The Extratextuals

The Thin Line Between Content and Promotion

I’ve waited a bit to post what follows, since it’s still thinking in progress. But, hey, that’s what a blog is, right? So here goes anyways:

All panels circled around issues of monetization in one way or another. Back during the strike, I was frustrated by the degree to which Disney and others suggested that new media were good only for promotion, and that they were barren when it came to revenue generation. This seemed a bad faith bargaining position, to say the least. But at the DMS, new media was again and again talked of as a site for promotion, for brand management, of the shows, yes, but even moreso of Disney, ABC, and ESPN, following a directive from on-high (Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO) that these core brands are what’s being sold. Thus, while I’m not ready to completely drop the bad faith notion, I do see things differently now. I think what we have is a profound shift in business logic, which results in a profound shift in languages used too. Let me explain, and in the process I hope to challenge that new logic somewhat:

If the brands are what Disney thinks it is selling, not the shows per se, then it’s meaningless to make distinctions between new media and those shows. If the “old” job of the network or media conglomeration was to attract viewers to advertisers by producing great shows, then those shows deserved special treatment, and we could easily make distinctions between shows and promotion. But if the “new” model is to regard all elements of the corporation as engaged in the same process of selling the Disney, ABC, and ESPN brands, then everything is promotional. Your station identification snippets exist on the same level as your shows. And so if you’re Disney, and you don’t pay royalties to those who make the station idents, it must seem unreasonable and annoying to have to pay those other “promo” makers, the writers, directors, and actors.

While there’s something to this logic, there’s also something wrong with it. The former first. As you may have gotten by now if you read this blog, I’m a big believer in the creativity in and importance of all sorts of paratexts. I think that designing a good trailer is a creative act. Ditto with movie posters. Even hype campaigns. If it’s done well, it contributes to the text. It doesn’t just sell the text – it makes the text. So I’m sympathetic to the notion that we should or could start to break down the conceptual wall that exists between promotion and creativity, realizing that often the former is an involved part of the latter.

However, precisely because I’m arguing that good paratexts don’t just sell the text, they make it, rather than remove the semblance of creativity from writers, directors, and actors, I’m more comfortable with making creativity a larger umbrella that also covers good trailer makers, good poster designers, etc. In other words, while Iger’s philosophy risks leading naturally to the notion that “creatives” get rolled in with “promotion,” mine is that “promotion” could be rolled in with “creatives.”

There’s a key problem here, though. Above, I wrote of good paratexts. “Bad” paratexts are just promotion. Paratexts can contribute to a text, but they can also contribute nothing. But this can be extended to the shows themselves, if we regard them, as Iger’s philosophy suggests, as promos for the brand. Good shows do contribute to the brand, and sparkle with their creativity. Bad ones don’t: they just sap money and labor, with no good return on investment (for industry dollars or viewer watching hours). Of course, different viewers will disagree on what is good and what is bad, but since I’m not using specifics here (I’m avoiding referring to Cavemen or Big Shots, in other words), that’s by the by. What I’m getting at instead is that it is only good, creative shows and only good, creative paratexts that will help or sell the brand. Reworded, as much as it may seem this way to some observers, it isn’t promotion that helps or sells the brand, it’s creativity. I can open my window right now and yell to all of Sunnyside, Queens that they should watch a certain show, but that doesn’t sell the brand. Only creativity will.

I said I wouldn’t talk specifics, but to break that rule and return to the Digital Media Summit, the panel that examined Lost as a case study was telling. Carlton Cuse noted the challenge to get good content into marketing, and many of their examples suggested that they have succeeded. Lost’s ARGs, evocative promotions, and so forth all impressed the room of largely non-Lost-watchers. Both Lost AND its paratexts sell the ABC brand, since both are good (and if you disagree that they’re good, well that doesn’t hurt my point, since that only shows that they don’t help your notion of the brand).

Going back to the WGA and negotiations in an economy where promotion and creativity are merging moreso than before, good paratexts (frequently produced by non-unionized workers) profoundly challenge the line between the supposed “creatives” and the supposed promotional side of the business. This allows the industry to conflate the two, and see the differential treatment as silly, thereby justifying (in their eyes) lowering creators to the level of promotion. Bad texts similarly (or even especially?) inspire the conflation, since a good paratext/“promo” can do more for the brand than can a bad text. But only good stuff, only creativity, will truly help the brand, and hence it needs to be compensated as such. And only royalties do this, since otherwise you are paying the producers of shows that contribute nothing to your brand the same as you are paying those of the shows that help your brand.

ARGs, ads, conferences, strike Digital Media Summit, Disney, paratexts, promotion, strike

Two more posts on the DMS, this one about set and studio visits, next about the thin line between content and promotion.

On the third day, they gave us a tour of the lot, which was reasonably interesting. This included a whirl around the Brothers and Sisters set. I’ve only seen the show a few times, which produced the weird feeling of recognizing some spaces, only part-recognizing others, and not knowing others at all. What’s more, though, is that the main house seems definitively of television, being a huge, immaculately tidy, extravagantly decked-out house, the kind that they give people on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, yet that you’ve never seen off the screen. Television kitchens in particular are always so fantastic, too, with huge islands, glass jars full of tasty looking things and infused olive oils, and modern appliances. Kind of like an Ikea showroom on steroids. So I didn’t feel as though I was “really there,” partly because I’m not fully aware of the “there,” through lack of exposure to the show, and partly because the “there” seems so unreal to begin with.

That said, there are so many wires and ropes on a set when you look up, and the size of the place is so huge, with sets wrapped around each other in interesting, labyrinthine ways, that it also holds the fun of being in a massive maze. We tried to get some juicy set gossip out of our guide, but all she offered was that Sally Field rides around the lot on her bike all the time, an amusing image, and that Calista Flockhart (whose picture adorns most sets, cult figure-like) doesn’t seem as skinny in person.

It gets more fun, with pics, after the fold …
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conferences Brothers and Sisters, Digital Media Summit, heroes, Simpsons, studio lot

So I actually have three more posts worth. This one’s a hodgepodge, the next one’s about my set visits, and the third is a little more unified and analytical. Anyways, here we go:

Super Tech Geekout Section

One of the highlights of the trip was when they took us into their screening room and showed off the 3D that they’re working on. The glasses have little batteries in them and flash at an ultrafast rate, while the film runs at 144 frames per second, interlacing left and right eye frames. This is meant to hurt the eyes less than traditional glasses, and to offer a better 3D experience. It did. They showed us bits of the NBA All-Star Weekend in 3D and it was beautiful. They had talked earlier of experimenting with playing college games in theatres for admission price, to great success, and I can see how the two of these could go together well. It really does feel like you’re courtside, and they discussed how they’ve learnt to keep the stadium sounds on, rather than use play-by-play guys, to recreate the feeling of being in the stadium. Their screening room is kind of small, so extrapolate that experience onto a bigger screen, and I could see this being very popular.

They also showed us a few other tech goodies, by far the coolest being this tiny little screen, called an Organic LCD (OLCD). Our guide insisted that you could grind it up and eat it without harm (“fresh pepper, m’am? Parmesan? Organic television screen?”). But its contrast ratio was a truly remarkable 1,000,000: 1. Sheer beauty. More after the fold …

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conferences 3D, Blu-Ray, Digital Media Summit, Disney, Full Episode Player, iTunes, mobile media

For those waiting for part 4 of the Malawian media consumption saga, I promise it’s coming. In the meantime, though, I wanted to write about the 2008 Disney and International Radio and Television Society Foundation’s Digital Media Summit in Burbank, CA. This was a three day event that I attended last week. In this post, I’ll set the thing up and give some data about Disney’s online Full Episode Player. In the next, I’ll list some random things overheard, and I’ll yabber on about the hazy line between promotion and creativity.

Granted, at times I felt like I was in a cult indoctrination program, with some insisting that Disney was the only true source for all that is good on this planet. However, it was also a fantastic opportunity if not to see behind the curtain, at least to be allowed into the front row, where peeks behind the curtain were possible. I met some tremendously helpful individuals whose brains I picked with joy. I finally got on a TV set (take that, Bob Rehak! Sorry to anyone not at MIT’s MiT5 conference: an inside joke there). I got a bunch of data. I saw some cool new tech toys. I met Damon Lindelof and got an Apollo candybar t-shirt. I got fed well. I got to hang out with Jenn Holt and Kevin Sandler. And as much as cynical Jonathan could gripe, I’m very thankful for the experience, and applaud Disney and IRTS for shelling out the time and money to produce the thing.

More after the fold …
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conferences, ratings Desperate Housewives, Digital Media Summit, Disney, Full Episode Player, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, Ugly Betty

A whirlwind week for me just ended. This time 8 days ago, I was in Vancouver for my best friend’s wedding, where, as Best Man, I had to do more than just the standard sit, eat, drink, and show everyone how badly I dance. Then it was back to New York for my Green Card interview, an event which proved anti-climactic, but that taxed heavily on my mind in the lead up: it’s very weird to be put in the situation of needing to prove that your spouse is your spouse. Moreover, M. and I tend to finish each other’s sentences, which you’d think is a good way of proving we’re married, but the lawyer instructed us that in this setting it might appear as though we’re “cheating” by helping one another answer questions. Anyways, it’s all done now, and I’m a permanent resident of the United States of America. What better way to celebrate than to leave the country? So off I went to ICA (the International Communication Association conference) in Montreal the next day.

ICA is at a good time of the year to make sure that lots of people can attend, but at an awful time for facilitating the process of actually paying attention to papers. By the end of May, I’m simply burnt out. So this year I went in with a new strategy. I had signed up for the pre-conference on Production Studies, which tied me down to a day of panels. And I was on another four – one paper, one workshop, one chair, one respondent. So I decided that that was it. The rest of the conference would be social.

Such is the oddity of conference paper presentations that I’m convinced I learnt more, discussed more, and was asked to think about more as a result of adopting this strategy. The pre-conference was excellent, if a little paper heavy and discussion light. And my panels had good material – Melissa Click, Nina Huntemann, and Cornel Sandvoss provided a strong, really interesting panel on flow and overflow; Megan Boler, Andrea Schmidt, Catherine Burwell, and Alessandra Renzi had a good panel on digital dissent; reliably, Avi Santo and Jeffrey Jones presented good papers on animated satire, and the Unboxing Television workshop with Amanda Lotz, Joshua Green, Laurie Ouellette, Aswin Punathambekar, John McMurria, Vicki Mayer, and myself worked very well, I thought, providing plenty of smart commentary on the state of television and television studies.

But many of the better interactions with ideas happened over meals, drinks, coffee, or simply sitting outside conference rooms. Jeff Jones was my roommate, and our late night conversations about politics, satire, and television generated plenty of ideas. Aswin Punathambekar offered some wonderful hypotheses for my forthcoming research in Malawi while we sat on the carpet outside the book room. Avi Santo and I had a few good chats about transmedia, career advice flowed fast and furious from many colleagues and friends, book or paper ideas were born over lunches, dinners, or pints, and so on.

I’ve been to a few paperless conferences in the last two years – at Flow in Austin, and at Futures of Entertainment 2, Unboxing Television, and the Convergence Culture Consortium Retreat in Cambridge. And I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is how conferences should proceed. I’m not adverse to papers per se, but I do tend to find that I’ve already decided that it’s worth reading the full paper, or not worth listening any longer, by the three minute mark, thus making the remaining 12 or 17 minutes largely pointless either way. The lack of interactivity, not just of the sessions, but moreso of the ideas, frustrates me with paper panels. As a listener, I’d like to get more involved, ask questions, test the ideas, and play with them; as a presenter, I’d like discussion, response, and/or debate.

I sometimes wonder, then, if the ideal conference wouldn’t look something like this: a panel brings together 5-8 people working on related issues. They discuss their work in under 5 minutes each. Then discussion opens up. Then everyone goes for a meal or a drink. Or maybe the best conference would begin at the final step, in a restaurant, or over drinks.

It’s an issue of how best to use the time. As a television studies-ish scholar, I’ll likely never have many colleagues in any department doing the same work. So ICA, SCMS, and the other variable conferences are my only chances to see people face to face. When I’m there, why should we play this game of reading papers? Before the Internet, and before there were 1001 journals on every topic, perhaps such a structure was ideal, or at least necessary. But I can now get people’s work and read it, learning way more from it, later. I want conferences to alert me to work I didn’t know was there, yes, but otherwise I want to spend my time chatting, establishing networks and connections, plotting, collaborating, and debating.

I did that this ICA, and it’s perhaps no surprise, then, that this was not only one of the most fun conferences I’ve ever been to, but by far one of the most generative of thought. I met some new people, heard some new ideas, had old ideas challenged, I luxuriated in the company of good friends, I met “old hegemons” (as Jean Burgess called them) and grad students alike, and instead of spending my last ounces of energy for the academic year, I had my energy cells recharged and rejuvenated for the summer.

conferences conferences, ICA

This past weekend marked the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia. This SCMS also marked the beginning of my time as a consulting researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium, based out of MIT. I’ve been chatting with the C3’ers for a while now, and was truly honored to be invited on board (incidentally, Ivan already has his C3 Brownie Badge, and Derek’s a consulting researcher now too, so The Extratextuals are now Completely C3-Compatible, or “C5”). I’m still not exactly sure what is entailed, but it meant I got a free breakfast at SCMS, so it’s already looking good. Sam Ford, one of C3’s several superhuman forces and one of the nicer folks in the business, asked me to write up some comments on SCMS, in the aim of perhaps sharing these with other C3’ers. Well, he paid for my eggs benedict, so I will deliver.
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Unboxing Television, conferences C3, SCMS, Unboxing Television