January 3, 2007

"Grease" - New Synergies For Hybrid Productions

I like the concept behind the upcoming NBC reality TV show, "Grease: You're the One I Want," which will premiere this Sunday, January 7th.

The goal of this TV show competition is to pick the two leads - Sandy and Danny - for an upcoming Broadway production of this musical. On the website for this new TV program, you can watch background videos, see some pictures (images are not very interesting), and download audio tracks to create and submit your own video auditions. I don't understand the purpose of the "Be A Star" section since this show is about to air and initial auditions must have already been conducted. At this point, you can't watch any of the submitted video auditions.

While the TV show's website may have some limitations, the idea of creating synergy between a TV competition and a Broadway musical is an excellent one. TV audiences not only get to watch competitors vie for the lead parts in the Broadway production, but they also get to participate in the selection process. And through this highly participatory process, it's hard to imagine that a huge number of tickets for the theatrical production won't be sold. My guess is that the Broadway production will quickly go on a nation-wide tour to take advantage of the pre-existing audience generated from the TV show.

It's interesting to consider how dance and theater companies can create the same type of synergies on a scaled-down basis. Clearly, not everybody can go out and produce a $10 million Broadway musical. But there are other approaches - and much less expensive ones - for engaging audiences in the process of creation and seeking innovative ways to give online and live audiences a voice in different aspects of your performances. How can you use your website and online videos, for example, to provide new types of access to your works-in-progress and current performances? How can you enable audiences to vote or offer their feedback in a way that is both meaningful to participants as well as to choreographers, directors, dancers and actors? And, then, how do you leverage these higher levels of participation to build audiences, create online distribution channels for your performances and generate new revenue streams?

None of the above questions is easy to answer, but I think they are worth considering in light of the direction that popular culture is going and the increasing move toward hybrid events that leverage multiple mediums (Internet, TV and the stage) to build audiences and generate revenue.

Promoting "Grease" through Context-Sensitive Banner Ads

On sort of a related note, I was reading a December 30th story "Unlikely partners: The art of dance is enjoying a surge in popularity thanks to reality television, which has provided a much-needed platform" in the Los Angeles Times by Lewis Segal.

Segal writes:

At a time when even PBS' "Great Performances" series has turned its back on dance, such network series as "Dancing With the Stars" and Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" represent a new beginning for dance as a popular art, an affirmation of the work ethic, self-affirmation and above all, the sheer pleasure involved with dancing and watching others dance.

Segal's take on these popular TV dance shows is much more sympathetic than that offered by Terry Teachout in a November 25th column in The Wall Street Journal, "Ballet? Never Heard of It: The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America." Teachout opens his article with the following paragraph:

Thirty-two million Americans tuned in the other night to see Emmitt Smith, formerly of the Dallas Cowboys, win the Cheesetastic Disco Ball Trophy on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." The network claims that the latest episodes of its primetime ballroom-dancing competition were the most widely viewed programs of the current TV season. That's an impressive statistic no matter how you slice it, but it's noteworthy for another, grimmer reason: If you want to see dance on TV, "Dancing With the Stars" is pretty much all there is.

One of the things that intrigued me about the LA Times story is that the article is surrounded by either 2 or 3 banner ads for "Grease: You're the One I Want." (How many "Grease" ads you see is based on when you happen to load the page.) This new TV show is produced by the same people who created "Dancing with the Stars" as the ads point out. Click on the following screen shot to see what Segal's article looked like when I viewed it with 3 ads:

Click for Larger Image

I'd like to know how this ad targeting works. If the article was critical of TV dance shows, would the ads for Grease have been displayed? Does the banner ad delivery network, DoubleClick in this case, do an automatic analysis of the words within an article to determine which ads to display? Or, is the process a combination of human choices and context-sensitive analysis? In Teachout's article that is hostile toward TV dance shows, there are no ads for Grease - but, in fairness, that might really not mean anything given that The Wall Street Journal might use a different ad delivery system which features different ads, and its audience demographics are probably much different from the LA Times.

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