Talking to entertainment consumers for a variety of clients recently, several overriding themes emerge time and again.
“IWWIWWIWI”
“I want what I want when I want it.”
We all know people are time-shifting, on-demanding, and streaming more than ever, and the younger they are the more likely they are to think watching what they want to watch when they want to watch it is a God-given right. The desire for immediate gratification implies more and more of the above, along with ever more mobile viewing, on whatever screen is at hand. For marketers, it implies that they should try, like Coca Cola, to be “within arm’s reach of desire.” After all, immediate gratification is as good for the seller as for the buyer.
Attention Division Disorder
“I can’t stand to be bored, but I can’t really focus…”
Our mobile screens allow us to never experience the excruciating feeling of having to be still and quiet without entertainment, whether waiting in line or commuting on a train. We game, read, view, text, facebook, follow… anything to not just be waiting. “Doing nothing!” Just being in class or only watching TV aren’t good enough, either. We want to be texting, facebooking, gaming, following, or reading, at the same time, because doing one thing is almost as boring and excruciating as not doing anything. With all our screens and feeds, the modern mind is more and more like a passel of puppies, a roiling pile of impulses and distractions. Each scrambling puppy needs a nipple before the fractious modern mind can calm down and enjoy itself. For programmers, this suggests giving viewers multiple ways to connect – real time twitter conversations, Facebook updates, and television, all at once.
Personal Marathoning
“We all know what it’s like to go on a kick…”
Some say this is a Golden age of television – so much good scripted stuff, so much of it on Sundays, so much of it coming from channels that used to be known for peddling movies. And so much salacious reality, the guilty pleasure –can’t-eat-just-one– of mindsnacks drunkenness, drama, dumbness, and dudgeon that so many of us simply cannot resist.
Entertainment consumers love this delicious stuff, both the steaks and the McMuffins, and are creating their own personally programmed marathons to binge on. Via Netflix, on demand, on DVD, online, in bit torrents, or just jumping into the stuff that’s “always on when I turn to that particular reality channel,” they’re gobbling multiple episodes, often with partners or friends, and “watching it all in one go.” This is partly about catching up on the important things one missed (The Wire, anyone?), partly about satisfying the desire for gratification (and, if doing so with friends, for multiple contact points), and partly about people having developed a real issue with cliff-hangers. They love ’em, but they can’t wait a whole week. They’re IWWIWWIWI people. So they’ll stockpile episodes and marathon instead of waiting. Programmers could feed into this behavior in their packaging.
Me in Extemis
The New “Relatability”
It used to be people wanted to watch TV to see people kind of like themselves, but a little better looking or funnier or more glamorous. Now they want to watch people who are a lot better looking, or worse looking, funnier or scarier, more glamorous or more downtrodden. They find not just girls-next-door relatable, but girls living in other realities. Kim Kardashian is relatable, and so are vampires, and meth dealers, incredibly rich “housewives,” and people whose houses have been destroyed.
In a world in which video games have trained us just how different an avatar can be from us – and still be us, in motion – our definition of “relatability” has changed. Viewers, especially young women, still want to see people of their own gender and about their own age, having fun and grappling with issues, but beyond those slight links to their own identity, they’re more interested in “me in extremis” — say, a youngish guy with supernatural abilities who is forced to become evil, becomes a villain — than in me, per se.
In the future, programmers and marketers can probably be more adventurous in pushing the boundaries of “relatability” with extremes of looks, ability, and even morality. People are interested in the edges of experience, not just its mainstream.
Hello Darkness
A hunger for sensation
Much of people’s favorite entertainment is dark these days, from Z (zombies) to A (apocalypse), from dark humor to deeply dark drama. vampires, ghosts, hoarders, meth dealers, and Louis C.K. take us where we want to go – into the Dark. Halloween is the fastest growing holiday, partly because times are dark. Scary rides and movies help us experience fear “safely” — it feels good to scream, a protection against truly scary things, like Congress taking the nation to the brink of default.
It’s partly more sophisticated entertainment palates wanting more bitter and spicy fare, the way adults prefer darker chocolate and kids like the milky stuff. It’s partly a hunger for sensation. In a digital world, we feel a bit like we interact with things with gloves on -fewer in-person contacts, fewer things we can truly feel. Dark programming makes us feel More. We don’t just want warm laughs – we want shrieking, pee-your-pants laughs, not just sad drama – dire, tragic drama, not just mysterious – twisted, terrifying plots. We want spicier, more meaningful food, and darker, more intense entertainment.
Comedy Gets “Real”
Reality = hilarity
There are still successful scripted comedies (Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny…), but when people want to laugh so hard that food runs out their nose, they turn to Jersey Shore. Increasingly the most “incredible” realities are fulfilling the function that used to be filled by sitcoms – reliable laughs. Reality co-viewing among families isn’t just American Idol anymore, it’s the “guilty pleasure” of the Kardashians, which is – let’s face it – funny.
Reality programming has blurred the line between observer and observed (as a parent in one of my focus groups said recently, “I walked into my daughter’s room to find her and a friend playing with a Barbie doll, and she said ‘and now they’re having sex… and now this one is videotaping it!'”). The laughs from reality programming are less comfortable, but more extreme.
Programmers can succeed with unscripted programming that goes beyond letting us fantasize about other “real” people’s lifestyles, and lets us laugh at them instead. And, marketers should remember there’s nothing’s funnier than someone who’s full of themselves falling down.
Studio Branding to Rise
What channel is this again?
As copycat programming, particularly in the reality genre, has become more prevalent, viewers have a harder time knowing what channel they’re watching. Which channel’s show about stuff/storage/picking/auctions/hoarding is this? Who cares, it’s entertaining.
Cable has chipped away at the broadcast networks for years, in part because they’ve been better at branding. But as the cable crowd chases each emerging reality formula, channels are getting as hard to tell apart as cellphone plans. Production companies may become more important to consumers as ways to tell one show from another. Magical Elves is a more reliable programming resource than many channels.
When you get your TV on different boxes, who made it may become as valuable an imprimatur as what channel showed it. Simon Cowell is already a bigger name than many channels. Over the next few years, look to studios to develop ways to leverage their own brands, not just build up the channels they sell to – who seem to care less these days about providing a unique and consistent experience than ever.
Together these trends comprise a picture of the emerging media landscape and consumer. In large part, these are the results of how digital media is changing people, and how people are changing and contributing to digital media. Much has been made of how digital makes content consumption more convenient, more mobile, smaller, more one-on-one. But digital is also making entertainment media more immersive, more able to satisfy our desire for simultaneous watching and conversing, and more able to provide intensity through 3D, digital effects, and interactive enhancements.
Consumers demand that their entertainment be not just more convenient, but more immersive, not just more immediate, but more gratifying. They’ll continue to look for programming that satisfies those demands, and to say to programmers and marketers: “Bring it on!”