My dad used to tell me if I sat right in front of the TV, my eyes would turn square. That was the least of his worries, come to think of it. I am a product of the Stick Stickley, Snick, and slime infested gameshows of 90’s Nickelodeon. I frequently recite the Eliza Thornberry monologue at zoos. I hold every guy I meet to the gallant standards of Arnold (no last name given…ever.) I worship Keenan Thompson, pine for C-list cameos of Lori Beth Denberg, and find my wardrobe inspiration from the closet of Clarissa, who still can explain it all. I attest that while my father was deeply concerned for my eyesight, there was a cerebral meltdown going on with the ingestion of every Catdog episode.
Ingestion. That’s all it really was from the 90's back to the birth of TV. Sitting in a zombie-like trance in front of the tube, minds like a sponge, soaking up the quotes I can still recite today (“WATER IS FOR QUITTERS”…pun intended).
Audio/visual in, nothing out. Any type of viewer-to-screen dialogue while
watching TV, despite what dad thought while yelling obscenities during a
playoff game, did not exist. The closest
I ever got was signing up for the Mary-Kate and Ashley fan club, when I
received my starter kit a month later with a “personal message” from the
twins. The most multi-tasking done while
watching TV was biting the shapes out of a Fruit Roll-Up. Further, there was no interaction with a
brother, sister, friend across the street, or random kid in Boise, Idaho. Why would I even care what was happening in
Boise anyway? Isn’t that, like, the
place where they make my walkman speakers?
Is that still the case today? Sure, there still exists the group of Americans who choose to simply ingest, watching re-runs of Cops, cheesin’ up the remote control with their Dorito fingers. The rest of us are cheesin’ up something else: laptop keyboard, blackberry trackpads, and iPhone touch screens. With the rise of perpetual social media and smartphone communication, I have become enthralled with social TV, and I bet many people reading this have been too without even realizing. The new day has come where viewers sit in front of the television wielding a snack, the remote control, a smartphone, and chances are, a laptop as well, ready to fire out social media bullets at the drop of a quote or breaking news story. The new “I” word is Interaction and the television industry has caught on, more than most viewers are consciously aware.
On the programming side, talk-TV dominates viewer interaction beyond the studio audience. Many show hosts collect viewer tweets or Facebook photos before or even during the show. In my opinion, Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live! on the Bravo TV network is a paradigm to all hosts. For one example of many, viewer social media interaction with the show’s accounts are read and filtered through right on the spot, allowing Andy to ask the questions about which viewers inquire most to his guests of the night. The content is nothing but fresh off the viewer minds. Social media and the actual program benefit mutually from this tactic of interaction, driving traffic to both platforms simultaneously. It is a push-pull method where those watching the show are pushed to social media, while those on social media are pulled into the show to become more informed.
Even niche market syndicated shows like Workaholics, a Comedy Central sitcom, subtly tap into viewer preferences and key moments of entertainment. The network tastefully places a hashtag in the lower left hand corner of the screen of a quote or word that is symbolic to the show which opens up a wealth of audience information as well as publicity from a universal trend. For a viewer like me, this hashtag also allows me to see that I’m not the only one who things the word “butthard” is funny.
On the commercial side, however; things have not progressed in such a prolific manner. As if avoiding commercials by holding in your bowel movements for that 3 minute break, flipping the channel, or microwaving some popcorn was not bad enough for companies, such social media and smartphone activities drive attention even further away from their mass advertising efforts. It could be said that commercial breaks come as a welcomed excuse for viewers to log onto Facebook and see what’s going on, making the fact that no one changed the channel nothing for companies to be excited about. Aside from the recent push for mobile ads and a pre-existing scramble for coveted internet ad space, companies had to get more creative to engage viewers in the same way programming did. Interestingly, they found a way to make consumption via TV ads almost as instantaneous as online shopping through a new app called TV Tak. Watch the video below if you didn’t already allocate the next 37 seconds for tweeting about how great this blog post is.
Interactive TV Commercials from TvTak on Vimeo.
I was astounded to find out the level of social TV happening
during the famous Super Bowl ads. A great example, unsurprisingly, were the
Coke polar bears which appeared about 3 or 4 times. Coca-Cola was channeling viewer reactions to
the game in order to come up with several “fresh-out-the-oven” commercials that
aggregated plays in the game and fan social media responses through the actions
of the polar bears. The polar bear reactions continued on the brand’s Facebook
account, driving traffic back to social media and creating more viewer content
to draw from for their next commercial.
See what they did there?
Aside from the fact that our family TV no longer doubles as a shelf for a small tree, nutcracker, and 5 snowglobes during the Christmas season, things in my family room have changed. I care what @Potat_hoe in Boise, Idaho is saying as long as she has the same hashtag as me about the Jimmy Fallon show. Chances are that Jimmy cares what we’re saying as well (or at least someone hired to care about it for him does). I need that power surge strip to charge my electronics so I can be on Facebook chat. I follow Spongebob on Twitter now so that I don’t need to watch Nickelodeon all day to catch one episode anymore. I mean, like, not that I watch it ever, or anything…Fruit roll-ups on the couch are a thing of the past because they make my iPhone screen sticky. I digress from simply calling myself a TV viewer. I am a television socialite now, and you can join my exclusive circle by clicking here: https://twitter.com/GoEsco25
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