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[How does this product attract and maintain its audiences both locally and globally? What marketing and promotion does it use to do this?]
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Explore how Humans and Les Revenants uses marketing and promotional campaigns to maintain both local and global audiences
Definition - Marketing it an absolutely vital aspect of ensuring that media products reach their intended audiences. In order to ensure that this happens, producers are increasingly relying on digital technologies in order to efficiently promote media products both on a local and a global level.
Argument - In this essay, I shall argue that it is possible to ensure both local and global success through the use of digitally convergent advertising and promotional techniques.
Context -Humans is a sci-fi TV show first broadcast in the UK in 2015 on Channel 4. It is an adaptation of the Swedish show Real Humans, although a number of changes were made in order to make the show appeal to a UK market. Humans in particular made use of a variety of digital viral marketing campaigns. Les Revenants is a French horror/thriller TV show set in a small village in the French Alps. It relied on Funding from the European Union, and has been successful with its niche/cult audience. Les Revenants tended to rely on more traditional forms of advertising and marketing to target it's audiences.
Answering an industry question is all about using cold, hard facts
Plan
- Through the concepts of the shows themselves:
- British sci-fi, with intertextual links to similar shows like Black Mirror and Doctor Who
- Les Revenants USP - (unique selling point) for international audiences is that it is French! Dark, sexy, edgy, chic...
- Humans: unconventional, subversive, atypical sci-fi. Philosophical themes and questions. Hyperreality as a promotional technique
- Contemporary modern British setting
- Persona Synthetics 'product recall' advert encourages audience involvement (Jenkins! Shirky!) and helps it to maintain niche audiences. Also encourages viral marketing
- Subversive advertising campaign breaks the rules of TV advertising. A diegetic advertisement that explores the themes of the show. Ethical considerations
- Magazine covers - 'total TV Guide' - working class British audience, allows the producers to target a mainstream audience
- Horizontal integration
- Les Revs trailer: action mainstream trailer
- Twitter account allows producer to maintain both local and global audiences. Adopts the mode of address of persona synthetics, allowing the cult fandom that the show is targeting to take pleasure from interacting with the diegetic world of the narrative
- Similar to the viral marketing campaign of the Blair Witch Project (1999)
- Les Revenants poster campaign traditional marketing campaign. Posters feature a range of different characters and themes
- Humans controversial themes and casting: Synths often POC, while humans primarily white
- Double mode of address: simultaneously targets two very separate audiences: mainstream and casual audiences
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| While Humans was advertised and marketed using a range of exciting digitally convergent media techniques in order to ensure it's cult target audience tuned in, it is important to note that it also made use of traditional forms of marketing too. This front cover from the We Love TV supplement from the working class British Tabloid The Daily Mirror is clearly targeting a secondary mainstream, mass market and working class audience. This is confirmed through the casual and informal lexis of the headline and the subheading. After spending so much time in class analysing the complex themes that Humans explores, from the representation of sex workers, the issues surrounding migration and the end of humanity itself, it is interesting to see this supplement simply sum up the series as "the creepiest show on [TV]"! |