Check out this quote in a BBC article today on trend changes in advertising.
It features an interview with Grant McCracken, "an anthropologist who has advised companies including Netflix and Ford on culture and commerce".
Quote:The worst [of modern ads] can attract derision, he says.
Author Malcolm Gladwell introduced the world to the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something in his 2008 book, Outliers. So if you apply that to culture, we are still very young by the time we have watched 10,000 hours of television, Dr McCracken says.
We become cultural experts very fast.
And being surrounded by smart voices on social media means lazy marketing is more likely to be jumped upon and ridiculed by smarter consumers.
"They are smarter through TV but they are smarter still because they can confer," says Dr McCracken. "You never watch alone. You are watching in a crowd, so you are enabled by the smartest person in the room."
(
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48118818 )
This is what the shows have misjudged massively in recent years IMO. Guys are instantly connected in ways they just weren't even 3 or 4 years ago. Even the operator's own chat boxes give a vehicle for guys to confer and get smarter about what they are seeing. No one punter has to be limited by his personal knowledge, experiences or wit any more. The online environment the shows are increasingly moving towards is predicated on instant social, and unlike the chat boxes largely unmoderatable, communication. That communication is currently being used against the shows in large part. It doesn't have to be that way.
Punters have been made more savvy than ever but the shows are still trying to pull the same old tricks or variations on them. The same tired fakery, misselling, purposeful miscommunications, manipulations and chicanery, achieving ever more of the same result - customer dissatisfaction - as each punter wises up to the extent of their mistreatments. We see through you now.
The shows are coming towards the end of their teenage years now and, frankly, it's about time they grew the fuck up. The upcoming challenges to their internet markets as represented by the introduction of AV gateways should prove a watershed moment for operator reflection on their relationships with their users.
They need to start exhibiting a little humility when they fuck up; giving proper explanations and genuine required information promptly at the appropriate times. They need to utilise the devotion of this forum for the good it offers instead of too often scorning it or cutting back its access; engage with posters and chatters and the issues they raise in a positive and friendly way instead of treating them as idiot cash cows. Acknowledge what they say rather than jumping for excuses and the delete button every time.
Deal with people properly, empatheticly and fairly, and you wont be lambasted, ridiculed, and eventually disowned. Stop being content to live in a twitter bubble of self vetted sychophants... Punters will take a lot but they are getting ever choosier on how the spend their disposable income and, if pushed, will stop engaging with you altogether. Continue to treat your own output, and audience as a whole, with contempt and an empowered, connected, "expert" consumer will make you pay in the end.