Given this omni-coverage, and proliferation of texts that could easily be construed as paratexts (or vice versa), it’s hardly surprising that showrunner Steven Moffat has recently remarked in Doctor Who Magazine: “I dreaded this month, because… how do you pitch it at the right level. How do you make sure there’s enough Doctor Who without making people vomit with it all being too much? But it seems to be about bang on, I think”.

However, Doctor Who’s November ascension to the heights of hype brought with it a few unhappy voices: aggravated letter-writers and email-senders complained to the BBC’s Newswatch programme that BBC News coverage constituted advertising for a Corporation product rather than media/entertainment reportage, whilst The Radio Times’ letter section (14—20 Dec) included the following gem, from one Stephen Thompson: “Having enjoyed Doctor Who as young people in the 1960s and again as parents in the 70s, my wife and I decline to go along with the hype surrounding the 50th-anniversary ‘special’. Like the little boy who watched the king parading in his new clothes, we did watch it, but we found it incomprehensible… Labyrinth, also featuring John Hurt as a centuries-old survivor, though panned by the critics, was much better!”

The ‘hype of the Doctor’ becomes a thing in itself for these members of the public, inciting them to critique and reject excessive promotion from a public service broadcaster. The show’s production team were aware of this potential danger, however, with Moffat observing that there “has been more hype than I thought possible, and vastly more than I thought (in my weaker moments) wise.” For, as Jonathan Gray has noted, paratextual promotion’s mere existence can devalue a text. Hype indicates a text’s industrial and commercial roots all too obviously for some audiences.

Doctor Who is perhaps unlikely to be deemed ‘art’, but it can certainly be positioned as a public good linked to historical worth and cultural value. The Director-General of the BBC, Tony Hall, got in on this act when he aligned Who with the “nurturing” values and virtues of the BBC in a piece written for the anniversary edition of the Radio Times (23—30 Nov): “If I may be allowed a small plug, it was the BBC that brought William Hartnell to that scrapyard in 1963. The BBC who nurtured [the series]… and invented the miracle of regeneration to explain cast changes. And after the decision to cancel the show was reversed, it was the BBC who reinvented it with some of the best acting and writing on television, anywhere in the world. And you can now watch the Doctor …in 206 territories… Each has fans tuning in and buying the merchandise. …All that helps the BBC generate income to spend on high-quality programmes at home.”

Setting aside how this objectifies “the decision to cancel” the show, whilst attributing agency to the BBC for keeping Who alive via regeneration and reinvention, “plugging” something usually means selling it. And hype conveys a version of the same thing – it’s generally construed as a blatantly commercial practice. Likewise, members of the public who complained about the BBC “advertising” its own wares under the guise of entertainment news were also hurling a devalued discourse of commerce at the Beeb.

Doctor Who’s explosion of paratextual incarnations across November thus risked casting a market(ing) shadow over the BBC’s status as a public service broadcaster, over-writing royalty with revenue-generation. Though Tony Hall was quick to point out that Who’s money-making would help to fund public service productions, by aligning the show with a kind of blockbuster paratextuality, the BBC unwittingly cast itself as a hype merchant as well as the custodian of a valued creation loved by generations.

Meanwhile, getting 3D cinema tickets or entry to the BBC Worldwide-led Celebration event became neoliberal exercises in consumer sovereignty. In the first instance, punters had to compete amongst themselves to secure bookings, with a Celebration ballot only subsequently being run. Sitting in the front few rows at the ExCeL required a higher fee – a VIP TARDIS ticket – giving the impression that profits from the fan market were being keenly maximized by BBC Worldwide.

Whilst sections of fandom might embrace neoliberal common-sense, this ultimately leads to calls for Doctor Who’s merchandising/ticketing profits to be fed straight back into the show. Fan magazine SFX says in its review of ‘Day of the Doctor’, “More than half a million people watched it globally in cinemas, and it made £1.7 million in UK cinemas alone! Let’s pump that cash right back into Who, eh Beeb…?” But this is not something the BBC could ever entertain without fatally undermining its public service principles. BBC Worldwide is probably already putting amounts of money into the series – but little information on such funding has made it into the public domain. Just how much of Doctor Who’s budgeting can now – directly or indirectly – be traced back to Worldwide and its various commercial operations?

As if to distract from questions of profiteering, the global ‘simulcast’ was immediately badged with a Guinness World Record, awarded on Sunday November 24th. This had obviously been pre-arranged as a photo opportunity (and as a way of persuading paying customers at the Celebration that they were participating in an “historic moment”). Articulating the episode with a grandeur of reach, ‘The Day of the Doctor’ was paratextually inflected here by a preferred BBC interpretation; as a record-breaking achievement rather than a money-making activity.

The BBC also addressed Doctor Who fandom via “red button” and online provision. ‘The Night of the Doctor’ and ‘The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot’ both blatantly catered to fan agendas whilst being made available at no charge. Were these texts or paratexts? Marketing for the Who brand, or gifts to fandom? I’d hazard that such ‘extras’ were liminal (para)texts, permanently caught in mid-regeneration between market and gift economies.

Whilst trying to make itself a kind of social glue uniting the nation (and multiple territories) around special event programming, the BBC consistently found itself enmeshed in commercial discourses of revenue, profit and (excessive/blockbuster) promotion. November’s week of the Doctor, and the hype of the Doctor, demonstrate an undecidability of commerce/public service, as each is caught up in the other, tangled together in an inseparably mixed economy. Throwing the Royal family, World Records, One Direction, and red button mockdocs into the paratextual mix, the BBC wants to be read as a source of public value: a giver of gifts rather than a shaper of hype. But like ‘The Day of the Doctor’, which rewrites the show’s back-story and yet fits into established continuity at one and the same time, the BBC’s celebration of the 50th anniversary rewrites the extent to which commercial operations can be built onto a licence fee-funded property, whilst still fitting into traditional PSB continuities of nation-building and community-serving.

1. Giant publishers Penguin and Random House are combining forces, a move which some say is absolutely necessary for survival against the onslaught of e-book competitors, and it’s likely that consolidation will continue, with money rather than culture driving publishing. A new era is also heralded by the Macmillan Dictionary going online only.

2. Brooklyn is becoming a key moviegoing region, thanks to new ventures like a hybrid theater/DVD rental store/bar. Further south, Virginia has seen its status as a movie production region boosted through tax incentives, with Lincoln providing a model example. The loser in that scenario is Los Angeles, which has lost over 16,000 production jobs since 2004, and now LA stands to lose porn workers too.

3. It’s shaping up to be a decent year at the movie box office, and there’s also increasing money to be made in video-on-demand, foreign markets (though China’s now a question mark), product placement, and branding.

4. Warner Bros. is beset by in-fighting, while Sony Pictures’ financial struggles continue. And though Sony insists the studio’s not for sale, Viacom’s CEO says fine, we totally don’t want to buy your stupid studio anyway. And now here comes Michael Eisner getting back in the game with Universal, which might mean…Are you sitting down? (Right, you’re probably sitting at a computer)…a new Garbage Pail Kids movie.

5. 33% of North American peak residential downstream internet traffic now involves Netflix, but while Netflix’s growth may have drawn some online video pirates away from BitTorrent, traffic via BitTorrent is still increasing. Mega is getting back in business in New Zealand, while Pirate Bay’s founder, already in detention in Sweden, is looking at new charges.

6. Spotify’s valuation just went down, but the music service has had a good 2012, with new investors and expansions and plans in place to rescue the music industry after it finally craters. Web radio is also doing well, though the battle over online royalties stands to get fiercer, and musicians are growing more dissatisfied with Pandora. The impact of such services on music fan habits is muddled, but at least one big label is now at a digital tipping point. And through it all, the hated Nickelback just keeps making bank.

7. You’ve heard this before: Console video game sales are down, the eleventh straight month of declines. Though the impending release of new generation consoles could break that streak, rumors are that there might not be as many physical games to buy soon anyway. But here’s something new: good old-fashioned board games are growing in popularity, apparently sparked by online gaming and the desire for social alternatives.

8. Election night was a big internet and social media night, as Twitter and Facebook saw huge activity, and Instagram also made its mark. Google+? Not so much. President Obama spent considerably more on social media than his challenger did and took greater advantage of internet marketing and data, and Obama’s tech team is getting high praise for its role in his re-election success.

9. Former Hollywood exec Peter Chernin has joined Twitter’s board of directors, and it seems he has some catching up to do as he helps to plot a new future for the social media service. That future will include tweets from the Pope, though His Holiness might want to get on board with the impressive Tumblr too.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past few weeks: Social Media Data, Amazon Money, Time-Shifting Down Too, ESPN’s Tebow Obsession, TV Wars, First & Second Screens, +3 Compared to +7, +7 Ratings, House of Cards Trailer, New MTV Programmer, BBC Crisis, Fox News & the Election, Rove’s Performance, Return of The Killing, Gay TV Impact.

As we approach the London 2012 Games, it is worth reflecting on the promotional paratexts that surround the Games, as these are often, too easily, mocked or dismissed in ways that do not sufficiently account for the complexities of promotional design work, or the way that texts such as logos and mascot films amplify clusters of meaning and expectation around media events. The London mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, have been a particular subject of press criticism since their unveiling in 2010 – two sleek CGI characters distinguished by a huge cyclopean camera-eye.  Generating revenue through toy licensing deals, the mascots have also been designed to embody the digital address of the Olympics, inviting children to interact with their “Olympic journey” through virtual encounters on Twitter, Facebook, and an interactive website. While their alien look has led to some very un-childlike descriptions within international media coverage – Vanity Fair calling Wenlock a “ghoulish cycloptic phallus,” the Toronto Sun describing the mascots as “walking penis monsters,” and Twitter postings labelling them “terror sperm” – Wenlock and Mandeville are a deliberate departure from the history of cuddly Olympic mascots first embodied by the cartoon bear Misha at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and carried through to Beijing’s Fuwa mascots. Phallic fears notwithstanding, they assume the appearance of high-tech toys born from – and for – a digital world.

Like the graffiti design of the London 2012 logo, which also received a press drubbing when unveiled in 2007, Wenlock and Mandeville have been given a deliberate multimedia inscription. This is captured in a series of animated mascot films released periodically in the UK leading up to the Games. Viewable online, on British children’s channels such as CBBC, as well as in film theatres, the film shorts began with Out of a Rainbowin May 2010 and have been followed by Adventures on a Rainbow (March 2011), Rainbow Rescue (December 2011), and Rainbow to the Games (May 2012). Animated by the Chinese digital media firm Crystal CG, these films reveal interesting networks of production. In industry terms, the mascot films are the result of multi-level collaboration taking place between British and Chinese creative personnel. While the shorts were written, produced, directed, narrated, and scored by British artists, much of the animation production was completed in Crystal’s offices in London and Beijing, highlighting the rise of Chinese digital expertise in the media  industry sub-sector of promotional design. 

Textually, the animated shorts serve a particular brand function in the UK, selling the Games as a participatory national event and identifying a diverse and youth-friendly selection of British Olympians as its sporting face.  The shorts also, importantly, develop a narrative of media engagement, anticipating the Olympics through mobile screens and social networking sites aimed specifically at children. The liquid design of Wenlock and Mandeville and the use of mobile phones and SMS messaging within the narrative arc of the mascot films both reinforce the digital identity of the London Olympics. While UK factories are figured in the mascot films as central to building the physical infrastructure of the Games, the meaning of the Olympics is vested in the mobile, data-driven world of the mascots. While the new media aesthetic of the logo and mascots has come under fire – one media critic labelling Wenlock and Mandeville “appalling computerised smurfs for the iPhone generation” – the entryway paratexts of London 2012 are more interesting than these sniffy descriptions suggest. Not least, they reveal the changing way that media brands, including the Olympics, are seeking to reconstruct themselves for the converged digital media environment. To what extent the London Games lives up to aspirations of being the first digital Olympics, and whether the mascot films become mere fig-leaves for impending organizational pratfalls, remains to be seen.  

It took The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly to help me realize I had fallen into a common trap, overestimating the show’s ubiquity. Recent articles have observed that Mad Men does not have spectacularly high ratings, with a regular viewership of only 1.9 million. Critically successful, the show has also garnered a good deal of interest from academics. Over the next few months Antenna will be featuring weekly the opinions of several media scholars who will comment on Mad Men’s fourth season as it unfolds. What makes a show on a network with extremely limited original programming and a viewership just under 2 million such a significant cultural event? Is it an issue of quality? content? the program’s relationship to the past? This series of articles will give our readers and contributors an opportunity to address these questions as well as many more issues involving the series.

For the record, I think the attention paid to Mad Men is well deserved. It always strikes me as not only a well written series but one that is extremely well crafted down to the music choices, lighting angles, and small gestures. It is a series that shows its work, the artistry that goes into a really good show. It is a series that captures a period of history and change complexly and with great pathos. But such nuance is not the whole story of Mad Men’s success.

Mad Men has succeeded in carving out its space in the culture by practicing what Don Draper preaches: good advertising. Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter observed that amongst those 1.9 million viewers is a much higher percentage of viewers with incomes over $100,000 than comparable cable dramas. The series has parlayed this into a targeted, strategic marketing campaign. The Mad Men/Banana Republic match may be the most visible partnership, but the show’s marketing efforts are much more complex. Viewers of the first episode were treated to lengthy advertisements from the episode’s sponsor, BMW, featuring a real “Mad Man” discussing the company’s early advertising. The ads beautifully tied together the series’ content, the ads’ product, and its affluent viewers. For a full month, Mad Men prepped these viewers to get excited for the new season. Having once indicated that I ‘liked’ Mad Men on Facebook, I was treated to daily updates letting me know about AMC marathons of previous seasons, on-line programs letting me Mad Men myself or have a job interview for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, mix period-appropriate cocktails, listen to Mad Men radio on Pandora, or access DVD style extras after the first episode ended. The series has clearly committed itself to creating as many opportunities for immersion for its viewers as possible. This marketing approach, and its apparent success – Sunday’s premiere drew over 2.9 million! – focuses on the quality of viewer for advertisers and the quality of these viewers’ interactions with content.

Apparently the group at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce received this memo as season four begins with a recently separated Don Draper who has becoming increasingly impatient and committed to his vision for creative directors and the company. The season begins in turmoil. The new agency has had some success but is still at risk. Don’s house has been taken over by Betty and Henry, and Don is living in a small bachelor apartment. This episode, “Public Relations,” was an excellent balance of melancholy and hope. The storm clouds are overhead, but the episode ends with a wink that with the spark of genius evidenced by Don, Peggy, and the others in previous seasons, success is on the horizon. Whether Matthew Weiner and his team will have their own spark of genius in this new season is yet to be seen. We hope you will join us in discussing this season of Mad Men as we watch to find out.

1. The Supreme Court will consider if the sale of violent video games to children should be outlawed, thus deciding if video games are more like movies or more like pornography. Millions of Boy Scouts await the ruling with great interest. This debate is playing out elsewhere: Rob Fahey says concern in the UK about video game effects has died down in recent years (replaced, of course, by concern over social media effects), while in Australia, gamemakers are frustrated that the highest age rating is 15+, and they feel that without the addition of an 18+ rating, they have to censor their content for adult gamers.

2. paidContent has a striking chart of the decline of music sales, but Glenn Peoples at Billboard says this is similar to a dip in the 1980s and, like then, sales will rise again with innovation. Gordon Smith says it’s the internet, not radio, at fault for music’s decline; We All Make Music considers the challenges musicians have with promoting themselves over the net; and fans debate whether the indie band Grizzly Bear writing an ad for a commercial is selling out or just doing what has to be done.

3. New York Magazine’s Logan Hill observes that the internet is taking music videos in audacious new directions, and Vulture provides a list of 14 music video directors to watch. A number of music videos grabbed attention this fortnight: Christina Aguilera released a Lady Gaga-esque video for “Not Myself Tonight”; Miley Cyrus got dirrty in “Can’t Be Tamed”, and M.I.A. got people talking and even yanked from YouTube with “Born Free”.

4. Mashable showcases a social media stats video that contains some grabbers, like that if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. Given what Facebook has been doing to its privacy settings in recent years (which Matt McKeon puts in a striking image form), I don’t want to live in that country. Tim Jones looks at how deceptive Facebook’s interfaces are, and while Jeff Jarvis says Facebook actually has an opportunity to turn around the privacy outrage by actually listening to it, Ryan Singel calls for the creation of an alternative to Facebook.

5. Christopher Mims says Twitter is the future of news, but it’s looking like a lot of people will go uninformed in the future, then, as a study says 87% of Americans are aware of Twitter, but only 7% use it. Teens in particular say they hate it and the celebrities who use it. 17-year-old Arya Zarifi says in the latter article, “It’s something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something.” Arya, I use Twitter; I don’t feel like it makes me hip or something. However, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being played out on Twitter, now that’s hip. Or something.

6. Apple didn’t come off so well this fortnight. There was the lost iPhone debacle, Apple’s shutdown of the Lala music service, which the AV Club says makes it that much more likely that iTunes “will one day control all the music in the world,” and the Ellen incident. What also got techie keyboards tapping was Steve Jobs’ dismissal of Flash. Dan Rayburn accuses Jobs of being disingenuous, while Christina Warren says it’s not Apple but HTML5 which is dooming Flash, with Scribd’s ditching of Flash for HTML5 as an example.

7. In Hollywood news, Kevin Maher explains Hollywood’s 1980s remake obsession (at least we don’t have to worry about any more Rambos); Matt Zoller Seitz stirred up a lot of dust with his anti-comic book movie position; and studios are ramping up cross-promotional efforts. In indie news, Anthony Kaufman wonders where the under-30 audience for indie cinema is, Michael Cieply looks at the process of rebuilding indie cinema, and Peter Knegt found six cases where indie documentary distribution has gone right, but Michael Moore fears for the future of documentary with a recent federal court ruling. In film criticism is dead news, Pete Hammond says theaters and studios can’t survive without critics.

8. Movie Gallery is shuttering its doors, while Bloomberg’s Tiffany Kary says it appears bond holders expect Blockbuster will go that way too, but one man thinks he can save Blockbuster. Redbox rentals are shooting up, and Chuck Tryon responds to a Redbox publicity piece about the  labor involved in keep Redboxes running.

9. Megan McArdle considers the theory that file-sharing is killing the entertainment industry, while Nate Anderson reports on a study that says file-sharers are the industry’s biggest customers and also points to India as the most consumer-friendly copyright country. The US has dropped further down on that list with the FCC ruling that lets the MPAA enforce the blockage of copying capabilities for first-run video-on-demand movies. Cory Doctorow says this is a ridiculous decision that opens to door for corporate control over all of our electronic devices in the future; David Poland is not so outraged.

10. The best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: FCC Internet Control; Lost Ending; TV Future; CBS & CNN; Soap Lessons; Dramas Dominate; Economist Series; MSNBC Following FNC Lesson; FlowTV Conference; Gender Imbalance; Sets Statistics; Reclaiming the Multi-Cam; Sports on Cable.

What exactly does all of this mean?  Essentially, NBCU’s emphasis on selling ISM deals focuses on delivering three potential benefits to clients.  First, by investing in a package, the client can choose from among NBCU’s television holdings (ranging from broadcast network NBC to cable channels USA, Bravo, Syfy, and more) as locations for their ads.  Second, the conglom is offering up their on-air talent as shills, so that the advertiser can produce an ad featuring Biggest Loser‘s Alison Sweeney or Community‘s Ken Jeong.  Finally, as part of this all-inclusive package, advertisers have an option to sponsor additional materials, including sweepstakes partnered with the company.

As the videos embedded above suggest, one such ISM deployed in both 2009 and 2010 was a partnership made with Turbo Tax leading up to Tax Day.  In addition to those ads featuring NBC stars, the company also sponsored ads throughout NBCU’s holdings, including on The Weather Channel, Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker, USA’s Psych, and NBC’s Heroes and Tonight Show.  One score even featured a “live” advertisement on Jimmy Fallon.  All of these ads referred to the programs during (or channels on) which they aired–starting with some variation of, “So, you’re watching The Weather Channel…did you know…”

It’s an interesting project, and one clearly intended to bolster NBCU’s profile, considering its fourth-place standing among other broadcast networks in terms of viewership.  By offering additional benefits that may not be possible from other networks (none of which have as large and diverse a system of cable holdings), the conglom clearly hopes to offset its poor performances with audiences.  Moreover, in addition to the large-scale sweep of the Turbo Tax example, NBCU also offers more targeted ISMs to advertisers looking to draw female audiences, environmentally-conscious audiences (with the Green is Universal campaign), and health-conscious audiences.

But will it work?  Some outlets rightly critique the 2010 Turbo Tax ads as rather lame (they’re not particularly novel or funny)–but also note that the presence of on-air talent within the ad caused them to stop fast-forwarding, which is really a win in and of itself.  There seems to be the sense that it’s certainly worth a shot, and NBCU has nothing to lose.  By packaging all of their holdings together, they do offer an enticing option unavailable from a lot of their competitors–one advertiser can put together a broad campaign pretty quickly and simply.  And the fact that they’re offering the use of their own stars provides added value for the customer without much added expense for NBCU.

Is this the wave of the future?  Who knows?  But it’s definitely an interesting development in NBCU’s attempts to offset poor performance with strategies designed to draw and keep advertisers.