In just the past few weeks, I have seen the word “scientific” attached to the subject “entertainment”.
If “scientific” is the way we do things, then I dread to think how my doctor works, or how they get the space shuttle up to the orbiting station.
It seems to be a virus going round, as I have just seen “scientific” attached to radio station clocks and formats.
I think I know where all this is coming from. Competition is steep. We have a plethora of radio stations and more on the way. We have some 60 television channels available and more coming. There are kids who are web casting “radio stations” from their home PC’s and drawing in a private audience of their friends.
So let’s look at what is really happening, and why all of sudden radio and TV are “scientific”?
The station owners are sweating a little. They want 20 percent growth a year, and if they are getting it now, they know that it won’t last long. So they put the screws on the financial manager, and tell him to check that all decisions made are wise and “in the interest of the shareholders”.
In turn, the financial manager (affectionately known to all as the bean counter), demands situation analyses, strategy reports, audience forecasts and so on from all the advert sales and programming people.
What do they do? Well first of all they cannot really deliver what the bean counter wants, and more than anything else, they want him off their backs. So they give him lots of “forecasts and analyses” that look really impressive – after all, they are creative people. He asks how they got all this data, so they tell him that he must not worry, it’s all quite scientific.
I found a cute little mathematical formula for calculating whether a creative work is financially worthwhile. It’s in Richard Caves’ book on the creative industries ands says that:
max u = u (wvc, (1-w) ve 0 = w = 1
Well that solves it all – except that there are so many variables in this formula, you may as well go back to your instinct – it’s quicker.
Do you know that if you want to calculate the churn you will experience in pay-TV subscribers, you just have to use this formula?
Wow, isn’t nature wonderful?
I have sat with audience researchers and we went through four years of ratings for TV soaps, and mathematically aligned fluctuations to the seasons, public events, consumer confidence statistics and to the subject matter of the sub plots, and we came up with a fascinating formula, variations of which will predict the audience for a soap opera.
The above formula is one of those used in chaos mathematics. We didn’t actually use it, as we don’t actually understand it, but it’s wonderful for showing the bean counter to get him off your back.
The one person who put it best is professor Susan Tyler Eastman, the only person to write a really good book on media programming. She said, “The networks and other program suppliers do not sponsor much theoretical research, although applied research (ratings) is a must. Ideas are tested, and pilots are tested, but programming seems to remain one big gamble where instinct is more important than science.”
Don’t tell the bean counter or the owner.
Howard Thomas is a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.