Red Bee’s Andy Bryant and Charlie Mawer have published a new book, The TV Brand Builders: How to Win Audiences and Influence Viewers. Billed as “the definitive account of how the biggest television networks, channels and programs are created as brands,” the book includes “rare privileged access to the marketing strategies and creative thinking behind culturally defining TV promos, digital and social media campaigns and design identities.”

In this second excerpt, Bryant and Mawer discuss the growing importance of strong dramas in building strong TV brands:

Why It Matters So Much

Dramas form the structural pillars and joists that all general entertainment channels are built on. Alongside top sporting rights, they are the battering rams that new entrants to the broadcast market utilize to achieve scale of viewing and critical acceptance. Dramas can define a brand – as they have done so successfully with USA Network or AMC – and they are the ratings totem pole that networks such as ITV rise and fall around.

It is no wonder, then, that drama sees the highest levels of marketing investment, and the greatest innovations in off-screen campaigns. For example, Sky’s premium drama channel Sky Atlantic was reported by Private Eye to have spent £7.5 million on promoting the series Fortitude to a settled consolidated weekly audience of 1.5 million viewers.

From ABC in the United States floating thousands of messages in bottles for the launch of Lost, and branding a million dry cleaning bags with Desperate Housewives ads – ‘Everyone has a little dirty laundry’ – to Channel 4’s pop-up shop for ‘Persona Synthetics’ launching Humans, and ITV’s fake newspaper-stall headlines for Broadchurch, the most successful dramas have nearly always been preceded by the most creative marketing.

Chapter 14 on storyworlds develops a number of these case studies in which fiction is woven into the real world. Often these are extensions of a campaign though, amplifying the sense of event for launches and rewarding existing fans of established shows. The battle for eyeballs with drama, as indeed with most genres, is won and lost with the quality of the TV spots, and the strength of the key art. Drilling down to find the essence of a new show that has the expectations of a whole network riding on it is the greatest challenge of the responsible marketing teams. No one in the world currently does that better than FX Networks in the United States. Stephanie Gibbons, the inspirational marketer at the helm, explains their approach:

“How we approach dramas is to say we’re going to do the trailers, we’re going to show the work as it exists in its completed form, but we also want to take the drama apart strand by strand. We want to unravel the helix, we want to think about it the way we would think about literature – in the most basic of classes, by asking, where does the foreshadowing exist, what are the subtexts behind the protagonists, what is their Achilles heel, what drives them, what doesn’t, what are the themes that the creators thought about before they put anything to paper? That’s how we market dramas.”

Writers from Hollywood and the theatre have been attracted to the “small screen” because global television is embracing more sophisticated thematic and mature dramas, and moving away from formulaic plots and hospital ward fare. The richness of the texts following this shift means that Stephanie’s approach becomes ever more important.

Yet equally, as the growing creative muscle of television attracts A-list names, so the oldest form of dramatic promotion – star power – needs examining too.

Speed Dating

Since the posting of playbills for the productions of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company at the Rose or the Globe theatres in London – an Elizabethan form of viral marketing – the simplest promotion of drama has adopted a fairly familiar guise. Priority is given to named talent, both in front of camera/proscenium arch, or indeed behind it as writers. Richard Burbage was an excellent box-office draw for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, William Shakespeare a headline act.

For a 10-year period, Britain’s largest commercial broadcaster ITV would put bankable stars Robson Greene or Stephen Tompkinson into any drama and the viewers would flock to it. A promotional and commissioning trope brilliantly skewered in The Fast Show comedy’s Monkfish sketches: ‘Coming soon to BBC One, John Actor plays tough, uncompromising detective/vet/ doctor/Scottish detective, etc… Monkfish’.

For marketers it was easy and unchallenging and, in many instances, it is entirely the right thing to do. But there is a subtler blend of reasons that can and should be used to capture an audience for a drama. A blend based on emotional engagement with the characters, universal underlying themes and a sense of impending jeopardy in the situation. Let’s explore these individually.

Emotional Engagement

Perhaps more than any other form of television, watching the first episode of a drama is a moment of potentially heavy commitment. A decision that could lead to 24 hours of your precious time being spent with a programme and a channel. It’s like entering into a long-term relationship, in comparison with a 53-minute dalliance with a one-off documentary or dipping in to gawp at a ‘structured reality’ half-hour. Good dramas retain an audience because they form an emotional relationship with characters – an empathy that lasts beyond the closing credits. As such it is important that you use the time within your trailer as a speed date for your cast. If you read any guide to speed dating you will find advice that is useful in drama promotion:

“Make an effort! Be yourself. Be engaged – 55 per cent of communication is body language.”

Of these, the third phrase is particularly apt in this context: Be engaged. It is unusual in the process of making a drama to be unduly focused on the audience beyond the moment of commission. Indeed the audience can often be construed as peers and critics. In the bad old days of the early 1990s, veteran drama producer Verity Lambert phoned to complain to one of us about the time-slot that her drama trailer (on the nation’s most mainstream channel) was getting – saying indignantly: “7 pm on a Friday ... but that’s when everyone is leaving town for the weekend.”

Bryant and Mawer will be on hand next week at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2016 at the New York Hilton Midtown.

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