The Marketing of a Sci-Fi TV show (both Firefly and Others) by millernate

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The Marketing of a Sci-Fi TV show (both Firefly and Others)

POSTED BY: MILLERNATE
UPDATED: Sunday, October 13, 2002 13:51
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Sunday, October 13, 2002 1:51 PM

With Firefly only one small step from cancellation (provided the futoncritic.com individual was correct in posting his ratings) it would behove me to draw a comparison between Firefly and brief comparisons to the marketing of other science fiction serieses (both successfull and unsuccessfull).

The good news was that Fox aired several adds for the show on their smash hit American Idol, thus garuanteeing the show significant exposure. The bad news is in what went into those ads. We had a variety of tones that presented wildy different formats for this show. The end result of this being that the average consumer was confused as to what this show was going to be. This was compounded by the fact that 2 highly circulated ads featured a song that made the show appear to be brain-dead camp (now that's redundant isn't it?

) which no show by Joss Whedon would EVER be, which resulted in alienating the intelligent viewers that a Whedon show would appeal to and bringing in a short-lived group of fools who left as soon as they realized the show did, in fact, have a brain. Now what Fox should have done is emulate the original marketing campaign of The X-Files (the only other Sci-Fi show, other than Quantum Leap, to succeed in prime time...assuming we don't count The Pretender as Sci-FI).

The X-Files campaign focused on only two subsets: The Sci-Fi geeks who would watch it no matter what and the conspiracy nuts. Every ad played to those 2 groups (often simultaneously) with no confusion as to the message, approach, or content. The result? Gradually growing ratings, numerous awards nominations, and a permanent place in TV history (whether Chris Carter actually created it or not

). Firefly's "ever changing ad" approach has led to continually falling ratings and continual comments from the Dark Angel morons (again a redundancy

).

Its worth noting that William Goldman (author and screenwriter) wrote that the one movie of his that was deliberately killed (to read in detail pick up "Adventures in the Screen Trade" written by Goldman, an excellent book on working in the movies if nothing else) the studio continually changed its ad campaign approach on purpose to create a sense of confusion in the public (sort of like Firefly...I wonder if...no it couldn't be). So its not just me that has this viewpoint on marketing buy William Goldman as well.

Nathan
"It looks like a great adventure...That's what it is; that's what it feels like. When I saw the pilot, it was really engaging. It was exciting. It was unusual. It threw me off every now and then. I think people will be grabbed by it." - Ron Glass, on the pilot, during an interview with the Indianapolis Star

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