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"Trollope on Trailers:  Audience Expectation in the Victorian Imagination"  

20/8/2015

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In Anthony Trollope's minor novel about trade and advertising, The Struggles of Brown, Jones & Robinson (1862), three business partners express attitudes and notions about truth, representation and consumer expectation echoed in our own contemporary research among movie trailer audiences.  In the sophistication, cynicism and naivete of the various protagonists’ remarks about marketing, you can read the same skepticism,  confusion and plain ignorance regarding a mode of communication that is only more ubiquitous and compelling today

‘"But, George," said Mr. Brown, "I should like to have one of these bills [advertising notices] true, if only that one might show it as a sample when the people talk to one."

"True!" said Robinson, again. "You wish that it should be true! In the first place, did you ever see an advertisement that contained the truth? If it were as true as heaven, would any one believe it? Was it ever supposed that any man believed an advertisement? Sit down and write the truth, and see what it will be! The statement will show itself of such a nature that you will not dare to publish it. There is the paper, and there the pen. Take them, and see what you can make of it."
"I do think that somebody should be made to believe it," said Jones.
[Jones, the other partner, is vain, venal and dull-witted]

"You do!" and Robinson, as he spoke, turned angrily at the other. "Did you ever believe an advertisement?" Jones, in self-defence, protested that he never had. "And why should others be more simple than you? No man,—no woman believes them. They are not lies; for it is not intended that they should obtain credit. I should despise the man who attempted to base his advertisements on a system of facts, as I would the builder who lays his foundation upon the sand. The groundwork of advertising is romance. It is poetry in its very essence. Is Hamlet true?"

"I really do not know," said Mr. Brown.
"There is no man, to my thinking, so false," continued Robinson, "as he who in trade professes to be true. He deceives, or endeavours to do so. I do not. No one will believe that we have fifteen hundred dozen of Balbriggan." [A kind of stockings.]
"Nobody will," said Mr. Brown.
"But yet that statement will have its effect. It will produce custom, and bring grist to our mill without any dishonesty on our part. Advertisements are profitable, not because they are believed, but because they are attractive. Once understand that, and you will cease to ask for truth." Then he turned himself again to his work and finished his task without further interruption.’
{Emphases and interpolated notes are mine; Text courtesy of Project Gutenberg}

150 years ago, Trollope (and we presume, some of his audience) disdained the truth claims of advertising, recognizing their near irrelevance to the communicational activity afoot. At the same time, he acknowledges the power of their aesthetic and emotional appeals. But while the fictional Robinson is incipiently post-modern in his conception of marketing communications and wicked in his satire, contemporary audiences appear to have regressed relative to Victorian counterpart in their critical evaluation of advertising.

(Editors note: Below Harry Furniss' famous 'I used your soap' cartoon, an illustration of the cynicism surrounding 19th Century Ads - this somewhat ironically, became used by a soap company.)
Picture
Like Robinson’s partner, Jones, contemporary trailer audiences (a significant portion thereof) express beliefs about and expectations for advertising incompatible with what they otherwise claim to know and understand about marketing language and its approximation to truth and accuracy.   In our data set, respondents shared frustration with misleading trailers, which is a perfectly natural response to being misled, lied to and persuaded to spend money on a good, service or experience that is not as promised and described.   Yet, elsewhere in the survey—often in the same comment-- many acknowledge that “of course, you can’t trust a trailer.”  So what elicits trust in the siren call of the trailer when experience and functional knowledge teach suspicion and caution? 
 
On the other side of the exchange, Trailer makers want to provide information to audiences that allows them to choose wisely.  An unhappy and disappointed movie goer is a liability and  sales dampener –just as a gratified and delighted movie goer is an asset and ambassador- and this was true even before the amplification of social media made everyone a widely published critic.   But when the need to “open” a film meets audience gullibility, trailers that misrepresent will find audiences who resent. 
 
For both parties to the encounter, it’s a case of knowing better and not knowing better.  Historically and economically, this ambivalent relationship between movie marketers and their audiences is neither new nor especially dangerous—at least not yet.  Still, as a cognitive problem or intellectual scandal, it’s a curious case.
 
Let me stipulate that our research confirms the received understanding of trailers as generally enjoyable and effective purveyors of persuasive appeals to targeted audiences regarding the movie-viewing experience in question.  But it’s the squeaky wheel of audience disappointment and hostility toward the world’s favorite advertising that grabs attention and inspires my own interest. 
 
Because the disappointment, disgust, frustration, anger, resentment or delight of audiences regarding a movie trailer implies that the feature film has also been consumed--or at least that the audience has learned from other sources what the film is actually like—the emotional intensity of the response is an index of engagement.   Consequently, the gap between expectation and fulfillment may be thought to be predictive of the intensity of hostility or delight, resentment or approval, with which audiences respond to a given trailer.
 
When our first year survey data were released to the media, headlines trumpeted “disappointment” as the key finding (it was but one among others) as if it were news that audiences, viewers and readers disliked being lied to, misled or fooled.  And yet, there is no crisis in the trailer industry; no boycott of trailers, and only frivolous litigation.  The risk of disappointment is faced and surmounted regularly by movie audiences trailer after trailer, release after release.  I’m inclined to think the challenge of “reading” a trailer,  “parsing” it’s positioning for the truth of the feature, is itself part of the movie consuming experience, an entertainment all its own, insofar as one gambles with time, money and desire for pleasurable outcomes. Under this hypothesis, frustration or disgust is a predictable result of judging, guessing or hoping wrongly.  Certainly it’s easier and more agreeable to blame the marketers than ones’ own faculty of prediction.
 
I return to Trollope for his insight into the understanding of advertising by the typical 1860’s consumer, for whom partner Jones is our proxy.     Robinson insists and makes Jones agree that “no one” is fooled by the truth claims of advertising: “No man,—no woman believes them. They are not lies; for it is not intended that they should obtain credit.” And yet, advertising communications regularly and predictably motivate behavior and yield results: “…that statement will have its effect. It will produce custom, and bring grist to our mill without any dishonesty on our part. Advertisements are profitable, not because they are believed, but because they are attractive. Once understand that, and you will cease to ask for truth.”  
 
Commercial stories and assertions appear to operate upon us much like fictional ones, eliciting emotional and cognitive responses. As Robinson appreciates, despite knowing better, audiences—then and now--can’t control ourselves.  Advertising appeals to sensibility, which is code for non-logical processes.  Indeed, Robinson bases his argument on aesthetic and rhetorical principles: “the groundwork of advertising is romance. It is poetry in its very essence.” Making the point more emphatically, he asks Jones, “Is Hamlet true?”
 
Certainly there are those—constituting a statistically significant percentage of audiences surveyed--who ignore the commercial imperative of trailers, neglecting to reckon with their function as advertising, their lack of accountability to literal or aesthetic truth. It is as if for some ticket buyers, marketing, journalism, promotion and news are no longer distinguishable or so totalizing as to prevent their imagining an alternative.  Meanwhile, the “truth in advertising” meme—a cynical rule propagated by the Federal Trade Commission of the United State—has gained a purchase on the consumer mind, despite compelling evidence of its lax and halting enforcement. 
 
In 1860, the skepticism assumed by Robinson and grudgingly acknowledged by Jones, seems more an expression of Trollope’s irony  than an accurate characterization of the Victorian consuming public. Much of the book is devoted to accounts of Robinson’s mastery of advertising and promotion in as many media as were then available to him.  And in each ingenious “campaign” that he writes and executes on behalf of the business, he finds credulous audiences for indifferent goods at unremarkable prices.  Only occasionally, as with marketers, does he meet with consumer distrust. 
 
If, as I think probable, audiences, trailer makers and media critics are speaking past each other because of a failure to agree on precise definitions and a reliance on sloppy metaphors,  let me mention a conception that is as wrong as it is frequently deployed.  Where I think the problem lies (and the “problem” may not be a problem for the box office, but rather a successful strategy of engagement) is in the mis-identification of trailers as a “free sample” of the film the audience is thinking of consuming. Unlike a bona fide sample, say a trial portion of cologne from the cosmetic counter or cube of cheese handed out at the grocery, a 2:00 trailer isn’t isotonic with the feature, like the cologne or cheese is with its larger bottle or wedge.  No, a trailer is another kind of film, smaller, differently edited, telling a different story with different graphic design features, music and extra-diegetic text.   While it might present shot sequences taken frame by frame from the feature, they have been slotted into a different structure, incorporated into another film altogether.   

A trailer is a film about a film, a story about a film, an allegory even, rather than a sample, a bite, a sip. A trailer must inevitably fall short of representing a film given that its function is otherwise: to position a film, provide information about a film and advocate for its excellence.  And then, its components and style of narrative articulation are very different.    Audiences who know better and those who don’t nonetheless persist in demanding from trailers experiences and assurances they are unable to provide.   And yet, to borrow the idiom of Trollope’s advertising avatar, Robinson, that presumption “will have its effect. It will produce custom, and bring grist” to the mill “without any dishonesty” on the part of the respectable movie marketer.  “Advertisements are profitable, not because they are believed, but because they are attractive.”   Trailermakers know this. Shouldn’t audiences?      
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Trailing the Digital Television Experience: The Promotion of Service Providers and On Demand Content

5/8/2015

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This fortnight's post comes from Sam Ward, talking about netflix, Spoofs and consumer culture, welcome!
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As a scholar of television’s promotional discourse, whose relationship with film is limited to that of a consumer, I have followed the Watching the Trailer project with admiring interest, but also a question: how might we account for the television trailer as distinct from the film trailer? Recent developments in the trailing of television content have raised a range of textual, industrial and even ethical questions. Trailers for big budget or ‘event’ television now routinely borrow stylistic tropes from movie trailers (for a randomly selected example see here), sometimes to the extent of playfully undercutting generic expectations. Indeed, cinema-goers increasingly find TV shows being advertised before the feature film alongside the usual upcoming cinematic releases. Just in the UK, we’ve had trailers for TV dramas disguised as spots for consumer products, unseasonably premature teasers (almost to rival Star Wars VII, as discussed in a previous WtT blog post), as well as more and more innovative transmedia tie-ins.

Here, though, I want to focus specifically on ‘trailers’ for the televisual experience itself. As my scare quotes indicate, whether or not the term fits here is open to debate, but I suggest that that debate is a complex one given the dense linking and overlapping of content, brands and technologies that such ‘trailers’ produce. Of course, the technology, channels and broadcasters that deliver content have all occasionally been the subject of promotion throughout TV’s history. But the intense competition in the UK between television service providers like Sky and Freeview, not to mention new web-based rivals like Netflix, has made selling the televisual experience a central and ubiquitous part of the contemporary industry’s make-up. This has given rise to a new kind of promotional text that ‘trails’ television – not simply as content, but as a technological object and a consumer experience.

Over the last couple of years, actor Idris Elba has appeared as the promotional face of Sky, Britain’s leading pay-TV provider. He has featured in several on-air adverts that focus on Sky’s On Demand service. They continue  in a long-standing style for Sky adverts, casting a television celebrity as the projected viewer, who is found in a pristine white space (in the video below it’s a library, in others it’s an art gallery or a stylish, minimialist living room), framing the Sky service as a rarefied, individualised and vaguely futuristic experience.

Like many other trailers for service providers, this spot perfectly encapsulates James Bennett’s characterisation of television’s shift to digital as dominated by a ‘discourse of choice’. A whole physical library (actually Stuttgart City Library) is seemingly contained within Sky’s set-top box. But can it be called a ‘trailer’ when there is no specific upcoming content being shown on screen? Another way of approaching this question is by thinking about the very complicated relationship that TV viewing now has with temporality. The ‘temporal subordination’ that the WtT team observe in previous accounts of film trailers (that is, the assumption that the trailer comes first, then the film itself) becomes problematic in a slightly different sense when we consider the unmooring of television content from the fixed schedule. None of the content that Elba namedrops is ‘coming soon’, or even particularly current. In fact, the idea that the content being trailed may have already been seen by others is used as a central selling point of the service (comparable to the ‘audience reaction’ featured in some film trailers).

However, the name dropping of several shows in Elba’s speech and the knowing nod to his own appearance in The Wire, as well as the prominent placement of certain DVD box sets, makes clear how the future-oriented promise of viewing content remains inseparable from the sale of Sky’s pay-TV subscriptions. Of course, on a basic level this expresses a re-elaboration of the old TV industry adage that people watch programmes, not channels (or, indeed, services or technologies). More complex forms of intertextual layering emerge, though, where we find flagship shows being trailed more overtly, and in the process being made to stand for the brand of a particular platform or service.

Take the advert for Netflix below, which appeared on British television in 2014. Here again a well-known television personality demonstrates the viewing experience offered by the platform. However, here he is actually transported onto the sets of some of Netflix’s most successful dramas. We might call this a kind of spoof or mash-up trailer, playing on Gervais’s trademark awkwardness as the Brit failing to ‘make it’ in the various narrative worlds (before finally being seen in his own sitcom Derek, for which Netflix has the second-run rights).
This comical deconstruction of the usual function of trailers has become a regular feature of adverts for television services. To take a final example, Elba’s predecessor as the face of Sky was veteran comedy actor Joanna Lumley. As with Gervais’s travels through Netflix’s shows, Lumley appeared in several fake trailers, spoofing characters from some of the series available on demand. 

Lumley’s cult-like indulgence, poking fun at the fan practice of ‘cos-play’, ironically reinforces the perception of this content as ‘quality’ (that is, compared to Lumley’s fake beards and hammy acting) that warrant devoted viewership. Meanwhile the service is given ultimate prominence as her punchline – ‘Watch the real Game of Thrones with Sky On Demand’ – bestows ownership on Sky as a whole. The comedy also plays on the shows’ American-ness, of course, against which Lumley’s well-spoken English accent serves to heighten the incongruity (although she also does Bear Grylls).

If, as the WtT team report, a common complaint with film trailers is that they mis-represent the film in question, it is interesting that it is precisely this tendency for discrepancy that provides the joke from which Lumley’s sketches derive their promotional effect. While most (official) film trailers at least claim to provide a taste of ‘the real thing’, ‘trailers’ for the digital televisual experience produce texts that are more taxonomically ambiguous, presenting a multi-purpose – and often ironic – mode of address. As television functions more explicitly than ever as a service as much as a textual form, analysing how that service is promoted to the consumer presents valuable questions – only some of which I’ve briefly raised here – about the relationship between content and technology.

Sam Ward has recently submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the place of imported drama in the promotional discourse surrounding digital television. He has also worked as a Lecturer at the University of Roehampton.

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