(R)evolutions in television and film – Peter Pan and The Player

What goes around, comes around…

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… TV executives’ concern over changing viewing habits is nothing new. Sports coverage continues to deliver; it’s such thinking that pushed BT to pay almost GBP900m to show some football matches. But it’s not just knowing the score as it happens that has kept audiences from time-shifting. We wrote a piece back in 2011 detailing how the industry was trying to put a renewed focus on live events. Social media have contributed to this; having a constant stream of wry comments on Twitter to snark at while watching Downton Abbey can vastly improve the viewing experience. This is somewhat lost if viewing the show later.

There was a time when live events were much more common on network TV. Back then it was other formats – radio and cinema – that were running scared from the box in the corner. Now it is television that is trying to retain eyeballs; DVRs and OTT rivals are diminishing its sway; the cable industry lost 2.2m subscribes last quarter and Fox COO Chase Carey recently conceded the cable cord was “fraying”. TV viewing in general dropped 4% last quarter, Nielsen reported on Friday. Mobile use in general seems to be the largest culprit (see chart, below). As part of a strategy to keep viewers glued to scheduled, linear TV, NBC has previously screened the live performance of Sound of Music, and recently announced plans for a live rendition of A Few Good Men. Like the latter piece on content, Peter Pan similarly began as a play, and this past week saw its own broadcast, live, on NBC. It was a fine tactic in a broader strategy. Sadly, execution, and timing, are everything. Salon saw much room for improvement. The New Yorker compared it with earlier TV adaptations (NBC did a live version back in 1955) and found it lacking. More damningly, it also saw a broader disconnection from reality, as protests swept the nation in reaction to events unfolding in Ferguson. Viewing figures were half what the network got for Sound of Music. As The Wall Street Journal points out, live events may be losing their pull; both the Emmys and MTV Music Awards saw dips in ratings this year. Meanwhile though, marketers are still willing to pay a premium for advertising during such shows. Brands are said to have paid as much as $400,000 per-30 second commercial for the telecast.

“The nature of the internet as a platform for art is double-edged. The thing that makes it attractive — the fast turnover of content produced by unusual, gifted people — may be what stops it from bringing about a Golden Age 2.0.”

– India Ross, Financial Times

Another tactic in the strategy to retain eyeballs has been to license old seasons of shows still running to OTT providers like Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. On the one hand this may cannibalise viewers who are just as happy watching old episodes as new ones. On the other, it could provide a new platform to find audiences and increase advocacy and engagement. What Nielsen has found is that both are happening. As the WSJ reports, “Dounia Turrill, Nielsen’s senior vice president of client insights, said she analyzed the results of 16 such shows and found an even split of shows that benefited and those that didn’t”. Netflix, meanwhile, closed down its public API and is seeking world domination with culturally diverse content in the form of Marco Polo. Such OTT providers have their own problems to worry about, too; their niche is becoming increasingly cluttered. Vimeo is not mentioned often as a competitor to the likes of Amazon’s services, but it too is now producing original content for streaming, in much the same way as its peers, where shows are greenlit by popular demand and creatives given full rein. An article in this weekend’s Financial Times points out the limits of such a business model, “the internet audience — vehement but fleeting in its interests — may not always know what makes the best content for a more substantial series… returns are unreliable in a marketplace where even established services suffer at the hands of a capricious audience”.

In film, new possibilities arise in the form of ticket-booking innovation. While TV is recycling old ideas of content and engagement, these new tactics look to push the industry onward. This month through January 17, New York’s MOMA hosts a Robert Altman retrospective. One of his seminal films, The Player, shows in some ways how far the film industry has come, and in others how we haven’t moved on at all. The New Yorker wrote a brief feature on the retrospective. It’s insightful enough to quote at length, below:

“In the opening shot of “The Player,” from 1992, Robert Altman makes an explicit attempt to outdo Orson Welles’s famous opening to “Touch of Evil.” He has the camera zoom in and out, track left and right, pan one way and the other, and, before a cut finally comes, pick up with most of the major characters of the film. The scene also situates “The Player”—a movie about a studio created on a Hollywood studio lot—in film history, with passing references to silent film, forties genre work, the sixties, and, finally, the Japanese, who were then moving in on Hollywood, and are seen looking the studio over.

When it came out, “The Player” was regarded as a scorching attack on greedy and unimaginative Hollywood: in the film, the industry’s shining past surrounds the executives at the studio and shames many of them. Twenty years later, the huge profits from big-Hollywood movies—digital fantasies based on comic books and video games—have washed away that shame. The executives in “The Player” have stories pitched to them constantly by writers, and then they say yes or no. They don’t consult the marketing division on what will sell in Bangkok and in Bangalore. The thing that Altman may not have anticipated was that one would be able to look back at the world of “The Player” with something almost like nostalgia.”

The laziness of whimsical advertisements

These two TV spots came on the other night consecutively, both with fantastical imagery and vaguely folk-like music. The goal of such campaigns we suppose is to elucidate what the brand of the product is all about; how it should make the consumer of said product feel when they open themselves up to experiencing it. It’s seen most often for those products with intangible benefits or hard-to-discern advantages over their peers, like cars and mobile networks. A few years ago, and ad using this type of approach would have been distinctive; no longer. The problem now is that all these adverts with brands presented as ethereal experiences blend together as much of a muchness, a gloop of mediocre, wishy-washy intellectualism. It’s specifically the music, which many a creative (and Zeitgeist included) may be a fan of, but it occupies such a niche as to be repetitive and conversely reductive of a brand’s unique identity.

So let’s please curtail this ephemeral, intangible, whimsical attempt at an execution. Not because it never worked, but it’s been so overused now that it surely can’t be effective, because it is certainly no longer attractive.

Sigur Ros for one is glad that he’s inspiring people with his music, except when his music is being plagiarised.

Transparent Blackberrys

From the August Zeitgeist…

Research In Motion, of Blackberry fame, have been somewhat nervously watching iPhone’s app empire build and Google’s Android software take off. Though Blackberry’s [rather large] niche in the business world is secure for now, competition is increasing. This article revolves around the necessity for both clarity of brand and clarity of privacy.

The brand has been trying recently to spread its wings in its campaigns to accommodate things you wouldn’t normally associate with it, such as not having to constantly respond to mind‐numbing emails. This puts the manufacturer in a difficult position; other than the TV spot below, it was unclear to what extent the brand was embracing the mentality of appealing to broader and more disparate audiences.

Now Mashable reports that Blackberry has developed a social network, which launched recently. This seems to gel nicely with its new desire to appeal more to non‐business users. The network, dubbed, inspiringly, “MyBlackberry”, “offers social profiles, app recommendations and more[.]

BlackBerry’s real goal is feedback and getting customers to answer each other’s support questions”. While this may save the technical team time, it’s not certain to bring much benefit to the user, who will most likely not be looking for a collaborative Yahoo! Answers‐like approach to their important technical question. It will have to convince those users used to seeing their device simply as a way to phone and email others. Moreover, finding users who have the time to participate in MyBlackberry and whose company has not for security reasons restricted access to programs like this (and the chat service that comes as standard), will prove difficult.

Concerns over security were highlighted last week in the UAE when thousands of Blackberry users unwittingly installed spyware on their handsets, thinking it was a harmless update from their network provider, Etisalat; who were in reality receiving private user data until RIM put a stop to it. The incident reveals that blind trust can be easily exploited. The backlash to follow, however, will certainly benefit the rival network provider, Du, and the uproar this incident has caused in international news should be a reminder for companies to always spell out even the smallest changes in the way information about their clients will be collected.

Previous examples of this include BT’s experiment with Phorm, and Facebook’s short‐lived venture with Beacon, which Media Week called “catastrophic”. In today’s current technological – never mind economic – climate, people are demanding transparency; whether it be from banks or network providers.