The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

Virginia Heffernan, writing in The Medium blog, examines the failure of NBC’s Friday Night Lights — renewed by execs even in the face of mediocre ratings and critical reviews.

Rejecting the notion that America isn’t up for character dramas (patently untrue given HBO’s continuing success), Heffernan instead points the finger at the show’s creators reluctance to open up the show to audience participation.

The show, […] ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity.

This lockdown is furthered expressed in a pointed refusal to extend the property into other mediums and mileaus (products, toys, games, what not).

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

[wistful aside] Talk about the rhizome takes me all the way back to my days studying Critical Theory (with its endless permutations of post–s), attempting to wrap my head around Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the subject.[end wistful aside]

The reticence to ease off on the control-o-meter runs smack into an increasingly-clear reality facing content-producers of all stripes — the desire demand for co-creation:

Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art […] They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games.

Those that don’t offer it can look forward to being consigned to irrelevance (or worse, milquetoast descent over financial quater after financial quarter).

Substitute “advertising” for “art” and the argument is just as poignant and relevant. Franchising for us represents a real and dedicated effort to diversify communications across touchpoints; not just the token Facebook group or one-off landing page, but a concerted and creative representation of the essence of a campaign in several (or dozens) of consumer touchpoints, backed up by a concomitant allocation of budget.

Tags: opinions, reviews, television