Mad Men audiences are active

http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/07/31/time-skipping-ads-cable/

Mad Men: Season 5 Ep 11 - 'The Other Woman' - Key Scenes

Examples of how to make and justify key points for TV audience appeal.

Mad Men: The Evolution of Peggy Olsen

Applying Audience Theory to 'Mad Men'

Applying Theory: Guidance 

• Developing your ability to apply theory in responses to exam questions is a key skill that needs to be developed in preparation for the exam. 
• Below are sample paragraphs of A and D grade responses to a Television/Audience question from a previous paper. 
• These highlight the contrasts in content, detail and discussion that is required to get the highest grade possible. 
• Strengthening your exam skills and technique to create better responses is not difficult if you can recognise your weaknesses and change your approach to answering questions from a more critical perspective rather than largely descriptive. 

(Section B)
Explore the different ways in which your chosen texts attract their audiences. 

'D' grade response

My second text is Mad Men, this show is aired on a cable channel AMC in America. So it is not as mainstream as programmes shown on BBC or ITV channels and therefore more niche in target audience. The target audience is males and females but may be tipped slightly more aimed at males but they didn't want to eliminate the female population, people in their late 20s to a much older generation due to the complex script involved. Mad Men is a long running narrative that invests in characters so will attract viewers that are less passive and will invest more time and thought into the series. There are scenes of promiscuity in the text I have looked at that shows the audience they want to attract is an adult audience and also implies that it is a male audience they are targeting the show at also. The series is set in the 1960s so will attract predominantly viewers that understand this decade, it uses many conventions like colour connotations and mise-en-scene to show the genre and era of this show.

Comments

Lacks detail - has a tendency to generalise - lacks confident use of audience terminology - does not relate a scene in the text to how an audience will be attracted

'A' grade response

In 'The Other Woman' episode of Mad Men Season 5, Don and his male team members are trying to strike a big deal with Jaguar. Herb, a Jaguar boss, explains to Pete how he would like to spend a night with Joan- a beautiful redhead, who has the perfect curvy figure of the 1960's.  A younger audience – 16-25 – may find the setting and situation lacks entertainment in terms of the Uses & Gratifications theory. They may find the topic only provides them with information about the sexual politics of the 1960's workplace. As the narrative develops and we see Joan basically prostitute herself to gain a 5% stake in the business it may also fail to relate to their own interests, therefore it would provide no gratification and have no use for them as viewers or their peers. In this case no social interaction would take place in discussion with the issues that occur in the episode. A younger audience would be more used to fast paced editing and simple narratives concerning gossip and relationships, such as TOWIE or Made In Chelsea, as they can personally identify with such issues or aspire to their ideals.  It is therefore clear that the target audience for Mad Men is a middle class male demographic. The highbrow nature of the show lends itself to a middle class audience, as it is often reviewed in newspapers like 'The Guardian’. 

Comments

Includes detail - does not generalise - uses appropriate audience theory/terminology - relates theory directly to the text - is confident

Strong Exam Responses:

• Include detail 
• Don't generalise 
• Use Media language 
• Apply appropriate theory 
• Are written with confidence 
• See the interaction between text and audience as a complex relationship

'Basket of Kisses' - for discussion on Mad Men

Click here to visit site/forum

Mad Men: Audience

If you find yourself struggling to understand the appeal and success of 'Mad Men' it is worth reading the quote below from The Women of ‘Mad Men’: An Essay, on the Cultural Learnings site.

"After watching the series, young viewers with no recollection of the 1960s will have a greater understanding of the conditions women faced during this period, and this historical account of women’s rights in America is a valuable discourse in understanding these ideas. Mad Men is not just a series about its titular ad executives, but rather a series about the society of an earlier era in which women play a prominent if marginal role; it is this realistic portrayal which brings to light important barriers facing women both then and now, even without developing into the pinnacle of a feminist text."

Read more here.

Mad Men intro and context

Mad men context from christimothy12

Uses & Gratifications in action

Here are a few forum/blog comments on our chosen texts. They indicate how fans respond to texts in different ways to different texts and highlight how researching such sites can provide valuable source material to include/quote in your exam responses.

Such research doesn't take long and blogging others comments allows for solid arguments and debates that can help you apply theory in more varied ways.  

Source: Lostpedia forum

Source: Guardian Mad Men Blog

Source: Independent blog

'Mad Men' - Production Company: AMC (other) Shows + Influence/Competition

'Mad Men': Production Company = AMC  (other successful shows/series)

Other AMC series:

The Walking Dead is an American horror drama television series developed by Frank Darabont. It is based on the comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. The series stars Andrew Lincoln as sheriff's deputy. Rick Grimes, who awakens from a coma to find a post-apocalyptic world dominated by flesh-eating "walkers", resembling zombies. He sets out to find his family and encounters many other survivors along the way. The eponymous title of the series refers to the survivors, and not the zombies.

The Walking Dead premiered on October 31, 2010, on the cable television channel AMC in the United States. It premiered internationally during the first week of November 2010 on Fox International Channels. Based on its reception, AMC renewed the series for a second season of 13 episodes, which premiered on October 16, 2011. Two episodes into the second season, AMC announced that the show would return for a third season of 16 episodes, which began airing on October 14, 2012. On December 21, 2012, AMC renewed The Walking Dead for a fourth season of 16 episodes.

The series has been well received and has received many award nominations including ones for the Writers Guild of America Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series (Drama). The series has also attained strong Nielsen ratings, surpassing various records for a cable series, including receiving 12.4 million viewers for its season three finale to become the most-watched drama series telecast in basic cable history.

Competition: Comparison/Contrast

The influence of Mad Men upon rival TV productions: 

Suits is a USA Network television drama series created by Aaron Korsh, starring Patrick J. Adams as Michael "Mike" Ross and Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter. The series, set at the fictional law firm Pearson/Hardman in New York City, follows Ross after he stumbles into a job interview with Specter, who is searching for an associate.

Mad Men - The orange couch - An active audiences response.

The Camera & Mad Men

The success of AMC

MS4 -Text, Industry & Audience: Television

Audiences: Television

What Mad Men Owes to Lost

Mad Men’s debt to The Sopranos is obvious — besides its compartmentalized, alienated characters and spooky dream sequences, the AMC drama is the brainchild of former Sopranos writer-producer Matthew Weiner. But watching the show’s two-hour season-six premiere (which airs April 7), one wonders if Mad Men owes just as much to Lost. The episode evokes the sci-fi drama’s setting, themes, and atmosphere and is full of the kind-of-sorta-clues and maybe-premonitions that made Lost the first show to take advantage of Internet-age obsessiveness.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is on a client-paid vacation in Hawaii, gathering impressions for an ad campaign for a resort. He’s cut off from the show’s other characters, smoking pot and feasting on roast pig; between the forlorn palm fronds, crashing waves, and meditative close-ups of our hero lost in thought, there’d be a sense of purgatorial isolation even if he weren’t reading Dante’sInferno. The book seems like a perverse choice for a beach read until you get to the end of this clever, at times tricky season opener. In Lost-like style, it strategically withholds key information that would help us make immediate sense of Don’s behavior, which by turns suggests a prisoner, a sleepwalker, and a ghost.

What does it all mean? Where is it all headed? We’ll be asking ourselves these questions throughout Mad Men’s sixth season, and we have Lost to thank for normalizing this level of attention. True, older shows like The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files prompted clue hunts. But after J. J. Abrams’s Lost debuted in 2004 — coinciding with the birth of social media—fan scrutiny underwent a mutation worthy of the series itself. Each new episode was custom-tooled to prompt post-broadcast debates. What was in the hatch? Who were the Others? Were the characters in hell, or perhaps purgatory? Were the echoes of the Bible, Lord of the Flies, and, yes, Paradise Lost meaningful or the writers’ prankish way of sending overthinkers down lit-crit rabbit holes?

As went Lost, so goes Mad Men. If you followed both shows simultaneously when their runs overlapped (2007 to 2010), you may have experienced déjà vu. Fan-driven microscrutiny of every line, reference, and prop on Mad Men was Lost-like, and the show did everything it could to stoke that frenzy. Weiner has even adopted an Abrams-esque anti-spoiler policy, one that bizarrely treats a realistic adult drama as if it were a superhero movie whose bad guy would be revealed at Comic-Con. The letter that accompanied the season-six premiere screener is a meta-masterpiece of mystery creation; Weiner’s request that critics not reveal particular details — such as the year the season begins, the status of Don and Megan’s (Jessica Paré) relationship, and “whether the agency has expanded to an additional floor” — made me think, Few of these questions seem particularly ­important — but might they prove important later? Or is he asking me to avoid these things so I won’t fixate on other, more spoiler-y things? Writers for Lost frequented chat rooms and blog comments sections, monitoring reactions to manage expectations and outwit plot-guessers. If they and Weiner ever got together — and who’s to say they aren’t playing poker at this very moment? — they’d have plenty to laugh about.

For example, during the Hawaii sequence, Don goes drinking at a hotel bar. He meets a Vietnam-bound, soon-to-be-married soldier, agrees to play “father-in-law” and give away the bride during a wedding the next day, then accidentally swaps lighters with him. Don doesn’t realize until later that he has the soldier’s Zippo; he tries to get rid of it, but it keeps coming back like a bad penny. Is the swap a commentary on Don’s secret history as a deserter who assumed a dead soldier’s identity in Korea? Is it a harbinger of future plotlines?

Lane Pryce’s (Jared Harris) suicide was foreshadowed here and there last season; just one episode into season six, though, and we’re already up to our necks in death imagery. The premiere opens with a shot staring at the ceiling from the perspective of a man having a heart attack. Don pitches an ad for the resort that seems to imply a suicide — an image of footprints vanishing into the ocean — and everybody senses its morbidity but him. There’s a shot of Megan closing his eyes with her hand, as you would to a person who died. Will this be the season in which Don’s secret life is exposed, his world of manufactured signs and symbols collapses, and he plunges into despair, echoing the falling man in the show’s opening credits? We might or might not learn the answers to those questions, or to others posed by season six; and, this being Mad Men, we’ll be all right with not knowing.

Which brings us to the most important (albeit unintentional) legacy of Lost: Its ending was so profoundly unsatisfying that it prompted viewers to soul-search about why, exactly, they watch television, and whether any show, no matter how carefully constructed, can ever give fans the cathartic closure they want. Mad Men is often about the unsatisfying, unknowable, uncontrollable nature of both life and storytelling — about the impossibility of life taking on the neat contours of fiction, no matter how many faintly literary allusions and how much foreshadowing it may contain. As D. H. Lawrence wrote in Sons and Lovers,“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as if it was slurred over.” Lost didn’t mean to line up art with life for us, but it did, and Weiner should be grateful, because it made it easier to sell one of Mad Men’s most effective and consistent tropes: the notion that it’s all a big mystery, and at the very end of it, you get heartbreak, and then somebody closes your eyes.

This review originally appeared in the April 8 issue of New York magazine.

Source: vulture.com/2013

Making Sense of Audience Theories

Researchers investigating the effect of media on audiences have considered the audience in two distinct ways.

(A)       Passive Audiences

The earliest idea was that a mass audience is passive and inactive. The members of the audience are seen as couch potatoes just sitting there consuming media texts – particularly commercial television programmes. It was thought that this did not require the active use of the brain. The audience accepts and believes all messages in any media text that they receive. This is the passive audience model.

The Hypodermic Model

In this model the media is seen as powerful and able to inject ideas into an audience who are seen as weak and passive.

It was thought that a mass audience could be influenced by the same message. This appeared to be the case in Nazi Germany in the 1930s leading up to WWII. Powerful German films such as Triumph of the Will seemed to use propaganda methods to ‘inject’ ideas promoting the Nazi cause into the German audience. That is why this theory is known as the Hypodermic model.

It suggests that a media text can ‘inject’ ideas, values and attitudes into a passive audience who might then act upon them. This theory also suggests that a media text has only one message which the audience must pick up.

(B)        Active Audiences

This newer model sees the audience not as couch potatoes, but as individuals who are active and interact with the communication process and use media texts for their own purposes. We behave differently because we are different people from different backgrounds with many different attitudes, values, experiences and ideas.

This is the active audience model, and is now generally considered to be a better and more realistic way to talk about audiences.

Uses and Gratifications Model

This model stems from the idea that audiences are a complex mixture of individuals who select media texts that best suits their needs – this goes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The users and gratifications model suggests that media audiences are active and make active decisions about what they consume in relation to their social and cultural setting and their needs.

This was summed up by theorists Blumier and Katz in 1974;
‘Media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (meaning it satisfies needs) related to the satisfaction of social and psychological needs’.

Put simply this means that audiences choose to watch programmes that make them feel good (gratifications) e.g. soaps and sitcoms, or that give them information that they can use (uses) e.g. news or information about new products or the world about them.

Blumier and Katz (1975) went into greater detail and identified four main uses:

Surveillance – our need to know what is going on in the world. This relates to Maslow’s need for security. By keeping up to date with news about local and international events we feel we have the knowledge to avoid or deal with dangers.

Personal relationships – our need for to interact with other people. This is provided by forming virtual relationships with characters in soaps, films and all kinds of drama, and other programmes and other media texts.

Personal identity – our need to define our identity and sense of self. Part of our sense of self is informed by making judgments about all sorts of people and things. This is also true of judgments we make about TV and film characters, and celebrities. Our choice of music, the shows we watch, the stars we like can be an expression of our identities. One aspect of this type of gratification is known as value reinforcement. This is where we choose television programmes or newspapers that have similar beliefs to those we hold.

Diversion – the need for escape, entertainment and relaxation. All types of television programmes can be ‘used’ to wind down and offer diversion, as well as satisfying some of the other needs at the same time.

Mad Men: Very Useful Analysis (Audience Response)

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Mad Men (Industry/Audience)

Are the Mad Men Barbies a merchandising opportunity too far?

Does the Mattel deal compromise the show's iconic status?

Oh Mad Men, what have you gone and done now? Just as the programme had firmly established itself as a work of integrity, artistic greatness and perfection, someone behind the scenes has sold out. Licensing rights to Don and Betty Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway have been acquired by Mattel, the people who make Barbie, with Mad Men dolls due go on sale in the US this summer, to coincide with the fourth series in the US.

Mad Men fans will try to persuade themselves – as I am trying to do, desperately and unsuccessfully – that this news is not as bad as it seems. The dolls are to be designed for "adult collectors" rather than children. But they will still be sold – for $74.95 a pop – under the title "the Barbie fashion model collection."

The blood runs cold. This is a terrible, compromising thing for the Mad Men team to have done. Mad Men – encompassing the characters of Don, Betty and Joan in particular – is a superb brand: super-cool, uncompromising, ironic and iconic. How on earth is it going to sustain its cult appeal if it resorts to the merchandising route?

Merchandising is the curse of any televisual brand. It needs to be seen to emerge organically – remember when fashion shoots were all in the style of Life on Mars and suddenly everyone wanted a beaten up 1970s leather jacket? – it can't just be licensed and marketed. And in any case, dolls are surely one of the worst products on offer; reminiscent of Thunderbirds or the Spice Girls at their most insane commercial heights. What next? A chaste Betty lingerie diffusion range? A set of Peggy notebooks and pens? A Salvatore limited edition closet designed by Philippe Starck?

Mad Men Barbies make the show look like Dallas or Dynasty where it's all about caricatures. But Mad Men is not supposed to have that kind of legacy; it's so much more subtle. Someone please just make all this merchandising go away – at least before they think up a JR-style "Who drank my martini?" Don Draper T-shirt.

Viv Groskop Wednesday 10 March 2010

The Guardian

Exam Response Content (Television)

B3. How do your chosen texts attract their audiences?

It is likely that candidates will need to begin by explaining (defining) the target audience for the text/s. Candidates may refer to some of the following points in their answer, depending on the media industry selected:

• content: form (TV, Film, Magazine etc.) and structure 

• content: representations, characters 

• mode of address (Language used, stylistics: these will be appropriate for differing audiences) 

• placement/scheduling (Channel, production company, viewing time/s)

Some references may be made to theories such as the uses and gratifications theory and to ways in which audiences are attracted to texts depending on the cultural positioning.

Answering the audience question/s for Mad Men