The Curious Case of the After-the-Fact Cult Hit TV Show
Over the last ten years, there has been a strange, reoccurring story of the television show that flounders, or downright flops, during its original broadcast, but then magically finds a massive audience in DVD sales and online that catapult it into cult-hit status or better. It can even translate into new longevity for the property; Family Guy and Futurama were able to bring their shows back to life, Firefly got a movie and Party Down is rumored to be getting one as well, and Pushing Daisies was going to return as a graphic novel before DC closed down WildStorm, the subsidiary that was slated to publish it. This phenomenon has received a lot of attention from entertainment journalism and has sparked a great deal of discussion on online message boards and fan sites, particularly around the question of why these shows were canceled in the first place. It’s a good question. If these shows were destined to be so popular, why didn’t it happen while the shows were still on the air? It also raises the question: if shows this brilliant fell through the cracks, what other gems have we lost? There are many factors that cause a TV show to fail. One of the most commonly discussed is a network executive meddling too much with the creative process. Firefly was famously reordered by Fox executives, which broke up the strong narrative flow and character development that had been written into the show. Another common explanation is that a show was simply ahead of its time. Of course, for times to change some show has to break the mold successfully to demonstrate that this new idea works. The Sopranos taught erudite TV viewers that serialized, continuity-dependant dramas could work on TV by making a very successful serialized, continuity-dependant drama. So why didn’t any of these cult shows make waves while they were on the air and change the TV landscape? I think it all comes down to one of the most overlooked reasons for a show’s initial failure: marketing.
Launching and Marketing a Wine
This is the longer version of a campaign pitch I wrote as part of the application process for Charles Communications Associates (http://www.charlescomm.com/). The prompt was as follows: Develop a brief strategy for a winery launching a new label to be carried in retail stores nationwide. The wine, which is a Cabernet Sauvignon sourced from prime vineyards in Paso Robles, is priced at $10, targeting a demographic between the ages of 25-35. The winery’s owner is a young entrepreneur who is also an architect. In a competitive wine market, how do you propose to promote this launch and secure both online and print coverage?
Based on my research, and my own experience with wine loving friends, a Cabernet Sauvignon targeted at the 25-35 year old market will be effectively a table wine. Millennials buy wine to have with the occasional quiet dinner at home, they buy a bottle for a date, and they take it on vacations to relax while lounging and maybe reading a good book. Typically, when they buy wine they are doing so for the classy cache that it brings. They are often young urban professionals, with maybe a bit of an artistic side, that think of themselves as hip and fun-loving, with aspirations of more wealth or refined taste, which is why they prefer wine to beer. Interestingly enough, these young wine-drinkers mirror the description of the owner of the winery. When marketing wine to this demographic, there are several important things to consider: the price and the packaging of the wine, the nervousness young people feel around wine culture, the way young people consume media, and where this subsection of the 25-35 year old market prefers to shop for groceries.
4K Resolution and the Future of Home Cinema
Earlier this week, I read rumors about Sony’s development of a new Playstation video gaming console. While some aspects of the rumors were completely unsurprising, like it’s going to be called the Playstation 4, one of the more interesting parts is that it going to come equipped with the capability to output 4096×2160 images, commonly referred to as 4k resolution. I don’t know whether these rumors are true or not, it could be based on nothing more then the 4K and Playstation 4 number-sharing coincidence. However, if it is true, it raises some very interesting possibilities that are worth speculating about.
The numbers in this article are going to get very confusing, so I’ll start off with an explanation of some of the more technical aspects of this potential technology. 4K is obviously drawn from abbreviating the first number of the resolution’s full specification, an image that is 4096 pixels by 2160 pixels. For those of people out there who aren’t familiar with how image density works, the basic idea is that the more pixels an image packs, the more clear and detailed the image will be. This also means that images with higher pixel counts can get enlarged, projected, or displayed on bigger screens than their counterparts before seeing any noticeable deterioration in image quality. The weirdness with resolutions comes from the fact that, due to the math used to calculate pixel counts, 4K is actually only double the resolution of 1080, the current high-end standard for broadcast high definition, despite what the numbers would lead you to believe. read more…
A Cover Letter I Would Never Send
In college, I learned an exercise to help with writer’s block. The basic idea is to remove from your mind all of the things that are preventing you from writing, such as sounding professional/academic, having the right structure, etc., and to just write freely the things you are trying to say. I was getting stuck while writing a cover letter, so I employed this technique using humor to break my mental barriers, and this is the result. After showing it to some people, they suggested I put it up on my blog, so I acquiesced, after changing names and details of the letter to make it more generic. I hope you enjoy the comedy.
Transparent Companies
Typically, when it comes to attracting customers, people think about advertising, public relations, and brand management, but in truth these fields are all becoming blended to the point where trying to define each by their differences is difficult. This is in large part because they are built on the same basic principle: positive differentiation. These fields, which I will refer to as the communications fields, since their practitioners are commonly referred to as communications professionals, all exist to help a company demonstrate, highlight, or publicize the positive things about them that separate them from their competitors. BMW highlights the top quality of their cars, the ultimate driving machines. Volkswagen instead highlights how much of bargain their cars are, with surprisingly ordinary prices.
I liken corporate competition over market share to a game of American Football. The communications fields are the offense and the company itself is the defense. The job of the communications fields is to score points, or build market share, by helping companies pull customers away from the other existing brand choices, or by helping introduce customers to a product that they didn’t realize they needed. For example, a company that spends a lot of money on supporting green initiatives within the company will do well to advertise this fact to the world, thus attracting the growing market of conscientious consumers looking for brands whose ethics appear to match theirs. Once the communications fields attract the customers, it is up to the company to keep them. To fall back on the sports metaphor, it is the company’s job to run a prevent defense by maintaining the lead once its been built by the offense. Often this is accomplished by simply having a good enough product that new customers don’t get turned away as soon as they try it. That is, until the opposing team starts making plays. read more…
Monetizing Pro-Gaming in the West
I would like to start off just stating some things up front. In the rest of this post, and really anytime I mention e-sports or pro-gaming, I am aware that there is a great deal of debate about whether video games can really be a “sport.” Let’s forsake the idea of sports entirely and just consider pro-gaming and e-sports as one of a massive number of competitive activities. I will therefore be relating pro-gaming to several examples of competitive activities from traditional sports to competitive board and card games. There are many parallels between poker, bowling, X-Games-style extreme sports, and auto racing, just to name a few. With that in mind, consider the following…
Why has e-sports in the West floundered in relative obscurity, been mediocre financially at the best of times, and generally failed to become the “next big thing” that many people believed it would be? To examine this phenomenon we have to look at a series of different factors: the games, existing pro-level tournaments, and game culture both at home and abroad. read more…