At the end of Ugly Betty, a shopping icon could direct viewers to places where they could buy Betty’s shoes, a New York Times article says of a new merchandising campaign by ABC.
IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS: Snipes and bugs sound like the sort of things you want to shoot and squash, and it’s unlikely that the new TV season will change your mind, as the big networks are adamant in their commitment to these onscreen graphics, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times business section.
Bugs are the slightly less dynamic distractions – they’re those network logo graphics, only occasionally animated, that take up residence in the corner of your screen like a watermark. Snipes, on the other hand, are more intrusive, with animations and even sound, and usually tease the next show on the network’s schedule or that week’s high profile episode or special. They’ve joined news crawls and banners and formed a gang of squatters that can and will claim onscreen real estate in whatever manner the networks and their marketing mavens consider appropriate.
The most aggressive proponent of these pixelated persuaders will be on ABC, who are launching their “ABC Starts Here” campaign with icons and snipes meant to push shopping services related to a show. “At the end of Ugly Betty, for instance, a shopping icon could direct viewers to places where they could buy Betty’s shoes,” said the Times story, “or an iTunes icon could invite them to that site to buy episodes of the show.”
The logic used by the network types is that viewers, especially younger ones, are accustomed to this level of visual noise, which has long been part of the experience of watching news and sports programming. According to Marla Provencio, an ABC executive vice president of marketing, they’re meant “to accommodate viewers’ multimedia, multichannel habits and still lead them back to ABC.”
What we’re really looking at, of course, is the death rattle of the 30 second commercial, which began atrophying the moment they put a mute button on a remote, and was last seen slouched in a corner, failing to thrive as TiVo and other digital recording technology made it possible to treat commercials like the boring and/or racist relative you barely pay attention to at Thanksgiving dinner, as you make up smutty lyrics to the Barney song in your head while they explain once again why they were passed over for a promotion five times at the board of education.
“The key word in television these days is engagement,” said Norby Williamson, executive vice president of programming at ESPN. At least a few network types admit, however, that the situation has already gone past the point of parody. “Our pixel footprint can get way out of control,” said Jonathan Klein, president of CNN U.S. Sherry Sklar, a writer interviewed by the Times for the story admitted that she has begun favouring PBS and HBO to get away from the snipes and bugs, which raises the spectre of a new level of premium programming that eschews onscreen clutter the way cable was once supposed to provide a refuge from advertising. And we all know how that turned out, didn’t we?
