Alex Holder: Entry #7
Week 9: New Media, Big Data and Telemetrics – How can television shows harness the power of new media?
A couple of weeks ago I made a blog post about how fandoms pressured entertainment studios into resurrecting characters by using social media. It was power that audiences never had before: the power to give the entertainment studios instant and detailed feedback and opinions. Fast-forward to now, and entertainment studios are using social media to market their products and test audiences for interest in new products. They’ve realised how good of a tool that new media can be for their own products.
Television networks can instantly get feedback on shows and encourage new people to watch their channels much more easily thanks to new media. To harken back to the fandom blog post, just look at Agents of SHIELD. It’s frequently posting teasers, posters, trailers, and news through its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages and getting likes and comments from across those networks. The amount of likes and comments become feedback. If Agents of SHIELD or any of its marketing taglines suddenly starts trending as a hashtag, it’s because the show is generating interest. Of course, because Twitter hashtags are regional and Agents of SHIELD is so centred on American audiences, we can’t really witness that here in Australia.
But I digress; when Agents of SHIELD first kicked off late last year, it had a lot of disappointed fans taking to the internet to voice their opinions on the show. It was dull. It lacked superheroes. It was cheesy and low-budget. When fans spent so many years getting used to high-budget action-packed Marvel movies focusing on superheroes, they expected more of that in a television setting with Agents of SHIELD. As the fans took to Twitter, the television executives started taking notice. To protect their Nielsen ratings scores (because that is what TV investors and network executives still prefer over new media feedback), Agents of SHIELD frequently took breaks between episodes – the Christmas break and the Winter Olympic break were all used to stop traditional ratings scores from plummeting and getting the show cancelled. Fans voiced their displeasure about this too, of course. The television network executives came back after those breaks with an almost-new version of the show: plenty of action, plenty of superpowers, and much higher production values combined with a lack of breaks meant that viewers are much happier with the show now and ratings have stopped declining.
This change came about through feedback that couldn’t have been gathered through Nielsen ratings or old media – new (social) media gave viewers avenues to actually talk about what they’re thinking. This level of interaction from Facebook statuses, Twitter posts, and internet trends helps to sustain a show’s popularity and help make the show become better, as proved through Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.
References: 1. Introducing “Telemetrics” | Darryl Woodford. 2014.[ONLINE] Available at: http://www.dpwoodford.net/introducing-telemetrics/. [Accessed 11 May 2014].
2. Australian Reality TV on Twitter: A Two Horse Race | Mapping Online Publics. 2014. [ONLINE] Available at: http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2013/08/13/australian-reality-tv-on-twitter-a-two-horse-race/. [Accessed 11 May 2014].
3. Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. renewed for season 2 | Den of Geek. 2014. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/marvels-agents-of-shield/30429/marvels-agents-of-shield-renewed-for-season-2. [Accessed 11 May 2014].