Examples from Television

6/16/08

In the last posting I argued that we have entered an extraordinary season for the Internet and television alike, as both are caught in currents leading toward convergence. Last week I presented four examples from the Web. Here are five examples from TV:

America’s Funniest Home Videos

First aired in 1989, this series is still going strong and will very likely enter its 20th year in 2009. Its model was the hit Japanese show Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-han, perhaps the first known example of a television show constructed from video clips submitted by the audience.

Along with such examples as Candid Camera, America’s Funniest Home Videos represents an early approach to reality TV. The series has shown beyond any doubt that user-made content can lead to powerfully attracting television.

I Survived

On March 24th, 2008 the Biography Channel launched this anthology about real people
describing incredible survival tales. The website includes a page called “I
Survived: Share Your Story,” and issues a direct invitation to send in descriptions of
extreme survival stories. The show’s interviews and re-enactments are done with actors.

The I Survived: Share Your Story website opportunity can be taken as a stand-in for other TV shows that invite true-story accounts from the audience. This model of open calls for a specific story concept has an established history that goes back to the early days of television. In 1963, the writer J.B. Priestley appeared on the British television show Monitor. Priestley openly asked viewers who had experienced precognitive dreams to write him letters describing those dreams and the events that later confirmed them. Thousands of letters came to his postbox at the BBC and many are quoted in the final chapters of his enduring work, Man and Time.

Project Greenlight and On the Lot

These two competitive reality TV shows follow a similar core concept: wannabe filmmakers are given the opportunity to create a strong screenplay, or demonstrate their directing skills, with winning entrants awarded one million dollars to produce and direct a first feature. Originally Matt Damon was associated with Project Greenlight (a Miramax project); Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks studio are behind On the Lot.

This model for growing homemade talent into professional television seeks entree through conventional forms of screenplay writing, studio financing, directing a movie with a union crew, etc. There is one problem with this model: it assumes the coming of free-form content will replicate the old structure of making TV dramas and comedies and movies. Yet that structure is appearing more irrelevant by the day, thanks to reality TV.

Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl Contest

Beginning in 2007, Doritos purchased a one-minute spot at the priciest venue on television, halftime at the annual Superbowl, and announced an open contest for submissions to find a freely submitted commercial that could fill that spot. Winners of the 2007 contest were Dale Backus and Wes Philips of 5 Point Productions, an entity created only weeks before they made their winning submission. Winners from 2007 and 2008 can be seen on YouTube. The notion of announcing contests for submitting airable commercials has spread to other advertisers: YouTube’s Contest page currently invites airable commercials for Gillette, Century 21, Schick Quattro, Tide, Chrysler 300, and Duncan Donuts.

That barely one year after the first contest was completed, six other advertisers would promote their own contest for homemade commercials, suggests the beginning of a fast-rising curve: audience-generated advertising and promotions. Again, consider the implications of that curve. Can anti-advertising and non-corporate promotions be so far away?

– William Kuhns