Data has its role, but creativity will still thrive in the future of TV

The future of television is disinter-mediated and data-driven. That’s the gist of this Wired story that covers Game of Thrones, the new season of Arrested Development and more.

One thing the story points out is that while traditional Nielsen ratings are still a big – dominant – factor in determining whether a show lives or dies there are more and more considerations coming to the forefront. In addition to how well it may or may not fit into the network’s (or whatever the outlet might be) portfolio – some shows survive longer than they otherwise would have simply because the look good on the lineup from a prestige point of view – those considerations include social buzz. So it’s possible for shows to stick around, be revived or otherwise survive because they’re being talked about to an extent that other shows, which may perform better in those traditional ratings, aren’t.

Some people have started to wring their hands about this sort of data-driven programming future because they’re afraid it will lead to a world where creativity is put in the back seat because the numbers show the network needs a zombie-driven comedy set at a community college where Kevin Bacon is a professor of 1960s advertising history.

That’s obviously an extreme example but even so I think these concerns are a bit over-blown. That’s because for every five decisions that are made at the network (or whatever) level to greenlight something that comes pre-market-tested, there will be two quirky, independent projects whose producers couldn’t get their show officially picked up but who decide to go it alone and distribute their 12-episode mini-series themselves in some other manner. And of the 15 that are released there will be two that are hits and the network (or whatever) execs will look past their spreadsheets and pick up a project because it’s what people have shown they want, not what the data has predicted they want.

All of that is a long way of my saying that while I’m glad data-driven decisions have helped bring back some great entertainment – I’m chomping at the bit for Arrested Development S4 – I’m also confident that it doesn’t mean the end of creativity in the media world.

Smash the current programming

There are so many choice quotes in this THR story about the need for the current president of NBC to just throw caution to the wind and get really inventive I can’t pick just one.

Love of witty turns of phrase aside, personally I’d love to see American TV adopt more of the BBC-type model. Lots of new stuff for short runs and then bring the popular stuff back for additional similarly short spurts of activity. That way familiarity doesn’t begin to breed contempt, creators can tell very focused stories and some great stuff can get seen.

I keep going back to Awake, the NBC show from the middle of 2012 about the cop who was basically living one life while awake in one world and another while awake in a second. Great concept and it had a bunch of intriguing episodes hung on a really inventive premise. I always struggled with seeing it as an ongoing, multi-season series but as a 15 episode mini-series it could tell that story in a truly interesting way.

This is more or less what cable is doing right now, which is part of what the story suggests as a way to rescue the network from its current doldrums.

Random Super Bowl ad thought mashup

(Note: I think I’ve said everything I want to say here but I’m not sure. It’s messy to be sure but I wanted to get this all down and shared regardless of the raw form it’s obviously in. Proceed with caution)

Twitter announced before the Super Bowl that about half of this year’s Super Bowl ads would contain a hashtag and according to a MarketingLand tally that turned out to be an accurate number, with 26 of the 52 aired spots including some sort of hashtag, whether it was one for a specific campaign or just a general one. That same MarketingLand piece points out that Twitter was included in 26 commercials while Facebook made it into just four, Instagram and YouTube scored one each and Google+ was completely shut out. Ads, according to a separate study, wound up making up about 30% of the tweets published during the game. Overall across Twitter, Facebook and GetGlue there were 30.6M social media comments over the course of the broadcast, with 24M on Twitter and 400,000 on GetGlue, meaning the balance of 5M or so happened over on Facebook. And of course some brands gained additional buzz because they quickly turned some creative around to take advantage of some timely stories coming out of the SuperDome.

A recent study showed that including a hashtag during a TV show broadcast can increase the social conversation about that show by up to two-thirds what it otherwise would have been. The idea behind using a hashtag is to take advantage of the multi-media-tasking that’s going on as people watch TV while also browsing Twitter or Facebook on their iPad or mobile device.

But I still wonder what the value of doing so actually is. What’s the point of pushing people to participate in a conversation that is not controlled – or controllable unless it’s through some sort of aggregation on-domain – and which has questionable long-term brand value?

I, as a publisher on Twitter, might be moved enough to go post something like what the ads are asking me to, whether it’s sending in a personal anecdote or sharing a memory or some such like that. But what is the brand getting out of it? They can say that X thousand people used the hashtag within Y hours of the commercial being shown, but what subset of that audience took the next step to actually follow the brand’s Twitter profile? And what subset of *that* visited the brand’s site or took some other action where they could get a richer, more full experience and message?

I get why hashtags are so widely used. They give most brands a nice cozy blanket to pull over themselves as they talk about how engaged in the community conversation they are. But the reality is most of them are the result of a brainstorming session and will be abandoned as quickly as they’re thought up.

Also, what’s better, a rise in conversational volume by 2/3 or a 20% increase in the number of visits to a brand website that comes in the wake of the Super Bowl? I say it’s the increase in site visits since that’s something a company can leverage in multiple ways down the road, not just abandon after this particular campaign is done, leaving nothing but the fresh scent of pine where it once was.

The New Orleans reporting power outage

I have to say I agree with this analysis of CBS’ handling of the outage during Sunday’s Super Bowl. While I completely get that, you know, the power was out it still seems like there were a load of missed opportunities.

Watching the broadcast during the 30-40 minutes while the lights were out and coming back on I was struck at how badly, to use an situationally-appropriate metaphor, CBS was fumbling the journalistic football. Maybe this says something about the deferential nature of sports reporting but I kept wondering why the guys on the sidelines who had power and were presumably just feet from the head coaches never went to ask them what they were thinking. How come we weren’t getting spur-of-the-moment interviews with the field refs about what the situation was going to be once the lights did come back on?

Instead of any of that we were shown the same five highlights over and over again while the panel of commentators talked about them in exactly the same way they had 10 minutes ago as they tried to talk some more about how the unexpected interruption may – or may not – help the 49ers regain some momentum and how these were professional athletes who are used to stopping and starting so they’ll just stay limber while things were sorted out.

But why weren’t we getting more information? While I know direct communication between certain parts of the stadium were down surely these reporters could send and receive text messages from the producers. Seemed like a sports news organization should have been able to transition into reporting on the news pretty quickly given the circumstances. This was a major missed opportunity for a solid journalistic moment.

Movies and hashtags go to the Super Bowl and YouTube makes the case for early ad releases

A good story finally broke a couple days ago about what movie studios will be advertising their 2013 releases in this Sunday’s Super Bowl. So what movies can we expect to see commercials for?

Universal will show off The Fast and The Furious 6, Paramount will advertise both World War Z and Star Trek Into Darkness and Disney will preview Iron Man 3, The Lone Ranger and Oz. Sitting out the broadcast are Fox, Sony and Warner Bros, despite all three studios having big tentpoles later this year that would be good fits for the game’s audience.

One big part of the advertising that will be done is the inclusion of hashtags, which according to Twitter will appear in half the commercials during this year’s game. The idea here is obviously to start a conversation online but, as I’ve stated before, while such a tactic might generate spur-of-the-moment engagement it’s still unclear what the long term brand value of it is. Especially compared to pointing viewers to an owned platform (ie website) where a stronger brand case can be made.

Meanwhile, there’s been a ton of conversation this year about the viability of releasing Super Bowl commercials early, something that a ton of advertisers have done this year but which seems to be subject to some questioning this time around. Which makes the timing of a new study from YouTube (the platform, of course, most companies release those teasers or full spots on) that claims ads shown before the game broadcast pull in six times the views as spots that aren’t.

No more Ben & Kate

I know we’re all supposed to be in full on “mourning the end of 30 Rock” mode right now – and I’m right there with everyone else on that as well – but I’m also bummed that Fox killed off Ben & Kate.

No, it wasn’t great TV, but it was solidly enjoyable week to week and star Nat Faxon’s kind of energy was pretty unique to the television landscape, bringing a weird improv-based vibe that fit the character perfectly. And I enjoyed how it was about a group of friends who, for a change, weren’t mean to each other or always waiting to pounce on one another but who instead backed each other up, genuinely like each other and otherwise came together as a makeshift family.

UPDATE: Marc Hirsch at NPR liked the show for many of the same reasons I did:

Ben & Kate took a different tack. The siblings have occasionally butted heads, but more important than them loving one another is the fact that they like one another. And they like their friends Tommy and B.J. And Tommy and B.J. like them back. So do Tommy’s parents, whose mild exasperation at being occasionally drafted as last-minute babysitters for six-year-old Maddie can’t disguise their affection for everyone involved. Everyone is happy to have everyone else in their lives. They’re all one team, them against the world.

That’s not all that common on television, and certainly not in television comedy. More typical are shows like Community, where the characters have grudgingly learned to love another while constantly struggling with the fact that they quite often don’t like one another very much. Modern Family and Cougar Town have similar (though less extreme) dynamics, while a show like Happy Endings shows its best-pals sextet occasionally treating each other badly enough that they frankly seem like a bit of a frenemy time bomb.

Going beyond three days for TV ratings

Even though I know there are problems with such a model and entrenched interests fighting against such a change, I’m more than a little shocked that there isn’t a broad TV industry push to not just increase the number of days during with program viewing is included in official ratings but also make sure that all platforms are lumped into a single number.

That’s the gist of this story, which calls out a number of examples where doing either or both of those things drastically changes the viewer demographics of a number of TV shows. It would require a monumental effort to create standards across platforms, but it could be done. The biggest potential problem would be in how ad sales are then divided up since a network’s ad team would likely not be selling spots on, for instance, Hulu. And many paid VOD options are ad free. But in terms of networks being able to point at a show and say “This is a success,” they absolutely need to be striving toward the creation of a unified distribution number.

This op-ed about the future of online video, specifically in how YouTube will be impacted by changing audience expectations as people get used to different models for both discovery and consumption and is a good complimentary read, particularly this one prediction which is my favorite of the bunch:

Big media has seen the rapid shift toward Web and mobile consumption, and sites like Discovery.com, Disney, MTV and CNN continue to produce more online content. Now the real challenge becomes the fight for more audience, monetization and market share. These content creators and their advertisers won’t be satisfied with the results they get within their own silos, and will start looking for a way to expand their reach while still maintaining control over their videos.

Stop Tweeting and write something!

Apparently the talent involved in the recent Television Critics Association presentations weren’t thrilled with a press corps that was sitting there on the damn Twitter all the time.

But the networks and cable channels seem to be having a very difficult time with Twitter. Why? For starters, they’re following a lot of people in the ballrooms of the Langham Hotel, where the tour is taking place. And what they’re seeing is, well, lots of snarky comments. About their shows, the actors, the executives. About what those actors and executives are saying. And what they’re wearing.

The real issue is, of course, about the lack of control that’s now available to those executives and other important people. They don’t like that all this is going out in real time and in an unfiltered way. But what they don’t understand is that this is often this is just an expression of fandom. Even if the comment itself might be a little on the snarky side, it often comes from a place of genuine enthusiasm. If someone is really down on or hostile toward something then they will generally not say anything, damning it with no comment as opposed to the sharing of a funny or mildly inappropriate moment.

Plus, the value of people putting out all these tweets far outweighs the potential downside. I follow people on Twitter whose sites I don’t subscribe to. So I’m seeing their real-time updates and hearing about shows I otherwise might not have, which is a good thing.

It’s a good article by Tim Goodman in The Hollywood Reporter and I’d encourage you to go read the whole thing as he makes a lot of good points.

Mars holds its Super Bowl ad back

Mars is bucking the trend (begun by Tom Biro and myself, in case you need a history lesson) of releasing all or part of its Super Bowl ad for M&Ms online before the game. They’re counting on the spot being a surprise and “delight” to the audience and don’t want to ruin said surprise.

This despite a recent study that showed 75% of the most shared ads from last year’s game had been released to online audiences before the broadcast. But, as this story points out, putting out the whole spot (back in the day Biro and I just released 8-12 second teasers) putting the whole thing out ahead of time ruins the sense of surprise and carries with it the very real risk of turning the spot into just another TV commercial, quickly forgotten as it blends into the rest of the white noise. This teaser strategy is also being adopted, or at least considered, by other companies who will be advertising during the game.

Also on the Super Bowl front, there are lots of companies who have come up with interesting (or silly) ways to integrate social media into their advertising strategy for the big game. And Hulu has launched their AdZone for the 2013 game, acting as a hub for all the spots shortly after they air on TV.

No GetGlue for Viggle

To the surprise of no one, GetGlue has apparently walked away from a reported acquisition by Viggle.

The rupture was announced on the GetGlue blog. While I’m sure that there were plenty of financial reasons behind this – Viggle apparently was struggling to put together the necessary money – I’m also guessing there are business reasons why a merger/acquisition no longer made sense as well. Particularly it’s my guess that the “Social TV” trend is starting to peak and that this is a sign there’s about to be some shaking out in this industry niche.

I like GetGlue quite a bit, mostly because it goes across media to include TV, movies, music, books and more. It’s already survived the first round of culling that’s taken place in the activity check-in market and I think it’s well positioned to continue as a leader. But it will need to continue innovating to provide a unique and attractive user experience since people can already have a basic “Social TV” experience on Twitter, which has been making big appeals to TV networks to get involved. And NBC is heavily hyping Zeebox, which it has a financial stake in.