples including Lost, 24, and Heroes, this book examines the ways that television programming has changed—transforming nearly every TV series into a franchise, whose on-air, online, and on-mobile elements are created simultaneously and held together through a combination of transmedia marketing and storytelling. Television studios strive to keep their audiences in constant interaction with elements of the show franchise in between airings not only to boost ratings, but also to move viewers through the different divisions of a media conglomerate.

Organized around key industrial terms—platforming, networking, tracking, timeshifting, placeshifting, schedule-shifting, micro-segmenting, and channel branding this book is essential for understanding how creative and industrial forces have worked together to transform the way we watch TV.

Chapter One
Fan tracking, targeting, and interaction from the web to the WB

The CW, the broadcast network formed in 2006 when the WB merged with former netlet competitor UPN, has embraced the circulatory paradigm of Must-Click TV. Its 2008 network identification campaign featured graphics of a laptop computer screen, mobile device, and television monitor, all interconnected and on a timed rotation that represented CW television content continually circulating among on-air, online, and on-mobile platforms. The network ID emphasized the CW’s commitment to a feedback loop, one in which comments viewsers make online or via a mobile device have fed back into the content of the network’s series. It also referenced the centrality of both technological and cultural convergence, that is, the capacity of devices to work in sync and the synching of the social practices and behavior enabled by these technologies.¹ Through this network ID, the CW proclaimed its understanding of how these new devices and technologies allow viewsers both to interact with or at least respond online to the content of a television series and to acquire content that they could then integrate into their everyday lives (such as music for ringtones or for MP3 players, screenshots for use on websites or for social networking icons).

Watching TV and talking about it is a social experience, one that is just as likely to take place online as in person. The on-air, online or on-mobile content the CW has on offer for each of its series continues to be represented as interconnected, especially given that the episodes themselves are available in the three platforms. Hopeful that viewsers engage with content in these other platforms in coordination with the terrestrial broadcast, the CW makes full episodes available in multiple platforms because it also understands that people “watch TV” on devices other than television sets. The online and on-mobile platforms also feature extensions of the story world beyond, but always in coordination with, the on-air TV show. These developments in the ways in which viewsers watch and follow television series have posed challenges and opportunities for broadcast networks, the biggest of which is that if viewers do not watch TV on TV, then advertisers start to wonder if they should continue to sponsor programming.

The CW’s 2009 network identification campaign addressed that concern with its assertion that the CW creates TV to talk about. The longer version of that tagline was CW TV: see it, hear it, blog it, live it. A reminder followed that the cw.com offered enhanced streaming of episodes, the opportunity to network with other fans, and click-to-buy fashions. A mobile device appeared in the space signaling that you could also “get music sent straight your phone,” a feature sponsored by Verizon Wireless’s VCast service with the tagline: get it now from Verizon and play it on VCast. This campaign assured viewers (and promised sponsors) that the CW is well aware that its viewers have a relationship with the television content on the network. That relationship, in turn, is what the CW can sell to advertisers worried about a continued investment in broadcast television. CW series, the campaign suggested, generate buzz no matter where they are watched and sponsors can “get in” on that buzz in all the platforms. Buzz is the ideal form of marketing, the CW implies, as it indicates that viewers do not just see these series, they want to be seen as affiliated with them, or more precisely, with the lifestyles and lifestyle brands they put on display. The 2009 campaign built on the 2008 graphic of the trio of devices as they represent the spaces in which potential viewers are engaging in these activities—watching episodes or clips on the CW’s streaming video player; talking with friends on social networks or cyber-chatting with their inner circles or expanding those circles through social utility applications; writing online journals or blogs; posting on a blog network like LiveJournal or a microblogging utility like Twitter; playing and downloading sponsored games and music; purchasing DVDs, books, and other series-related content or the CDs and lifestyle brands with which it is associated. The CW campaigns suggested that its television series offer viewers opportunities to do all that because the network has a presence in all these new media spaces. The CW brings its content to the spaces in which it hopes its viewers congregate and offers them ways in which to extend their interaction with series via the new media activities in which they are already engaged. It addresses them in the vernacular of each space and tries to sync its content with the feel and tone of the surroundings. The CW understands that savvy producers and networks make sure their content is part of viewers’ everyday lives and activities even when they cease to be viewers (either in their non-TV-watching hours or because they never watch TV on TV).

Of course, these were also damage control campaigns as it is the phenomenon of watching TV off-TV that has networks worried because their advertising rates are dependent on the promise of their ability to deliver a certain number of viewers. The CW became especially attuned to this problem as a good portion of its 12–24 target demographic and some of its extended demographics have become culturally habituated to click to view media available online or on-mobile. To combat this problem, the CW arranged alternative sponsor deals that captured the on-air viewer’s attention through a combination of “sponsored by” advertising cards, bumper spots, and interstitial programming along with traditional 30-second spots and offered parallel promotional content and advertising space on its website and within the series storyspace. Often its on-air advertising also encourages viewsers to move online or on-mobile and then back on-air again, keeping sponsor as well as network products in circulation among the platforms.

This circulatory advertising paradigm makes sense, the 2008 and 2009 network campaigns suggested, because viewsers use multiple platforms to stay up to date with trends and friends as well as TV characters, especially those associated with immersive web and mobile content positioning them as friends. Online message boards also enable viewers to make contact with other viewers and share with them consumer advice as well as their speculations about plot and production developments. Among themselves they circulate breaking news and updates about the TV series and their characters as well as information about the trends they represent. Viewers might think of these recommendations as part of socializing, but networks hope they can double as word-of-mouse advertising. Since the popularization of MySpace and Facebook, among other social networking sites, viewsers are also likely to post a popular culture-inflected online profile. While site users may simply want an online location in which to stay connected to friends in between in-person meetings or to make new online friends, television networks see these sites as potential spaces for marketing, especially given that users’ profiles often include images, videos clips, audio snippets, and hyperlinks as a form of self-presentation or simply as recommended content.²

To that end, many production teams create pages on MySpace and Facebook for fictional characters, locations, and/or companies associated with their television series. Similarly, the blog network LiveJournal, an online space in which viewers ostensibly construct narratives about their everyday lives in posts that can be read and commented on by others,³ has also become a place for organizing online communities that revolve around fandom for a particular series.⁴ Community members post and respond to other posts about their favorite TV shows and characters. The appeal of the site, as Kurt Lindemann explains, is that “users with little or no technological savvy can construct narratives using texts, personal photographs, icons, and images appropriated from popular culture.”⁵ Twitter, a social networking utility that ostensibly enables users to send out a short burst of 140 characters’ worth of information in response to the question “where are you,” is now a space for fans to follow fictional characters as well. Production teams also use it to send public relations bursts in the guise of friendly “tweets” that offer breaking news or a link to series-related content. The irony of the space is that early adopters got ahead of producers and began posting tweets in the names of fictional characters. Producers quickly realized that they had to establish Twitter feeds or at least to reserve them in their characters’ names, at the same time they created new series and casts of characters. This dynamic of fan-related production preceding network production has its parallel in the creation of fan websites and other ways that fans followed and kept track of their favorite television series in the early to mid-1990s, as the subsequent discussion of early X-Files sites demonstrates.

Networks have learned to create web and mobile content that accommodates all the ways that fans make and seek contact points with their favorite television shows. Of course, the economic motivation for creating such content is that the new media spaces which invite fans to engage with series-related content also provide important contact points for sponsors frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the television commercials that viewers now have the technological means to bypass. Today’s network-generated fan address strategies grew out of those pioneered in the 1990s by the CW’s netlet predecessor, the WB, which, in turn, drew inspiration from earlier offline fan activities and online fan and fan-producer web content. Tracing some of the key developments in relation to new media content related to FOX’s The X-Files, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, WB’s Dawson’s Creek and Smallville sets up an analysis of the CW’s 2007 address for newly acquired series Veronica Mars and its 2008 address for its original series Gossip Girl. Charting this history suggests that the collision of the world wide web and broadcast television programming in the 1990s resulted in a recalibration of space including the space dedicated on the web for a television series; the on-air and online screen space dedicated to promoting sponsor, network, and media conglomerate products; and the spaces in which storytelling, promotion, or a hybrid of the two occur.

FOX’s The X-Files: Inside the X

Twentieth Century FOX played a role in this evolution of televisual space with the 1993 FOX network debut of The X-Files (1993–2002) as it conceptualized the television series as a multiplatform entertainment from the outset. The X-Files franchising was enabled by media conglomeration that allowed various divisions of Twentieth Century FOX to create and profit from X-Files content.⁶ Modeling its approach on Paramount’s successful franchising of Star Trek, Twentieth Century FOX purposely set up The X-Files as a franchise and was able to anticipate the kinds of content and products in which fans would be emotionally and economically invested. It was less astute about the behaviors and expectations of a cult fandom.⁷

For the most part, early 1990s internet use was not mainstream activity in that most daily users were accessing the net through a computer connected to a mainframe usually at a university, hi-tech company or government agency. Given the role of the latter two in science, research, and development it is not surprising that the genre of choice for these users was science fiction. The result was that many of those posting online were middle- and upper-middle-class university students, employees, and graduates.⁸ They were also the tech-savvy early adopters who would want to be the first to try out the latest technologies and were often those with the skill to create their own sites. It was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that the online activities in which only dedicated fans engaged in the 1990s would be mainstreamed.

The internet-enabled fandom soon would alter the economic structure of television production, distribution, and promotion, especially once fans created electronic bulletin board web pages dedicated to their favorite series. Given that the world wide web hyperlink interface was newly introduced (in 1990–91) and was only slowly popularized, especially after the Netscape browser was introduced, it is hardly surprising that the early adopters would create websites prior to the ones created by production teams and networks, which sometimes didn’t bother to create a series site at all.⁹

As it is a series about two FBI agents who investigate possibly paranormal events and then become embroiled in a long-arc mystery, it makes sense that The X-Files inspired hundreds of websites between the series premiere on FOX in 1993 and the 1995 debut of Inside the X, the official dedicated website for the series. During that time, FOX did not categorize these initial sites as a threat. In 1995 a Twentieth Century FOX attorney said, “these sites aren’t stealing any revenue … They might not obtain permission, but most are not attempting to attribute copyright … Basically they are promoting our product.”¹⁰ Fans agreed, noting the role they played in spreading the word about the series and expanding its fan base. They argued that they kept the series on the air by helping it advance in the ratings from a Nielsen ranking of 102nd in the first season to 64th in the second, and into the top 20 by season five.¹¹ One commentator called these early fan sites the electronic equivalent “of taping posters of favorite actors to a bedroom wall.”¹² When the sites merely featured static screen captures of images or even snippets of audio and video, no one seemed particularly threatened by them, especially given that the content lacked sound clarity and video resolution because of dial-up downloading speeds and unreliable connections.

In the absence of an official X-Files site in the first two seasons, fan sites often provided information to keep people interested in between episode airings. Some even took on the time-intensive task of writing transcripts of episodes and posting them for other viewers who missed the episode. In the era before TV-on-DVD, these transcripts were the only immediate way to catch up before the next episode other than borrowing someone’s taped-off-air VHS. In contrast to fan sites that offered episode and character guides and various show-related lists of information, most network sites at the time functioned more as electronic billboards, a sort of “point and click promotion.”¹³

When Inside the X (June 1995–98), the official website, did finally debut, it copied fan site formats and offered something that they could not, the production team members’ episode commentaries and “tales from the production site” anecdotes that now come standard as part of the special features on DVDs. The original site related the story of the development, for example, of the trio of computer hackers who became known as “The Lone Gunmen,” expert web trackers and conspiracy theorists who were introduced in an early season one episode. From the message board commentary, producers learned about the popularity of the trio and, consequently, expanded their on-air appearances.¹⁴ A never-seen fourth character called “The Thinker” was, according to the account posted on Inside the X, modeled on a fan with whom writer Glen Morgan had a long-standing, thought-provoking email exchange. That kind of interaction with, as well as acknowledgment of, early fans is part of what made them so loyal to the show and prompted them to spread the word about the series across the net. By cultivating an “address to the viewer as insider,” the site created an “illusion of proximity” with the production team.¹⁵ Fans flocked to the official site because series creator Chris Carter and his team logged on after the Friday night episode concluded and interacted directly with fans. In this way, they established a direct relationship with fans who dubbed themselves the X-Philes.¹⁶ Amanda Howell argues that

“the interaction between writers and fans in the early years of the series suggest just how well-suited the Internet is to promoting the sort of personal connection—the imaginary bond—between viewers and texts that has long been the goal and mainstay of film and te...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Fan tracking, targeting, and interaction from the web to the WB
• Chapter Two Timeshifting, circumvention, and flow on FOX
• Chapter Three Placeshifting, schedule-shifting, and the long-arc serial on ABC
• Chapter Four Branding, synergy, and product integration on NBC
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index