Archive for the ‘Framing Narrative’ Category
Bad Commercials: How to Damage the Narrative.
We all see commercials on television every day. Someone thinks up these commercials, writes scripts for the commercials, casts actors in the commercials and shoots the commercials. Which means someone is trying to frame the narrative in a constructive, preferably positive, way.
But what happens when you get a bad commercial, one that not only fails to frame the narrative in the expected way, but actually brings up a terrible reaction?
I’m not the only writer who’s thought of this issue; there are blogs and blogs of information about bad commercials out there. Here are just two:
http://www.screenjunkies.com/tvnews/12-more-insanely-bad-tv-commercials
http://www.uglydoggy.com/2009/01/bad-commercials-from-big-brands.html
There’s even a Web site posting that claims even bad commercials, those which you can only describe as “cringe-worthy,” are good for you:
http://culturepopped.blogspot.com/2009/03/bad-commercials-are-good-for-you.html
My contention is far more humble. I have watched much live television lately (Milwaukee Brewers baseball games, mostly) and cannot fast-forward through commercials, so have been forced to deal with three horrible commercials. I am uncertain how to put up video links, so I will describe the commercials instead — if I later get video links, I will be happy to update this post.
The first, and worst, commercial I’ve seen during the Brewers telecasts is one for Motorola Droid phones. There’s this thirtyish nebbish, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, rather frazzled man who’s still at work but is about to take a break. He looks at his Droid phone, which has Blockbuster pre-loaded as an application (or “app”), and suddenly he can see his three-inch cell phone clear as day due to eyes that look to be straight out of the original “Terminator” movie.
Now, why doesn’t this commercial work? (In a writerly sense, why does this narrative fail?) Simple. First, the guy is at work. Yes, people check their cell phones at work, but very, very few are going to be watching movies at work — and if they do, they most likely would be doing it as a work exercise so could use a better computer.
For the record, I also thought the guy was too intense, too focused and too driven to watch a movie at work; when his eyes bug out and turn into reddish-black orbs that expand outward, I felt disgusted and almost lost my lunch. The visual image that Motorola was trying to convey was that their little three-inch phone is more than powerful enough to play a movie — but what I got instead was a picture of an insecure, unsettled man who’s about to throw his job away because the telephone has messed with his brain.
Big thumbs-down to that.
My second least-favorite commercial during Brewers games is one for Miller Lite Beer. (There are several for Miller Lite I don’t care for, but this is the worst of the lot.) A couple is sitting in the park; the guy (he’s African-American, as is his girlfriend) is extolling the virtues of his beer. (Very common in beer commercials.) Then, when his girlfriend asks why her boyfriend loves her (as he’s been saying why he loves his beer for most of the minute commercial,) he can’t come up with anything. As time starts to run out with the commercial, he tells her that he likes her hair (though he says “I like what you’re doing with this,” twirling a piece of her hair in the process), he loves “all her teeth,” and asks in desperation why she loves him.
Of course, she says, “You’re my soulmate.” (Odd soulmate to have, IMO, but I’ll go along with it for the case of argument.)
What is his reply? “Ditto.”
The narrative intended to be framed here is simple: if you drink Miller Lite, you’ll love your beer so much it’ll crowd everything else out of your head. But what I got instead is, if you drink Miller Lite, you’ll turn into an insensitive, inarticulate jerk.
So these folks get a big thumbs-down as well.
The third is less offensive, but just as annoying. It’s for a local car dealership, Porcaro Ford in Racine, WI. These commercials (there are a series of them) always start out with someone using the “Dragnet” theme — “dum-de-dum-dum,” then one of the guys starts talking about what a crime it was that a lady customer had gone somewhere else. But now that the woman has come in to see them (it’s all rendered in cartoon format, too, which I find cheesy rather than amusing), she has her pick of cars and Porcaro will give her top dollar on her trade whatever she picks.
The narrative here is that Porcaro is honest — they won’t “rob” you (their whole thing about how they’re “working robbery out of the Racine division” tips you off to that aspect), they won’t cheat you, they’ll give you “top dollar” — but also that they’re so relentless that they won’t leave you alone.
Now, why would I get that out of a simple 30 second spot or at most one minute spot? Simple. This commercial is played over and over again, as are the other two I mentioned during Brewers telecasts. And because they’re played multiple times per game, and there are 162 games in a season — well, let’s just say these commercials go from mild dislike to active hatred to visceral disgust in a matter of days. And the longer I see them, the less likely I am to get a Miller Lite beer, purchase a Droid phone from Motorola (much though I know Motorola needs to stay open and employs many people in Northern Illinois), or most especially go to Porcaro Ford.
These commercials, as marketing, are probably reaching someone. I can’t imagine who really likes these commercials, though I can see a guy being mildly amused by the Miller Lite commercial and perhaps if you’ve only seen the Porcaro Ford commercial once, it might not annoy you. (I can’t figure out for who, or what the purpose was, or even why that Droid commercial was aired once, much less multiple times. Sorry.)
But as an exercise in framing the narrative, they have failed.
What are the worst commercials you’ve seen? And do you think most commercials actually hit the target, miss the target, or are somewhere in between? (In other words, do most commercials actually frame the right narrative?)
Publishers, e-books, and why the Baen Free Library Exists (UPDATED).
The e-book is here to stay. So the question now is, how should publishers deal with e-books? More importantly, how much in royalties should be paid to authors?
My friend Jason Cordova wrote a very interesting blog tonight about publishers and e-books and these questions exactly, available here:
http://warpcordova.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/publishers-and-e-books-round-ii/
What set Cordova off was an article by Michael Bhaskar at BookBrunch (written on 7/29/2010). There is a long-standing fight going on with regards to e-books, Amazon.com and its Kindle device, and MacMillan, which may be why Michael Bhaskar wrote his article; at any rate, that article is available here:
The Bhaskar article attempts to frame the narrative in such a way as to make authors look greedy for wishing to have more than 25% of net royalties. Yet this is only one part of the entire narrative, as Cordova ably points out in his blog.
Random House, according to Bhaskar, believes 25% of net receipts is fair. Whereas to many authors, including Cordova, that simply isn’t enough considering the lesser overhead of an e-book compared to a “dead tree” version.
The second question has to do with the fight between Digital Rights Media (DRM) and open source coding being used in order to sell e-books. Cordova’s points need to be read in their entirety, but the upshot is that many publishers put out e-books in a way that is intended to keep people who haven’t paid for an e-book to read an e-book. I know that sounds clunky, but the idea behind it is clunkier still — DRM, or to use a less fancy term, encoding or encryption, is to blame for any real long-term costs to the publisher, because it’s the cost of keeping a book encrypted and making sure no one has cracked the encryption that tends to cause long-term problems for publishers.
Yet several publishers, including Baen, Tor, Pyr, Twilight Times Books, Paladin Press and the new MuseItUp Publishing, have not chosen the way of DRM. These companies believe it is far more important to be friendly to the customer and make it as easy and as rewarding as possible for the customer than to encrypt their books using DRM.
Baen in particular has made it as easy as possible to buy e-books through something they call WebScriptions — they come in as many formats as need be, using non-encrypted materials. This has been a big marketing draw for Baen.
Better still, there’s something called the Baen Free Library, where many of Baen’s authors have chosen to allow one or more of his/her books to be put up so anyone, anywhere, can read it free of charge. This has not hurt Baen’s business model; it’s actually helped instead. Because most people want a dead-tree version of their favorite book; it’s still the easiest way to read a book, and will almost certainly continue to be so until and unless the Kindle, Nook and other electronic book devices become more user friendly. (I know there’s been progress in this regard. But I can still read a regular book far faster than an e-book, partly because it takes me less time to flip an actual page than it does to hit a mouse key or toggle downward.)
Not every publisher can put out their e-books in multiple formats; it’s almost certainly time-consuming to set up such a system, and I know Baen requires at least one full-time Webmaster to keep things running along smoothly. But there must be some “wiggle room” between a publisher that puts out everything using DRM and those who don’t; customers like it when a company like Baen or MuseItUp Publishing offers several different, easy ways to buy an e-book, which tends to drive customer loyalty and satisfaction over time.
I wish I were more of a computer “geek,” because the esoteric points being made by those who swear by DRM (many of the publishers, including MacMillan and Random House to the best of my knowledge) tend to get lost in the aether. That’s one reason I can’t explain them in more than general terms, though many of my friends are computer specialists and do completely understand all sides of this taxing and frustrating issue.
I do know that I very much appreciate what Baen Books is doing with its Webscriptions and the Baen Free Library, and that I’m very pleased to update this post by adding Tor, Pyr, Twilight Times Books, Paladin Press and MuseItUp Publishing to the list of smart publishers that want to please their customers and their writers. Because it’s a simple equation for readers: if a publisher puts out books that are high quality and well-edited — Heck, puts some of them out for free! — that aren’t encrypted, this leads to higher sales, better royalty payments overall, and far higher customer and writer satisfaction.
That, my friends, is a win-win. Which is why it puzzles me so much that the other heavy hitters in the industry haven’t followed the Baen model — which works — rather than continue to swim stubbornly upstream.
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** Note: Jason Cordova’s comment about other publishers that do not use DRM have been incorporated into this blog post. In addition, I heard from Lea Schizas, the publisher of MuseItUp Publishing, and she assured me that MuseItUp plans to offer several user-friendly options with regards to e-books, and that absolutely, positively, MuseItUp will not be using DRM.
Framing Your Own Narrative — or, why LeBron James’ “The Decision” ESPN Program Failed.
We writers know all about the dangers of framing our own narrative. Sometimes, our best assumptions regarding plot, characters and story just do not work. And that is exactly why LeBron James needed a writer/editor in his entourage, to keep him from making his disastrous mistake in coming up with his recent one-hour ESPN special entitled “The Decision.”
As most know, LeBron James is a highly paid athlete. He is from Ohio, and he’d played for his hometown NBA team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, since he was drafted out of high school. He is now twenty-five, and he’s been told for years how good he is, how kind and generous he is, and how he may even be the best player the NBA has ever had. (A debatable assumption, one I do not agree with.) And he’s been highly marketable, even likable — the best liked player in the NBA in many senses, someone who had fans throughout the country and possibly even the world due to his play on the court and his generous nature outside of basketball.
So perhaps it’s more understandable that LeBron James would think it was OK to announce his decision on where he’s going to play basketball next year on national television in a live special that was aired on ESPN. All the revenue from his one-hour program was given to charity, something James and his people requested and ESPN agreed to do. James was even allowed to pick his own interviewer, Jim Gray, something unprecedented in the history of sports journalism to the best of my knowledge.
Note that LeBron James, at this point, had not announced his decision, which is why the program became entitled “The Decision.” (I know it’s basic, but humor me, please.) And James figured that no one would get upset with him when he announced that he was going to play for the Miami Heat alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh (Wade is a perennial All-Star and Bosh is just under that caliber) — James only saw what he wanted to see, and nothing more. His plot, story and characters were all laid out — and yet what was the outcome?
As ESPN ombudsman and former NBC Sports executive Don Ohlmeyer put it here http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=ohlmeyer_don&id=5397113 :
It was billed without irony as “The Decision.” But for those who thought ESPN could agree to televise live LeBron James’ announcement that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat — ultimately served up with ample hype in the form of an awkward, uncomfortable, staged one-hour network special — and still be free from public controversy, it might as well have been called “The Delusion.”
As has been well documented, Team LeBron proposed the exclusive special to ESPN with the following conditions: (1) Veteran broadcaster Jim Gray, who has no current association with ESPN, would host the segment in which James announced his plans; (2) The network would yield the hour of advertising inventory to be sold by James’ team with the proceeds directed to the Boys & Girls Club of America; (3) The network would produce the entire show and pay for all production costs.
And Ohlmeyer’s column goes on to quote many journalists who were very upset at James’s action (along with ESPN’s questionable ethics in televising it), some of whom I’m going to quote below:
• David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun: “ESPN led the way Thursday night in some of the most debased sports coverage I can remember seeing. The hype was shameless, the lack of perspective colossal.”
• David Barron, Houston Chronicle: “LeBron James hijacked ESPN, selling the network on an hour-long glorified infomercial preceded by three hours of breathless hype and numbing repetition.”
• Tom Hoffarth, Los Angeles Daily News: “The truth is, how does anyone believe anything else ESPN reports about James from this point forward?”
Now, obviously, this isn’t what James had expected. Nor was it what most of the people at ESPN had expected, with the possible exception of Mr. Ohlmeyer (who, if he’d been asked, would’ve given an immediate thumbs-down to the whole charade). But it’s what James should’ve expected!
Listen. Cleveland is an economically devastated area. They don’t have too much to cheer about, and being able to cheer for a native son who happens to be an exceptionally gifted at the game of basketball playing for the Cavaliers was one of the most hopeful things many Ohioans had to look forward to, bar none.
What James did in framing his own narrative is to forget about the external factors going on all around him — the bleak hopelessness. The utter despair. The futility of an area that has a 9.5% unemployment rate as of June 2010 according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the most recent statistics available.
Note by any objective standard, by someone who wasn’t surrounded by “Yes Men,” this narrative — someone who’d grown up in Akron, OH, leaving his hometown team for the bright lights and big city of Miami, FL — would be a non-starter. And by any objective standard, James’ decision would’ve been made quietly and privately as most NBA player decisions are (no one really cared where former Milwaukee Bucks guard Luke Ridenour went, for example, though Ridenour was an essential cog in the Milwaukee Bucks’ surprising playoff run earlier this year)**, which means some of the criticism being leveled at James now wouldn’t have happened.
I’m sure it’s not really fun for LeBron James, a man with an enormous ego, to hear from NBA analyst and Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, this (from http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5391478):
“There would have been something honorable about staying in Cleveland and trying to win it as ‘The Man’ … LeBron, if he would’ve in Cleveland, and if he could’ve got a championship there, it would have been over the top for his legacy, just one in Cleveland. No matter how many he wins in Miami, it clearly is Dwyane Wade’s team.”
Or, how about this from Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a Lakers standout for many years, and also a Hall of Famer, who said this to Bloomberg News reporter Barry Rothbard:
Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson said he never would have joined with Larry Bird to win a championship the way LeBron James is teaming with Dwyane Wade(notes). […]
“We didn’t think about it cause that’s not what we were about,” said Johnson, whose Michigan State squad beat Bird’s Indiana State team in the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. “From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird.”
Or how about Michael Jordan himself, who said this at http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5391478 :
“There’s no way, with hindsight, I would’ve ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, ‘Hey, look, let’s get together and play on one team,'” Jordan said after playing in a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada. The interview aired on the NBC telecast of the event. “But that’s … things are different. I can’t say that’s a bad thing. It’s an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys.”
In other words, LeBron James’ attempt to frame the narrative failed with his own peers or at least those he truly wants, some day, to be among — Hall of Fame caliber players. They saw this as a sell-out, in short — they saw this as a player who’d proven he wasn’t enough to win with a good supporting cast around him take the easy way out and join a team with two other superstars in order to win a championship — something most of them would not have countenanced under any circumstances.
So we see what’s happened in retrospect: James’ “story” has taken a marked detour. From a beloved near-demigod playing for his hometown team, James has become a carpetbagging, narcissistic athlete who will do whatever he wants for fortune and glory — something which should be a cautionary tale to us all.
The moral of this tale, if there is one, would be for James to run his decisions by someone who is outside himself and outside his circle of “Yes Men,” for the same reason fiction writers have first readers. Because someone who could’ve told him, “No, you don’t do this if you want your fans to still love you,” and “No, you definitely don’t go on ESPN in order to announce you’re leaving economically depressed Cleveland for Miami” would’ve saved James an inordinate amount of grief.
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** Note: Ridenour went to the Minnesota Timberwolves this off-season, quietly and without fanfare.
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