Wherever You Go, There You Are
Illustration 1: The KCTS 9 television studio
As has been happening so often in my recent readings, I can almost catch glimpses of myself in the pages, a ghostly figure peeking out from behind the words. The article tips its hat to the Walt Disney Corp.’s entertainment experience expertise, then in the next paragraph describes Recreational Equipment Incorporated’s experiential shopping approach. For me, these two companies are more then just interesting examples in support of a thesis.
Disney and REI are former employers where I helped turn the experiences they offered into something that could be delivered over the Internet. Now, at public TV station KCTS 9, I’m trying to do the same thing. What I’m coming to realize is that while much of television has moved towards experiential programming, public television’s brand identity is built around a premium presentational style that doesn’t lend itself easily to experiential remediation.
Voting Off Gilligan’s Island
Pine and Gilmore briefly touch on the Internet as an experiential medium, but they explicitly dismiss television:
The kinds of experiences most people think of as entertainment – watching television, attending a concert – tend to be those in which customers participate more passively than actively; their connection with the event is more likely one of absorption than of immersion.
(Pine & Gilmore)
While it may be that as a medium television is inherently passive, it too was transformed by the experience economy. Pine and Gilmore’s article was published on the cusp of the reality television era, as “Survivor” was about to lead the American commercial networks from “must-see” primetime sitcom blocks, and into a new age dominated by vicarious experience programming.
Reality TV has embraced interaction in a number of ways, most directly through tabulating audience votes to determine outcomes. Following suit, a new form of multichannel storytelling – NBC’s “Heroes” being an exemplar – has emerged, enhancing TV viewer experience with story extensions online or in comic books scheduled for release the day after the episode they reference is broadcast (SXSW, 2010). The cable news networks have increasingly turned from the traditional presentational style to incorporate experience, although when it manifests in form such as CNN’s Rick Sanchez showing essentially random comments on Twitter, media critics may find it cringeworthy.
High levels of viewer engagement provide business justification for the shift to experiential television, but viewer engagement doesn’t just happen. Engagement comes from meeting some desire the viewers can’t get met elsewhere, and in the case of reality TV that desire was for the standards of the experience economy to be applied to the protocols of primetime. “Survivor,” “American Idol” and the other reality hits traffic in vicarious experience. Viewers watch because the premise – dubious as it may prove on close examination – is that the contestants may just as well be them.
This Is not a New Section
At the recent TEDx Seattle event, game designer Elan Lee built his talk around an interesting observation of the evolution of new media forms. While handling a first edition of Defoe’s “Robinson Cruse,” arguably the first novel published in English, Lee noticed that the introduction included the following paragraph:
The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch’d, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.
(Pierre-Marteau.com, N.D.)
Defoe, Lee explained, felt it necessary to introduce a new medium – book-length fiction – by pretending it was something else that the public was already familiar with: Book-length fact. It made him realize he’d done the same thing a few years earlier when he’d introduced a new approach to gaming based on following clues through a serious of fictitious Web sites with the phrase “This Is not a Game.” In his talk, he further showed examples in which then-new media were presented as though they were older, familiar, media when they were first introduced (MCDM, 2010).
In media studies, the idea that every new medium contains within it the medium it is disrupting is both foundational and a path for new inquiry (McLuhan, 1964 & Gitelman, 2008). What Lee did was come to an understanding of how it is that media creators attempt to bridge the disruption for their audience, and present it in a context that has meaning to business strategists. His talk concluded with a warning that companies that pretend their new media forms are old, familiar media, in the way Defoe lied about the nature of his book, will fail. Defoe himself removed his disingenuous introduction in later editions.
What is surprising about television’s embrace of the vicariously experiential programing to which it seems so well-suited is that it took so long to happen. From the earliest mass TV entertainment, which was a broadcast repackaging of the Vaudeville variety format, commercial TV quickly progressed to short “fourth wall” plays packaged as sitcoms. Of course there were exceptions, but anyone who has considered the prescience of Ernie Kovaks’ work in the early ’60′s, which reworked the variety format to take advantage of the new medium’s unique protocols, is struck by how little impact outlying work had on mainstream programming in the decades to come. Only recently has television begun to feel comfortable not pretending that is isn’t television.
While the distance from “The Honeymooners” to “Seinfeld” may seem great, the underlying format protocols are virtual identical. It may have been the threat of TV itself being disrupted by a newer medium that finally forced the medium into a new level of maturity, even if the result reminds us that “maturity” is not necessarily a synonym for “artistry.”
Public media has had little use for the sitcom (unless the punchlines are spoken with a British accent) and even less for reality-based competition series. Primetime, non-pledge, programming is almost all news and public affairs, high-minded enactments of canonical literature, or documentary films. PBS doesn’t get down and dirty experiential with the muddy money-grubbers on “Survivor” – it prefers to polish its shows to a shine and place them on a pedestal. The non-profit media economy is the opposite of the experience economy, whether this from choice, inertia, resource constraints, or a combination of all three.
Of course, there is great risk in trying to embrace the new experiential protocols. This week PBS unveiled “Need to Know,” a new show promoted as “cross-media” replacing the retiring – and traditionally presentational – Bill Moyers in the lineup. Critic Tom Shales savaged it, and the whole cross-media approach:
PBS promises that this dreadful “Need to Know” show, which supplements vacuous televised drivel with fancily designed Web-page graphics, “empowers audiences to ‘tune in’ any time and any where.”
Meaning that you are free to supplement inadequate broadcast material with unsatisfying Internet material whenever you inexplicably get the urge. Oh boy, what a boon!
(Shales, 2010)
The Man Behind the Curtain
When I’m at work, I occasionally have opportunity to leave my desk and visit the main television studio. The visual cues that identify the room’s purpose are familiar to most people. In addition to the video cameras and lighting equipment, there are two stage sets built to resemble physical rooms when seen from the limited range of perspectives allowed to the cameras (see illustration 1). In Elan Lee’s formulation, television shows produced in the KCTS 9 studio scream “this is not a television show!” at their audiences.
On every episode of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert conducts an interview on a set similar to KCTS 9′s interview set. But in one of the show’s running bits, the cameras track him running from his anchor desk set to the interview set, mocking the convention while metaphorically screaming “this is just a television show!” Colbert’s audience is being welcomed into the joke, enhancing the experiential nature of the show, while reinforcing the real lesson in media literacy that underlies much of Colbert’s humor. While often talking the talk of media literacy, it seems to me that in any given year public television does less to educate its audience in it than one good week on Comedy Central can.
Public media, constrained by expectations that are often tied to funding, is institutionally conservative in use protocols. Changes that are economic imperatives at commercial stations are unthinkably risky are public ones. While the low production values of public television operating on a shoestring budget are recognizable enough to be the stuff of sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” the reality is that major market public television stations achieve professional results, and the quality of national productions is as good as any on television. But those professional results come with weights attached.
As a producer on the Internet – a primarily experiential medium which relies on user engagement, choice, and action – it is my job to further my employer’s goals in that medium. But turning the product of an organization that has deliberately clung to non-experiential protocols as a mark of quality into content that works as an experience is a definite challenge.
Money Changes Everything
Ecommerce has been one of the Web’s biggest success stories because the medium’s use protocols are inherently well-suited to transactional interactions as well as experiential ones. My time at REI was marked by considerable cross-department tension about the relationship between experience and monetization. Get it wrong, and you may not kill the goose, but it will lay fewer golden eggs for you.
At KCTS 9 monetization comes in many forms, often with conflicting goals, and the conflict plays out on the Web as degradation of the content experience that I would argue is the true public media mission.
The pledge team’s imperative to solicit individual donations sets up an expectation that the site can be built on an ecommerce model, structured as a funnel leading users through an array of product (in this case the product is content) and into a shopping cart/checkout conversion funnel. But the underwriting team is selling ad space that is measured by its success in taking users away from the site entirely. And the grant writer brings in money that pays for meeting the content mission but also carries with it a requirement that traffic is directed to specific sites for the benefit of the grantor. Meanwhile, back in pledge, there’s a struggle going on ensure that users interested in owning DVDs or other physical products obtain them as part of a high-markup pledge premium and don’t discover they could have bought them more cheaply from the low-markup commercial store that operates as a subsidiary of the non-profit television station.
The result is a fractured site that ostensibly exists to provide an experiential interactive dimension to the public media mission, but is nearly impossible to guide in that direction due to deep-seated and unexamined organizational goal conflicts. Real-world “experience shopping” stores let customers use products in a relaxed atmosphere separately from the expectation that they will buy them, gambling instead that after experiencing the product, the customer will convert by making a future purchase at a conventional store (Barbaro, 2007).
Experience shopping may have a dubious shelf-life for retailers – indeed, given the economic conditions since Barbaro’s article was written, the examples given may already be shuttered – but it seems a perfect model for understanding how public media’s experiential imperative should relate to its business need for monetization. Engaging experiences offering conversion opportunities that don’t compete with each other or with the public media mission is the challenge, and the opportunity.
It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)
Earlier this year, while attending the South by Southwest conference, I went to an event hosted by public television station KLRU. When I walked into their studio, spread before me were tables covered with tamales, beer, and margaritas. I’ve certainly never seen that in the studio at work.
Although the studio had seating risers, they were all filled by the time I got there. But that was fine. Because when the bands stepped onto the “Austin City Limits” stage where some of the most famous names in American roots music have performed over the past 34 years, I didn’t feel much like sitting down.
Pine and Gilmore dismiss concert going as a passive activity, but perhaps that reflects the concerts they go to. It was clear to me that night in Austin that public media can provide an experience in physical space and capture some of it for mediated distribution too (PBS, 2010). The trick for staying relevant in the future is to learn how to convey experience in mediated forms without surrendering to artlessness and destroying the premium value associated with the public media brand. And the trick for monetizing may be to let that premium value exist on its own as an experience that leads to future conversion.
References
Barbaro, M. (2007, March 18). In aisle three, couch potatoes trying the mp3s. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/weekinreview/18barbaro.html
Gitelman, L. (2008). Always already New: media, history and the data of culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
MCDM. (Producer). (2010). Tedxseattle – elan lee – 4/16/10 . [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyyrW8bIk6M
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pierre-Marteau.com. (N.D.). Daniel defoe, robinson crusoe, vol. 1 (london: w. taylor, 1719), e-text of the first edition. Retrieved from http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1719-robinson-crusoe.html
PBS. (Producer). (2010). Pbs@sxsw. [Web]. Retrieved from http://video.kcts9.org/sxsw/
Pine, B., & Gilmore, J. (1998, July – August). Welcome to the Experience Economy. Harvard Business Review.
Shales, T. (2010, May 11). Tom Shales on PBS’s ‘Need to Know’. The Washington Post, Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051005113.html
SXSW. (Producer). (2010). Multiplatform Storytelling: A Master Class with Tim Kring . [Live Event]. Description at http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/7255
YouTube. (Producer). (2010). Youtube – ernie kovacs. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=ernie+kovacs&search_sort=relevance&search_category=0&page=
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