fans: fight for your survival, eat subway sandwiches

04 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

According to a study done by Initiative Media, the average network program was identified as a “favorite series” by only 6 percent of its viewers. But in some cases, as many as 50 or 60 percent of viewers may rank a program as their favorites. Early evidence suggests that these loyals have a higher rate of brand recall and are much less likely to be lured away from the networks toward competing cable content. Loyals are twice as likely to pay attention to advertisements and two to three times more likely to remember product categories than more casual viewers. And they are between 5 to 20 percent more likely to recall specific sponsors – not huge numbers, perhaps, but big enough that they can give a competitive edge to advertisers who consistently target shows with a high degree of viewer loyalty. Historically, networks ignored those fan bases in making decisions about renewing series, seeing fans as unrepresentative of the general public; but advertisers are increasingly realizing that they may be better advised investing their dollars behind shows that have high favorability than shows that have high ratings.

- Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. HENRY JENKINS, 2006. (p 76)

A lot of tv shows are on the chopping block right now. But not all shows have the same kind of favorability, or fan communities willing to work to keep their shows on-air. And what’s more, these communities (and a star or two) seem to be taking a page out of Henry’s book (and the referenced study) to prove why their fandom is so critical to both the network and its advertisers.

Chuck:

Fans have rallied to prove their loyalty to Chuck. The owner and blogger at Give Me My Remote has called fans to action: to flood Facebook and Twitter during the show’s airing, to download images to use as their Twitter backgrounds, and even to print and send custom postcards directly to NBC. But these are all fairly routine actions taken by fan communities (see Friday Night Lights). What makes Chuck so interesting is what the star, Zach Levi, is doing to rally his community. Levi has asked fans of the show to eat Subway sandwiches. Specifically, Levi asked fans to show up at Subway on April 27th, buy a footlong, and leave a comment card letting Subway know that fans really do care about the show’s sponsor. Fans have even begun calling on Subway itself to finance the show’s renewal. From Levi, “Again…the intent is to let the network and their sponsor know that we’ve received their message. This is something a Nielson box can’t do…this is a translation of fan loyalty into real dollars that NBC & Subway can measure.” Read more about the campaign to save Chuck at Mashable.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

In a recent E! online poll, fans voted Terminator the show most worth saving this season. So sci-fi blog io9 decided to help fans take action. They’ve started a Flickr group where fans can post photos of themselves with products advertised during the show. Like the photo here, fans attribute their purchase to the advertiser’s sponsorship of their favorite show. The pool is still pretty small (14 photos/75 members) so far, but it was only started on May 1st. I’ll be keeping an eye on the pool to see how or if it grows. And fans are certainly encouraging friend tune-in and increased activity within Twitter and Facebook.

All in all, both campaigns represent a significant shift in how fans lobby for their favorite programs. There seems to be a genuine change in how fans view the economies that their shows live and operate in. Research had shown that loyal fans are more likely to recall brand sponsorship; but this is proof that they’re willing to mobilize (with their wallets) in order to save a favorite program. If their efforts do prove successful, the next question will center around how fans interact with these brands that they patronized in order to save a show, after the show is back on-air. Henry and many others have long posited that there is an incentive for brands to sponsor shows with more well connected and fervent fan communities, rather than those simply with high ratings; and this could be further proof of that supposition.

If you care about either of these shows, or the power of fans, help spread this post, or the posts linked to from here. Long live fans.