MTV to Start Playing Music Videos

Curiously enough, they didn't publicize it themselves. I had to find *gasp* other media to tell the story!

Anyway, it was bound to happen--you can only exhaust reality shows for so long before going back to basics. The Real World: Brooklyn is old-school, early '90s edition, Unplugged will again be on the airwaves and Vh1 is bringing back Behind the Music. Now if only they can resurrect Pop Up Video...I'm telling you, it'll be gold. Gold!

The videos are early morning--starting very early, but meant to put a small dent in the GMAs of the world, perfect to wake up to or watch while you get dressed. With a 3 am start time, it's a new benchmark of insomnia.

What's more interesting is how this new video block will be exempt from ratings. Ratings for music videos as a whole are silly; it's the aggregate or the popularity of a given video/artist that's more important, similarly to this point made by Brian Stetler regarding cable news numbers. MTV plans to use the block now as an experiment in terms of advertising and marketing, possibly having one or few advertisers sponsor the whole thing, like what Hulu and other online video portals do. They'll also integrate the videos and Unplugged segments more, hoping for a greater awareness of the product (music). I hope they continue to show videos while credits run, though I can see them phasing this out now that they'll actually be able to play the whole thing.

And be on the lookout for Asher Roth. He's poised to be the Big Thing this year: a mix of Eminem and Mickey Avalon with the cheekiness of Travis McCoy.

Brand Integration, 30 Rock, and the "Responsible" Point of View

I tend to keep a few magazines piled up on my desk at work—ones that feature stories I want to read, but aren’t so pressing that I take them home. I had about four that were there for months, and finally decided, since they were at that point where no one else would want them either, to take them home.

I was looking through the newest one, a New York with David Patterson on the cover, dating from October that I had plucked to read a Times story, when I came across a hidden treasure: “What Tina Fey Would do for a SoyJoy”, written by a fave of mine, Emily Nussbaum. It’s about brand integration in television shows, and specifically discusses 30 Rock and MadTV, two shows that have been on my mind recently.

Television is expensive to produce, and ratings are going down, down, down. So what are TV execs to do to make money? Introduce brands inside the programming. This has gone on for some time—dating back to the early days of TV—and it’s been controversial for nearly all that time, too. But advertising is hot property (just look at shows about advertising, Mad Men and the forthcoming Trust Me), and stories about ads also enable the producers to use real products to tell those stories.

Websites and magazine features connect viewers with the brands their favorite characters wear, so why not just have the characters say what they’re wearing? But that’s hard to do well. A big deal was made a few years ago when Alias and Ford struck a deal requiring the characters to constantly call attention to the vehicle. It made a mockery of the program, taking everyone out of the action; it was so obviously an ad that had an expensive budget and story tied to it that the idea of a television show seemed besides the point.

30 Rock is a case study here; Nussbaum frames the show as the tension between art and commerce, exemplified by Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy. This is also where the set up for many of the jokes come from, all meant to give double the laughs since they’re satirizing many things at once:

In the show’s fifth episode, Donaghy talks with Lemon about integrating brands. “I’m sorry, you’re saying you want us to use the show to sell stuff?” Liz asks.

JACK: Look, I know how this sounds.

LIZ: No, come on, Jack. We’re not doing that. We’re not compromising the integrity of the show to sell—

PETE: Wow. This is Diet Snapple?

LIZ: I know, it tastes just like regular Snapple, doesn’t it?

30 Rock has done this a few times, notably with Verizon. But while it’s a wink-wink to the audience and the advertisers, it still leaves a somewhat queasy aftertaste—yeah, you’re shilling, you’re just being tongue-in-cheek about it. Fey has said that she wants to point it out to her audience always, but as the article makes clear, that isn’t always possible, and in fact, one brand prominently displayed was widely believed to be a fake: SoyJoy. The integration didn’t really work, since no one actually realized it was a brand, and the brand itself didn’t get the boost it was looking for, since it wasn’t placed within the series as they wanted it. They were an afterthought, squeezed into the story for the sake of commerce. Not always the best way to get a brand mention.

But these kinds of jokes get old quickly, as Joss Whedon points out: “You can’t do it again and be cute, because then it’s a different type of shilling. Eventually you realize the reason they’re making a joke is because there’s something abhorrent going on.”

I don’t mind brand integration it as long as it works within the story. I am a story purist. It’s all about verisimilitude. The problem is, whether or not a brand is used in storytelling it tends to be noticed if it’s prominent enough in the scene. I’ve seen Seinfeld episodes where Jerry has a box of generic corn flakes on his counter, and that looks just as weird as seeing Sprite cans in front of a bunch of writers on 30 Rock, one because the absence of a recognizable brand is bizarre, the other because it’s so obvious that it’s product placement. It made perfect sense for Dwight to temp at Staples, for Don Draper to wax eloquent on Kodak cameras, for Lorelai Gilmore to express shock when Christopher bought a Volvo; all of these times I was fully following the story, with no thought about companies buying airtime and the deals that were exchanged. If it makes sense for a character to have a Mac, then no one will wonder how much money it cost for Apple to have the computer in the scene.

Interstitials, extras—things like webisodes, blog posts, and other interactive elements that make up the rest of a television show’s official site—have also become a battleground. Actors often aren’t paid extra for them, which of course causes problems. It can also cause confusion deciphering the actor from the character. Most NBC shows have a “Chime In” promo that airs right before the cold open; this is to prompt viewers to stick around for the show and to generate excitement. For The Office promo, Jenna Fischer taps the microphone three times, mimics the “ba ba ba” of the NBC jingle in a fun, flirty way, and John Krasinski, who is standing beside her adoringly, responds, “Boy, you’re cute.” How sweet. Except they are identified by their real names—“Chime in with John & Jenna” appears onscreen—not as Jim and Pam, who would actually do an exchange like this. John and Jenna aren’t dating; it is their characters who are in love with each other, not the actors themselves. It’s not cute, or endearing; this forced element (no matter how natural it appears onscreen) takes the audience out of the show. If they shill for NBC, they should do it as themselves; if it’s a funny bit in-character, then they should be identified as being in character. Of course, it’s Joss Whedon (interviewed in this article on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), who sums it up: “We invest in the reality of the show! And this is one of the ways they’re picking apart the idea of the narrative, keeping you from knowing if it’s a show or not…. They want to take the story apart so they can stuff it with as much revenue as they can. And ultimately what you get is a zombie, a stuffed thing—a non-show.”

Exactly. I understand a network and a show has to make money. And webisodes and blogs and podcasts can be fun—as long as they don’t mess with the core product.

So what about the Responsibility Project?

Liberty Mutual runs ads every week in the New York Times magazine, framing "The Ethicist" column, posing a scenario and offering several ways of solving it, asking which is “the responsible point of view”. Liberty Mutual’s campaign is the Responsibility Project, a series of films that pose thorny situations and the choices the characters face. Liberty Mutual also struck a deal with NBC as part of the Responsibility Project to offer television that offered “responsible viewpoints” and to help develop scripts that featured this mindset.

Liberty Mutual is an insurance company, and they, like Dove, are marketing themselves based on a feel-good principle. Having television that explored ethical viewpoints could be interesting, if the show doesn’t get preachy and bogged down by company objectives. But what exactly is the responsible point of view? Isn’t the point to explore the options, that sometimes what one person thinks is right is completely wrong and immoral for another? Mandating a mindset doesn’t work; the Family Friendly Programming Forum tried to make family-friendly programs, working on the pilot of several shows, most notably Gilmore Girls. Most shows that are labeled family-friendly tend to be anything but—The Secret Life of the American Teenager, 7^th Heaven—even Gilmore Girls, especially as the show continued, made a mockery out of marriage and fidelity, two important values when discussing family. Too many people are leery of corporations watching and controlling our every move; even when they try to do good (and many do), it’s hard to shake the notion of ulterior motives (money money money).

Pretty much everyone interviewed for the New York article is a 30 Rock fan. I am not. I’ve seen maybe about half a dozen episodes, a few from this season and last. I do not find the show funny, though I concede I haven’t seen many of the “best” episodes, as I’ve understood them to be. According to Nussbaum, “What makes the show funny, and timely, and terrifying, is that on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon always loses.”

Which is exactly my problem.

Liz Lemon (a terrible, self-defeating name…which is probably the purpose) is supposed to be the Neurotic Single Woman. She’s supposed to follow in that long line of 30ish single women who worry about their singleness—Mary Tyler Moore, Ally McBeal, Carrie Bradshaw. She babbles, she’s awkward, she’s often the sanest one amidst the crazies. Not only does Liz never win, even the smallest battles, but she’s constantly made a fool; no one at her job respects her. They walk all over her, but she has to corral her castmates together to make sure they can function, while she can barely function herself. Tina Fey has said that Liz Lemon is her single alter-ego, that if she didn’t meet and marry her husband she would be just as pathetic as Liz Lemon. For what bugs me most of all is that Liz Lemon is pathetic. She is fake-perky, always trying to hide those tears of shame and embarrassment by starting another ill-advised endeavor, failing at that, and then doing something shameful to get over her feelings. She never has any pride. She doesn’t stand up for herself. She’s not funny, she’s sad.

I welcome a real discussion on 30 Rock, why people think it’s funny, why Liz Lemon is the complete opposite of how I characterized her. As I’ve said, I haven’t seen enough episodes (nor have the notes), to write a real review of her character, why I don’t find her as appealing as she should be. I enjoyed her immensely on Saturday Night Live, but I find her strikingly unfunny—and sometimes insulting—on 30 Rock.

The Merchants of Cool

In doing some “research” for my Britney Spears entry, I came across this Gawker piece, which reviewed “For the Record”. The reviewer mentioned he recently watched Frontline’s documentary on the merchants of cool, and compared the two. I came to Frontline today to watch a documentary on the US Navy I caught the end of several months ago, and when I couldn’t find it, watched “The Merchants of Cool” instead, which aired in 2001. Whoa, nostalgia!!!

One of the first people interviewed is Malcolm Gladwell (with a very short haircut), whose essay in the New Yorker on coolhunters formed the basis of the documentary. (I first discovered this concept when I read The Tipping Point, which lifts a chapter from his article).

The special reminded me very much of my “Media & Persuasion” class in college, and no wonder—one of the experts interviewed wrote a book that was a text in class (which I thought was slightly outdated and also-ran). Obviously many of the statistics are outdated and the documentary is very much a capsule of a specific moment in time, but many of its overarching themes are still present in society today, if in a different context and format.

TRL is the big thing, and there’s a lot of discussion around rap-rock music, Limp Bizkit and the Insane Clown Posse (in fact, it was that clip that made me feel déjà vu, as there’s a chance I’ve seen this documentary at some point in the last seven years.)

Here, the internet is shiny and new! Media fragmentation! AOL and Time Warner are still buddies, and Viacom rules the universe (which might still be true). There’s no talk of how the internet is killing whole industries, no mention of Napster...iPods haven’t been invented yet and the Macs used by some of the marketing companies (using what some consider unethical practices) are the old-time blocky ones. Real children’s and tween’s programming is given lipservice in the form of MTV, but there’s no acknowledgment of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel’s grip on the youngest generation of Americans. Social networks are still years away. TRL is the epitome of cool.

But what I found most fascinating, in this clip (Chapter 3, The MTV Machine--no embed capabilities), was the synergy between advertising, marketing, and real programming, how MTV used a launch party for Sprite.com as content for one of their brand new shows at the time, Direct Effects (which aired after TRL for a few years).

Although the documentary itself cursory mentions Eminem, he’s a focus in a lot of extended interviews, from Jimmy Iovine to Brian Graden to Dave Sirulnick. There’s a lot of discussion focused on music, marketing, and the intersection of the two; a lot on history as well. It’s interesting to look at this piece—while still relevant—as also a unique moment in time, before the internet overtook practically everything, when the economy was good and everything was flush, when even the angry music wasn’t depressing.

As for Eminem—an artist who’s gone largely out of the spotlight the last few years—even MTV was a bit naïve when it came to promoting him:

[D]o you worry about fanning this flame?

Yes. At MTV, we are absolutely in a constant internal discussion about our role in the media. One thing that is true now that wasn't true 10 years ago is that 10 years ago, we might have been the only proprietor of a certain kind of art or a certain kind of product. Now, in this particular age, there are 20 channels playing music videos on television. There are endless channels programming for a young audience. On the computer you can get access to absolutely anything musical and otherwise. I worry less about what we're perpetrating and more about just finding the right line for ourselves. And it's a very fluid discussion; what is true today may not be true six months from now.

And as MTV, I don't feel we can ever stop having the discussion. There's a tendency to say, "Well, we found our line. Let's move on." But you can't do that, because culture is always shifting. It is a non-stop discussion, because we take the responsibility very seriously to not put dangerous things out there. At the same time, the reason the audience trusts us in the first place is because we don't censor. We present their art in the most honest way. . . . We won't cross violence lines. We won't cross certain language lines. But otherwise, we will let the art express itself as purely as possible.

Well, let's take an artist like Eminem. He may be the most popular and most controversial figure at the moment. You not only went with his videos--but you really gave him a platform. Tell me about the internal decision there. Why did you decide to go that way?

Around Eminem, what you have to remember is that his second album had a different tenor than his first album. There is definitely a through line, and you can see the progression. When we decided and planned. . . we had not heard the second album in its entirety. What we had was a very sanitized, friendly, saturated video that was very much targeted right at a young consumer, and that video was perfectly innocent. It passed all of our standards in terms of violence and language. And away we go.

It's only after we had a chance to really listen to the album and we had a chance to sit down with lots of other groups . . . that we began to have second thoughts in pulling back the promotion. And we did, in fact, pull a lot of the promotion back. And we decided we don't want to censor the artist. The video's going to play on the channel if the audience chooses to have it played on "Total Request Live." But we did feel a responsibility to express the other side of the controversy. So we did this half-hour special on hate lyrics. I think it's infinitely better for us as MTV to get out both sides. . . . That's a better role for MTV to have than to simply say, "Let's not show this and let's not talk about it," because that's disingenuous.

Is it fair to say that you may not have done the two-week thing had you known the full album?

Yes. Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't know that. That would sound like a cop-out if I just said we wouldn't of, but certainly the picture became clearer over the ensuing weeks. And like I said, since the discussion is fluid at MTV, we weren't afraid to say, "You know what? Let's pull back on promotion, and let's tell the other side of this story."

You have wonderful documentaries about the issues that are raised by the rest of your programming. You don't see yourselves as moral guardians. You can't act in that role.

I would say that MTV works on two levels. We see ourselves as champion of artists. And whether we like it or not, the themes that artists sometimes choose to embrace reflect sometimes anger, sometimes views that we would never agree with. For the most part, we aren't going to censor the artist, beyond standard television network standards. As MTV, we do believe that we have some broader role in educating consumers, in getting behind social campaigns like our campaign to vote, our campaign to stop violence. So we tried to make both coexist on the channel. Artists can express themselves, but so can we.

And doesn't this sound interesting?

And at about the same time, Roland Joffé came in and pitched the show "Undressed." And his pitch was really interesting, because he is fascinated by these small conversational moments that ultimately really say volumes about a relationship. His pitch was that you don't get honest until you get home at night and you start to get in bed. Once you . . . get undressed--which was his metaphor--that's when you start to get real.

I saw only a few eps, and was kind of squicked out but perversely fascinated--it was very much soft-core porn, just really awkward and not terribly realistic, though it was porporting to be.

Many of the extended interviews are pretty interesting, even just for skimming purposes. I recommend Dave Sirulnick on MTV, TRL, and how they influence the culture; Jimmy Iovine for the historical background with teenagers and music, and how MTV fits into that; Brian Graden for MTV as a business and many of their strategies; Robert McChesney on the state of the media and music landscape in 2001; and Todd Cunningham for how MTV conducts market research.

P.S. A guy named Barack directed “The Merchants of Cool.” Ha!