← New Books Network
New Books Network
Justin Wyatt, "Creating the Viewer: Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem" (U Texas Press, 2024)
01:07:28
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:00]
Expedia Narrator
Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live. She saved so much, she got her seat close enough to actually see and hear them. Sort of. You were made to scream from the front row. We were made to quietly save you. More Expedia made to travel savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [00:30]
Blinds.com Advertiser
@Blinds.Com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Shop blinds.com Labor Day mega sale happening now. Save up to 50% site wide plus a free measure. Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [01:00]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Pete Kunze
Welcome to New Books and Media, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I am your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Justin Wyatt, professor and Interim Director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode island and the author of Creating The Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem. The book was published by the University of Texas Press in 2024. Good afternoon, Justin. How are you doing today?
- [02:31]
Justin Wyatt
Very well. Thanks for having me.
- [02:34]
Pete Kunze
Pleasure is mine. As we get started, can you tell folks a bit about your background and your training and the interesting career that brought you to this project?
- [02:44]
Justin Wyatt
Sure, of course. My background is kind of an interesting mix of academia and industry. So my undergraduate degree was in economics and I knew that I loved media and film in particular. So I did my degree in economics and then I did my M.A. and Ph.D. at UCLA in film and TV studies. But during that time I really tried to dovetail as much as possible, economics and aesthetics. So, for example, I took a lot of courses, not just in film and television, but in management, in marketing, in the business school as well. So I had this kind of mixed background of business and aesthetics, shall we say, or business and film, business and media. So as I was finishing my dissertation, I was actually working full time for a company called the National Research Group that was the leading provider of film research. And they actually had contracts with all the major studios. And it was a great opportunity because I was the junior analyst at the time. But this is the time in the late 80s and early 90s when the junior analyst was given companies like New Line to work with and Orion. So I had access to testing films, testing advertising materials. I would be the analyst on these projects. I would write the write the reports, work with the studios. And this influenced a book that was my dissertation really, called High Concept Movies and Marketing in Hollywood that came out, oh, 30 years ago now, a long time ago. But basically that book is about the shift in marketing practice that took place after the end of the new Hollywood era and moving into the era of the blockbuster Star Wars, Greece, Saturday Night Fever, and so on and so forth. And kind of looking at the shift in terms of aesthetics of these films as well as shift in terms of marketing and advertising practice. So I had that book under my belt and I was working on it, but I knew I wanted to teach. So the first part of my career, I actually became a professor of radio and television and film at the University of North Texas and then eventually ended up in media arts at the University of Arizona. This is at a time when the document.com was booming and really people were looking for analysts who had experience in media and particularly media and aesthetics. So I was doing a lot of consulting while I was a professor, while I was teaching and writing my academic articles and books. I was lured in the year 2000 to actually leave my tenure position at the University of Arizona to go and work full time for a consulting company. And the appeal at the time was actually there are two appeals. One, I'd done film market research, which was a very set number of studies that was very obviously based around the film as a stimulus. This was in the TV industry. And the TV industry, the research that was being done was much more exploratory. It was more about not just the individual shows, it was about branding, it was about viewership, it was about technology, all these kinds of issues as well. So part of the appeal was being able to jump into this area, specifically a television research that I had done a little bit of work on, but not much before. And then the second appeal of leaving my academic job to go work in the industry was based around bringing skills from the marketplace to the classroom. I was teaching media marketing, media market research, and I had a little bit of background, but I kept thinking, in some ways I'm not enough of a practitioner to be teaching this material. So I wanted to actually go and get more firsthand knowledge. So I left my academic position at the time, people, the academic friends of mine, had one of two reactions. Either I'm so jealous that you got out, that's unbelievable that you did that, or you're such an idiot to leave a 10 year position, you'll never get another one again. And I was like, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. To me, it was an adventure. And I worked for a consulting company. I worked for ABC Television on the east coast doing primary research for ABC News. And then on the west coast being the head of primary research for the whole network. I worked in the Cable Group for NBCUniversal, mostly for E exclamation point, which I call the Kardashian Network. So I always say that the Kardashian and doing testing for the Keeping up with the Kardashians paid my mortgage for several years. And then my last job in the industry was with Viacom for the music group, mostly for country music television for cmt. So I knew by I expected to be gone from academia, oh, say five or six years. I was gone for 15. Okay. Partly it was because I was jumping into market research at a time when all these variables were changing the way that people engage with television, the way that people watched, the way that shows were marketed, social media as a marketing force, kind of reorienting all the variables. So it was an exciting time to be part of market research. And that kept me in the game longer. But I would say by about year 12, I plateaued and I felt like I wanted to get back to academia. So I started applying and I took a job at University of Rhode island in communication studies and in film media. And I have been at the University of Rhode island ever since. So I knew when I came back to academia that I wanted to bring this knowledge that I gained in market research to the classroom, but also to the academy. Partly because, you know, I published quite a bit in the area of media industry studies, but I knew that this specific silo of media market research, there was hardly anything written about it in media studies. And partly because in the industry, no one wants to talk about media market research because it's like it's a creative product. They think that they know more than the viewers. So even though I've moderated hundreds of focus groups, done hundreds of surveys, a lot of times confidentiality agreements, non disclosures, so I couldn't talk about anything I was testing or any of the projects, because the illusion is there in Hollywood and in the media generally that it's a creative product that doesn't need to have the voice of the viewer influencing it as part of decision making. So trying to expose this kind of hidden area of market research in an academic way was the impetus behind this book, Creating the Viewer Market Research and Evolving Media Ecosystem. And I wanted to approach this in two different ways. I wanted to have a book that would be useful to academics in media studies, meaning that I wanted it to be informed by current academic discourse on audience technology, media research. I also wanted it to be useful for practitioners of market research. So part of the reason I did this is because I wanted to show the kinds of surveys, the kinds of methods that we used in the industry. And at the end of each chapter, there's a sample questionnaire for a hypothetical show or a hypothetical product. And the reason I did that was very deliberate. You can use those questionnaires to understand exactly how market research was conducted. You can use them for your own products, you can morph them in your own way. So the questionnaires became a crucial part of the book and a crucial part of sharing my learning from working in the industry. So that's what I wanted to do with this book and the form of it. It sort of morphed over time, and it became in some ways, a history of that period that I was working in the industry, partly because even in the period since I left in 2015, media marketing media methods were changing so rapidly. So everything was kind of moving along very, very quickly. So what I wanted to do in the book is I wanted to have a dual approach where I described the methods that we were using, but I also wanted to describe how the methods were inadequate to conceive of television viewing and the viewer currently. So it's a dual purpose. It's here are the methods and then here's what they're missing. And I wanted to go back and forth. So it was, it was walking a tightrope, in a way, is how I see this book.
- [12:32]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's a tendency within media industry studies, there's a certain disposition where it's the scholar versus the industry. Right. And yet in order to do this work, we so often need to engage with the industry in productive, hopefully respectful ways. And then for your research, as someone who has been in both, I'm wondering how that kind of shaped your voice, your criticism, your methods in kind of tackling this so that you can both maintain this perhaps illusory sense of a scholarly objectivity. But also, it seems at times in media industry studies, so much of it is the impression we get from outside, but as an insider. So I guess maybe talking a little bit more about the managing that kind of insider, outsider relationship and maybe drawing attention to the ways that we're never completely outside of it, right?
- [13:28]
Justin Wyatt
No, absolutely we aren't. I mean, it's interesting because even though I was working in the industry and I was being paid obviously for doing it, I felt in that 15 year period, I was always an outsider because I felt like I was an academic at the end of the day and a scholar. And what was interesting too is that most people that I worked with had no idea that I was a professor in the first part of my career. So when I went back to it, they're like, what, you're becoming a professor? How did that happen? So they just didn't know about it and I didn't talk about it. That was tactical on my part because I felt like if I brought up, oh, I have a PhD or I was a professor, there'd be a chip on my shoulder a little bit and people would be like, okay, we're going to bring him down a few notches, or he thinks he knows it all, but he doesn't know the industry or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I was very. I just didn't discuss my past academic experience. I think that one of the things that surprised me about working in the industry was how valuable my academic training was. Now I'll give you an example. At the time, you know, I was. I was in. I was doing my PhD in. In the 80s and 90s, Star studies and iconography was kind of a very hot area, and I published a little bit in that area. But what was interesting is when I was able to translate theories around stars and celebrity culture into terms that would work in industry. The people in industry were fascinated by it and actually really spoke to them in a meaningful way for crafting a product. So I was able to use a lot of my academic training in a very specific professional environment. So that was a nice thing. That was like a good thing and in some ways a surprise because I kept thinking, oh, well, you know, this training I have in aesthetics and in media from UCLA and from teaching. I don't know how much I'm going to bring to the table, but I brought quite a lot to the table. That's one. One thing I found. The other thing I found is, honestly, some of the questions that I was asked were so fascinating that I felt like I was writing dissertation after dissertation with these research reports. So I will give you a specific example, Pete. I worked for E. And one of the shows I worked for, Obviously this is 10 years ago, 12 years ago, was Keeping up with the Kardashians. Now, Keeping up the Kardashians, at that moment in time, say 2010 to 2014, was a very hot show. It was a very kind of. There was a lot of buzz in culture about Keeping up with the Kardashians. And the head of the network came to me at the beginning of one summer, and she said to me, we need to know why people connect with the Kardashians. And I thought to myself, oh, well, that's easy. You know, they're hot and they're partying and they're hooking up and they're the outrageous behavior and all that. And I thought I had, like, it all worked out. And I. And she said, no, no, we really need to understand it in a deep way. So I spent the whole summer doing research on Keeping up with the Kardashians. I did dozens of focus groups. I watched the show in people's homes, did ethnographies about the Kardashians, and I did several surveys. And what was interesting, a couple of learnings that I think are interesting. One is that all of my initial hypotheses about why the show was popular didn't hold. Like, what I thought was the motivations for the popularity were very thin level. That was a very surface level. What I found that there were two main factors that played into the appeal with Kardashians the show. One, the fantasy of having a large number of sisters who can squabble with each other, but they have each other's back if somebody from the outside comes up against them. So that's one huge appeal. The second huge appeal is a blended family bringing two families together. So by doing this research, I realized my initial hypotheses were very limited, shall we say? They didn't really answer the question. And by talking to the viewer, by listening to the viewer, by engaging with the viewer in all these different methods, I was able to get a much deeper, more profound answer, even in terms of the methods that I use. Pete. So, for example, one of my pet peeves is I kept thinking, oh, my goodness, nothing happens in this show. Like, there's hardly any plot, there's hardly any narrative. Like, why do people watch this? So I went through all the episodes and I found what I thought was the most banal. Okay, here's what happens. Chloe is in Miami and she gets addicted to Cuban coffee. She goes up on her scooter on a Sunday morning, early, like at 5 in the morning, and the scooter breaks down. End of episode, that's it. Nothing else happens, okay? And I thought, oh, my goodness, there's hardly anything going on in this episode. So as part in the focus groups, I would show this episode, and I would not bias them. I'd be like, I'm going to show you an episode of the show of the Kardashians. And then you tell me what you think of it. Inevitably, here's what happened. I would show it. I was, you know, I was stone faced, so they didn't get my reaction. And here's what I hear. I'd say, what did you think of the episode? And they were like, we loved it. We thought it was great. And I was like, okay, tell me why we didn't know that Chloe loved Cuban coffee. We had no idea that she was into coffee that way. We didn't even know she had a scooter.
- [19:23]
Pete Kunze
So.
- [19:23]
Justin Wyatt
And I was like, okay, like, this is a great lesson to me, because it's not about narrative. It's about character and connecting to the characters. So again, something that I thought I knew from my academic training, you know, it was the wrong angle to go at it. I thought people connected through narrative. And for these kind of reality shows, it was much more connecting through character. So, you know, the academic training was useful, but I learned so much about engagement and viewership and connection through doing these studies. And, you know, it was invaluable to me because it changed the way that I approach all of my teaching and my research. Now, you know, I, I, I, I look, I try and be absorbent, meaning I'm a sponge in some ways. I want to hear what people say. Like if you're a market researcher and you're doing media market research, you should be a blank slate. You, the best way I, I can describe it is if you're moderating a focus group. You're the host who's invited all these fascinating people around you and they're comfortable, they're opening up to each other. You might ask a question or two. You don't portray anything of yourself. It's all about what they have to say. And you make it out like it's the most fascinating thing you've ever heard. And honestly, that's not bsp because I was fascinated by what people had to say. So I think you have to be curious as a person to be a good market researcher. And there has to be an innate curiosity if you want to go into this industry. If you're not curious, people pick up on that. If you just try and check off boxes from your discussion guide, they see that my curiosity and my interest in media and how media operates actually grew over that 15 years. I became more entrenched in media and my love for media over that 15 years from having been a practitioner of market research. I think that's a long winded answer to your very specific question.
- [21:30]
Pete Kunze
No, I think it sets up for what I want to talk about next. Right. Because one of the things that I think is important here is that there are these two parallel traditions within our field. One is spectatorship studies. This idea of the imagined viewer and the response they're having to the text that's deeply grounded in theory. Right. Like think psychoanalytically. And that's kind of, that's kind of just in pre market research, thinking about the Kardashians. And then Justin, after doing the market research is more in the audience studies tradition. Right. Which you map out for us in this kind of. I was just impressed how much you were covering within a matter of pages. Right. But kind of walking us through like, you know, we get through media effects and then we get to cultural studies and Ian R. And Nick Brown. So I was hoping we could talk about how you see this project not just contributing to media industry studies, which we've talked about, but also audience studies and how a knowledge of market research can Help media studies scholars interested in the question of audiences to perhaps think with more nuance and more complexity about their subject.
- [22:43]
Justin Wyatt
Yeah, and I think it's actually crucial for audience studies. I mean, part of what I had to do as a market researcher is I had to represent the viewer, meaning my job was to understand the opinions and attitudes of the viewers and represent them honestly, transparently, ethically, to the heads of the network and to the producers. That was a difficult thing to do sometimes because I literally would never sugarcoat things. I was very straightforward. This is what they're saying. Use the information as you see fit. Part of what happens, though, in the media industries is you construct an image of the viewer. So people who run networks, people running streaming services, they have an idea, maybe not articulated, as to who the viewer is, the ideal viewer, the perfect viewer for their show. And part of what I had to do, honestly, a lot of times is break those conceptions. Because a lot of times what you would see is you'd see kind of like, okay, there were people like me, late middle age, white guys, and their conception of the viewer were their friends and their neighbors who were just like them. So part of what I needed to do is break the conception of the image of the viewer for them to show the diversity of viewership. So I feel like a lot of my challenges as a media researcher was, and this has impact for audience studies, obviously, is to define the viewer in multiple ways, beyond metrics. So in ways that go beyond five metrics that you can sell to ways that get to emotion, psychology, motivation, all these things. As a industry, as a culture, we're kind of based around metrics at this point. I mean, I think that social media has kind of added to this. It's all about numbers, it's all about KPIs and seeing trends across time. Audience studies needs to understand that if you're understanding the audience, you have to do it in a discreet way, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't iron out the complexities and the contradictions of the individual viewer, because there are tons. I felt like a lot of what I had to do was really present as nuanced a picture of the viewer as possible to the people at the network and to the producers. And I feel like audience studies is doing that in a certain way, but I'm doing it with empirical data and with primary research. What I choose to focus on and what the issues are or what the motivations are would change based upon who the people were, what the setting was. Most of the time in a focus group, I would have certain questions that I needed to be answered, and I wouldn't finish the group till I got those questions answered. But I would let. If there was a productive sense of a dialogue where I could understand more about who they were as people, I would always go down that road because I was fascinated by who they were as people. And it would give more nuance to the conception of the viewer. So audience studies needs to understand, we need to get beyond metrics, we need to go back to the individual viewer. We need to understand the contradictions. And this is why, you know, the end of my book, part of what I'm fascinated with now is the very specific method of ethnography where we are going back to square one and we are being with viewers in their home, in their workplace, and watching how they engage with media. Because honestly, all of the lessons, all of the protocols that I grew up with and experience as a young adult no longer apply. I mean, 30 years ago it was must see TV. It was like NBC is going to get you to watch at 8pm on a Thursday and all the advertising, everything will drive you there. Well, appointment viewing as a concept doesn't really, really exist. I guess it exists somewhat, but, you know, particularly for things like the Oscars or sporting events, but not really for regular television. So, you know, how has our engagement shifted given these new technologies? And in particular, what is the difference by generation? So, I mean, one thing coming back to teaching that I really feel is that my students have a much more peripheral connection to television and media than I did at that age. So they just don't connect in the same way. There's not as strong as connection. I'm not saying they don't connect to certain shows. They do, but it isn't central to their leisure time activity. There's this IPSO survey from a couple of years ago that was fascinating. It looked at leisure time by different generations, you know, generation baby boomers. Movies and TV were by far number one. By the time you get to Gen Z, video gaming was at 39% and it was number one. And movies and TV 14%. Wow. Okay. When I saw that, that survey, it confirmed a lot of what I was seeing in the classroom. And the way that we need to rethink understanding the audience, understanding the connection to media, and trying to maybe characterize it, characterize peripheral viewing, which no one wants to talk about, because you'd like to think that it was concentrated viewing. But my guess is now short bursts, watching different on different modalities and you have to be careful because social media is going to give away a lot of. So like one of the shows that when I came back to the classroom was Game of Thrones. That was a show. And this is like what, eight years ago, nine years ago now, this is a show that I felt did have a kind of appointment viewing still, because at that time people were scared about going on social media for spoilers. You know, I would say that, like, social media spoiler stuff happens less now, but eight, nine years ago, it was a factor. So everything is shifting so quickly and all of the variables are shifting that it's still a fascinating time to understand media and how we engage and why we engage. And my big note honestly, to anybody who's interested in teaching about media is please step out of yourself and look at your students and think about how they engage, how they consume media, what role it has, and don't be biased about it. I mean, I learn all the time about different ways to engage with media from my students, and it's useful and interesting.
- [30:06]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I teach media industry analysis, I often ask my students not just what they're watching, but how recently were they watching, because, like, a lot of them will say, I've watch television, but I'll be like, how many of you watch television in the last day? And they might say, no, I'm like, how many of you watch TikTok in the last day? How many of you watch TikTok in the last hour? And then all of a sudden we see very different media practices. I'm going to ask you a very dissertation chair kind of question right now, which is that you have an interesting point at the outset where you encourage us in thinking about media market research in the television industry to distinguish between the viewer and the audience. And the book, of course, is called Creating the Viewer. It's not called Creating the Audience. What kinds of distinctions would you push both scholars and your students to think about? As we kind of parse these terms in our critical thinking?
- [31:05]
Justin Wyatt
It's partly what I mentioned about the difference between the one and the many. Okay, so literally the viewer is specific. Because what I want to do is get back to the individual. Get back to the individual in terms of trying to understand the complexities, the contradictions of their engagement with media. Now, of course, you study one person, you're only going to get so much. You have to study many people to really get a nuanced view of it. But I feel like Creating the Audience would have been a book more that Title by itself would have been a book more about ways to engage with audiences to get more viewing. So ways to push viewing to this highest possible levels. When I worked in the cable industry, I said my job was two things is either to get people to watch a show or, no, I'm sorry, to get people to watch a show and to get them to watch longer. At the time when I was working for E. The average tune, the average length of tune was like nine minutes. Nine minutes is not very long. So, you know, our shows were either mostly half an hour, right. So my job partly was to get that nine minutes and push it to 10. You know, that's creating the audience. That's push. That's trying to understand how you can reach KPIs and metrics that will result in dollars coming through the system. And you still have people running these companies, media owners and media moguls and producers. And I remember one cable producer who's the head of a network, very big network, and we were talking about different genres of programming and the appeal, different genres. And he had intelligent person. He said to me, you know, I know some about the genres of my shows, but all I really care about is money. Like, that's the only thing I care about is making as much money as possible. So what I put on my streaming service, does it matter so much so long as I make money? So. And I was like, okay, that's a great reminder that we're living in late capitalism. And I should never forget that. That's actually a really interesting point too, about the scholar versus the industry practitioner. The scholar would be interested in aesthetics and genre and the construction of the narrative. The industry practitioner is interested in the audience and money and how to appeal to viewers.
- [33:53]
Pete Kunze
This kind of leads into the question, when you were bringing in Eileen Meehan's work and trying to kind of understand this relationship between producers and consumers and how we kind of nuance that. And in reading your book, I was also thinking of your earlier work, High Concept, and thinking about what are the continuities here between what you were doing in High Concept and what you're doing here in creating the viewer and what are the changes? And one of the most obvious changes, of course, is digitization and digitalization. So I'm hoping we can talk a little bit here about digital technology. And, you know, obviously in our field, we have that. That one school of thought, a dated school of thought, technological determinism, right? That the digital changed everything. And we were all just left to figure it out. And then we of course, have the other school of thought, which is that there's a feedback loop, right? There's a two way flow where thinking about structuration or something, where the user and how the user uses it or doesn't use the technology effects. So I guess my question in a very long pedantic setup is how has the introduction of digital media reshaped not only television, but reshape how market researchers study television viewership?
- [35:18]
Justin Wyatt
I feel like it's. Yeah, no, it's a big one. I feel like it's reshaped the entertainment product first and foremost. Okay, and by that I'm going to give you a very brief example. I was doing a focus group around 2010, so 15 years ago, and I was asking about the period leading into prime time. So this is a period where usually you see a lot of syndicated shows, Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond and so on and so forth. And typically when we'd ask about viewing in that period, that's what you would hear. You'd hear syndicated shows, comedies, comedies that I've seen a million times, but I could watch it again and so on and so forth. I was asking somebody at that time about that period and they said to me, oh, I don't watch television anymore during that time period after dinner. And I was like, well, what'd you do? And they're like, social media. I'm like, tell me more. Like, well, I go on Facebook and I said, what's the appeal of Facebook? And they said, the appeal of Facebook is it's drama and it's comedy of my friends, of my own friends. So it's narratives that are built of my own friends. And that's more compelling to me than watching Seinfeld where Everybody Loves Raymond or, you know, constructed narrative. And I honestly felt when I heard that from that viewer, I was like, oh my goodness, TV is never gonna be able to compete with that. How can you compete with narratives that are created for the person by their own friends? And, you know, it's the train wreck quality. Who's hooking up with who, all that stuff gets played out, right? So to me, it became like, I noted it at the time. I was like, this is the time when you start to see what I would call social media entertainment. So like, literally, social media becomes a form of entertainment that could be substituted, you know, for shows you mentioned earlier, Pete, about people engaging with social media and how that's changed the product. A couple of years ago, I was asking my students in my media advertising class, I said, tell me about what you did last night in terms of entertainment. And one of my students said, well, I don't watch TV anymore. I usually just go on TikTok and then pause, and then she goes, maybe I do TikTok a little too much. I'm like, well, how much? And she goes, well, I started at noon yesterday, and I looked at my watch again, and it was like 6pm And I thought, oh, my goodness, six hours of engagement with social media and TikTok. And, you know, how can you compete with that if you're making a movie or making a TV show or doing a digital show? You can't, because it's such a huge amount of time. And the way that it's structured is that it's addictive. So you just keep watching over and over and over again. So I feel like part of the answer to your question is that the digital technologies have changed the form of entertainment so that if I'm studying television and film and digital media generally, I'm kind of behind the times. So we have to now think about alternatives to traditional media that are entertainment. So the idea of spending six hours on TikTok, that's a long period of entertainment. Part of what we did in the media industries is we'd always try and understand through surveys or through focus groups what the competitive landscape was. And typically it would be what are the competitors in terms of broadcast and cable that are options now? The competitive landscape is so diverse that it's almost impossible to defy. Okay, so to me, part of answering your question would also be to say we don't know how to approach market research. Given the growth in digital media and the way that the concept of entertainment has become frayed. So, so many things are now considered entertainment but would never be tagged as such. You know, from a traditional standpoint, how do we study it? Like, how do we go about it? Back to the ethnographies, you know, back to. We need to get back to the individual viewer. We need to understand the. The variety of ways that people engage with media throughout their day, the function that plays and not give it too much emphasis. If it really is a peripheral relationship, like, if what we've seen in the last 25, 30 years is a shift between a consistent relationship to a peripheral relationship. That's a huge finding. That's a shift in culture. You know, how do we go about understanding that in market research? We need to start from ground zero? Like, I mean, part of the reason that I did this book is to show how a lot of the Traditional surveys are brand tracking surveys. There's a flawed concept at the basis here, and that is that we have a connection to the brand in the first place. Okay? And my guess is for a lot of brand tracking, the connection to the brand is way more peripheral, way, way more distant than anybody thinks. Pete, part of the problem also is just by asking the question in a survey or in a focus group, you're going to get an answer. Okay? So by constructing the question, you're giving that area or that focus a particular view, a particular positioning, a frame. Right. That's dangerous in and of itself, if you see what I mean. Because if you're putting that frame as part of the answer, well, you're never going to get out of traditional media. You're going to keep bringing it back somehow. So part of what I think we need to do is not just understand viewers from ground zero, from ethnographies. We need to understand how we construct questions, how we construct surveys, how we. How we analyze things like social media comments beyond just positive, negative, neutral, you know, and I don't know that we necessarily are able to do that effectively yet, partly because it's a moving target. I do know that some of the surveys that I present in creating the viewer, I think are dangerous in that they privilege a certain traditional form of media and media engagement that I know doesn't exist.
- [42:20]
Pete Kunze
Yeah.
- [42:21]
Justin Wyatt
Does that answer your question?
- [42:23]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, that does. And it actually leads me into something that I've just been struck by recently. I was. I'm from a working class part of New Jersey and I was home recently and I went to Walmart and they still had a red box. Right. Yeah. And I. And I think it's a reminder that, you know, as college professors, we are often dealing with a privileged class of students, you know, especially at larger institutions. Right. But, you know, we have students who don't have streaming or don't have high speed Internet access. I mean, there are students at institutions where, you know, asking them to write a term paper might require them to go to a library. So, you know, you mentioned how the instruments are sometimes inadequate. I'm wondering what you saw or what you're seeing in terms of are certain audiences being privileged over others? Are we, you know, as much as we can talk about the Netflix and the Hulu and the Amazon prime, there are still people watching those shows, those audiences that are left behind. How well is market research acknowledging those audiences that haven't left broadcast or haven't left dvd?
- [43:32]
Justin Wyatt
Yeah, I mean, you have to understand that if you're talking about the media left behind, let's call it that. Okay. We're talking about probably broadcast and cable, say, and physical media. So I think that what happens is market research for traditional media ultimately is based around money. It's based around a sales demographic. So I would say 80% of the market research surveys were based around the ages 18 to 49. Under 18, you don't have enough money to spend over 49. I guess that you're close to retirement. I know. Not really, but those are the prime ages in terms of spending power. What does that do? If you're focusing on 18 to 49, and again, you're putting a position or frame around that, you're going to get a certain set of answers. Now, one of the things that I thought was very interesting in doing research for news is that if you look at the average age, people watching news shows, it skews way older. So like, you know, Wellness Tonight or this Week or Nightline, quite a bit older.
- [44:48]
Pete Kunze
60 minutes.
- [44:49]
Justin Wyatt
Yeah, 60 minutes. So like, basically, if you're, if you're applying a sales demo that you want to be attract to and yet your viewership is different, that's a problem, you know. So, like, I would say, like, part of my answer to your question is honestly based around trying to understand in depth what the right recruiting parameters are. So, you know, like, so if you want to understand the diversity of media, as you're saying, Pete, you got to go back to traditional media. The media left behind. You got as well as dealing with streaming and social media and so on and so forth. But you have to be open beyond a sales demographic. You have to be open to the full diversity of viewers. And in that way, that's a challenge because ultimately, still, it's about eyeballs and it's about people watching things, and it's about reforming advertising, too. I mean, part of what I found really fascinating in the last 15 years are the alternatives to the traditional promos. So, like, for example, in American Horror Story, you know, they'll have like a whole season sponsored by one company, Mercedes Benz, whatever it is. That protocol is something from the 50s, you know, like a single sponsor. And to me, that's really, really fascinating because I'm like, we're still advertising oriented, but we're trying to find a different way beyond the promos, you know, a different way to attract people to products. And again, that's morphing still, certainly. And traditional media still has it. I mean, it's hard to really think about how you would construct an adequate recruiting instrument to capture the range of media engagement and consumption. Just by constructing it in a certain way, you're limiting the answers and you're presupposing basically a set of responses. I mean, I always felt, just to give you a very minor example, that doing a focus group about a pilot show, if you bring up the name of a character that perhaps wasn't highlighted, a very small supporting character, you bring up the name and then you ask about that person, a lot of times you're gonna get responses back just because people want to tell you something. And what it does is it puts too much emphasis on that character in the narrative. So then the people be like, oh, we should build them up or cut them down. And really the response should be, I shouldn't have asked about that character. They don't play a big role. And to ask about that character impacts the research in a negative way.
- [47:47]
Pete Kunze
I'm hoping we could talk more about just briefly. The first part of your book is identifying four types of media market research studies and uses those to kind of structure that section. They're pilot series maintenance, brand talent testing, and ideation. Can you just briefly, I know it's hard to say when you've written half your book on this topic, but, you know, what are those testing modalities seeking to do?
- [48:20]
Justin Wyatt
I mean, I think most of market research is still stimulus response. You show people something, whether it's a pilot episode or an ad or a promo of some kind, and you're going to get a response to it. So pilot testing obviously is you show the pilot, get responses. Series maintenance is how can we continue to engage viewers and maybe even build viewership across time. But you have the starting point of the individual show, so you'd recruit people who were viewers of the show or relapsed viewers or watching less often for brand and talent. Also, you're dealing with a product and you're dealing with talent. It's another kind of product. It's a person and their connection to the person. All those studies, pilot series maintenance, brand testing, talent testing, are all of the same kind. It's all stimulus response of a certain type. Ideation, or what we call the supergroup in market research was quite different. So ideation, I included that chapter as really the last chapter because it was aberrant in terms of the methodologies. What we would do is we would ask people to create a personal artifact collection of things that were important to them. Images, sayings, pictures. And then we would recruit them into a long focus group, like literally six hours. We Would have them do creative exercises, starting with their personal artifacts. Create a show that you'd like to view. And it's not like a show that you think everybody in North America is going to view. It's a show that you want to view based on stuff that's important to you personally. And then we would have them work and react to different poster boards that people would develop. Then they would work in pairs or in groups to look at how you can combine ideas across time. And they would vote, but not in a kind of priority way. Literally which show represented on this poster is most visual, which one would be most exciting, which one would be fun to watch. And you put little stickers all over it. What you end up with by the end of the six hours is you end up probably with 30 to 35 different show ideas, different show concepts. And these are generated by. Usually it's a different kind of strata of respondents. So we try to have, for these long ideation sessions, doctors, lawyers, teachers, creative executives, but not in tv. So people who wouldn't necessarily be going to a lot of regular 90 minute focus groups that would be, that would be interested in a deeper engagement. And also we did that, we did it, we included those people because we wanted to get different perspectives. So you would end up with 25, 30 ideas, I would say in probably six or seven ideation sessions, there was only one idea that ever became a pilot for a show. The rest of them, the networks ate up, they loved it. And you'd be like, well, why? Because it became a stimulus for them. It became something they could react to and be like, oh, this reminds me of that incident, or that story. Or I could build from here to here. So the ideation sessions became a way to help creative executives build. Obviously, because it's a long session, six hours, the incentive was quite different. Like $500 perhaps is what we would pay. And it wasn't stimulus response, it was creative execution. And it was privileging whatever the person valued most in their lives and trying to build some kind of media form from that. So, you know, the first four studies we talked about students response, the ideation is on a different island. And you know, it was fascinating to me because I kept thinking like the first time I did the ideation session, I was like, oh my goodness, they're not going to love these ideas. Or, you know, only maybe six of these ideas could become pilots. And it didn't matter. The ideas became a stimulus for the creative executives. So to me that was actually the most fun of doing market research with these ideation sessions, because you would end up with some of the most idiosyncratic and unusual but compelling ideas for shows that again, would maybe would never make it to E or Oxygen or Bravo. But there's a nugget of truth in each one that you could build from. So those are kind of the differences between those studies that basically there's one group and then ideation is off by itself.
- [53:36]
Pete Kunze
So as we head into the home stretch, I have a big question for you. Which is where do you see or where do you hope audience studies and particularly critical studies of media market research might go from here? When we write these books, we can only do so much, but we hope others will kind of pick up the baton. So what do you see as some future directions in our understanding of audiences and market research?
- [54:01]
Justin Wyatt
I mean, what I hope is a little bit what my individual journey was meaning. I would love to see more partnerships between the academy and industry. It doesn't have to be leave your academic job for 15 years. It could be partnering together to develop new research methodologies, partnering together to analyze viewer research and metrics. The perspective that academics in media industry studies is so much different than the perspective of the media executives that to bring these two groups together over a common purpose of understanding viewership or audience or motivation or appeal is fascinating to me. I mean, like one example this from years ago now, is from the Carsey Wolf center at UCSB where they did just that. They looked at kind of like the transition to digital and the impact. And it was a partnership between academics like Michael Curtin and Jennifer Holt and people at Warner Brothers and people in industry. I would love to see those kind of partnerships, those kind of collaborations continue because I feel like there's benefits to both sides that the academics would be able to understand industry in a much different perspective and that the industry folks would be able to get the nuanced in depth theories and critiques of the academics. And by theories and critiques, I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean it in a way that's good in terms of model building. So they'd be able to understand the way that academics have conceptualized different media products and they could learn from that. That's my hope, is that there'd be more of an intersection. How that happens, it's a great question. You know, I mean, one of the things that, you know, I'm excited that people are engaging with this book and reading the book and have questions for me. But one thing that surprised me When I came back to the academy, Pete, after 15 years in the industry, was people who are riding on a specific show or a specific genre. And I'd say, I worked on this show or I worked specifically in reality TV for 12 years. They would have no questions for me. And I was like, really? You're a very smart academic who's writing these conceptual pieces, these books, these articles about just this topic that I worked on day to day. Yet you don't want to. You're not. You're not curious at all. And like that. That disappointed. That disappointed me a little bit because I kind of hoped more that folks would not seek my counsel. I don't want that. But be curious in the way that you're curious. Asking your questions, Pete, and the way that you engage with this book about industry practice and about industry structure, and it's happened much less than I thought. That makes me sound like a sarpus. Sorry.
- [57:18]
Pete Kunze
No. And I think both of us are in media industry studies, and I think media industry studies owes a big part of its charge to sociology. Right, right. You know, you and I also have a great love of film studies, and you've written extensively about some of the great directors, but I think we also realize that they're operating within a system that. That limits and constrains them at the same time. Right. So I think that as good materialists, we should be interested in not just what someone's able to express through their art, but the ways they were able to do that within and against a system. Right. And hope. Absolutely.
- [57:56]
Justin Wyatt
Yeah, absolutely.
- [57:57]
Pete Kunze
And the ability to realize that the. You know, and this leads me back to structuration. Right. But it's. The structure limits the agent, but the agent also can restructure the structure. So. Yeah, So I think. I think we're, at this point, we're just agreeing with each other and we're preaching to the choir. But, you know, I think that, as one of my teachers used to say when I was learning about media industry studies in grad school, like, there's no question in film and media studies that wouldn't be enriched by a greater understanding of the context in which all this unfolds. Right. So all questions become industry questions if you open your mind to it, and hopefully more folks will do. So my last question. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
- [58:38]
Justin Wyatt
No, I mean, like, part of what I. I have, like, a personal mission, too, is that I want my students and the people that I engage with in the university to understand what media market research is, because, you know, if they're Interested in film and tv. You know, they're going to be director or a writer or a producer. And people don't think about like that kind of track or that career, which to me is very like what I did. Some might say it's a little rote, but actually I found it very creative. And there are so many judgment calls that went into it. And again, I learned so much that I want people to know that this is a path they can follow if they're interested studying the audience. And it's a viable career path.
- [59:22]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I mean, it seems to blend the critical and the creative in really exciting ways because I think a lot of us worry about the extent to which the work we do matters. Right. And it seems to be able to advocate for audiences is a really important thing that one can do with their commitment to studying media critically. My final question for you is, what are you working on now? What's piqued your interest? Are you continuing on this path of critical market research studies or do you find yourself kind of pursuing other avenues?
- [59:59]
Justin Wyatt
At the moment, I've got two sides to me and the market research side. I'm still writing about market research. I'm still studying market research. And of course, the thing I'm interested now is AI and market research and the use of synthetic data. So, you know, used to be 10 years ago, five years ago, you would have a large sample for survey, a thousand people. Now some market research companies are interviewing 200 people and then creating synthetic data of the other 800. So what does that say about understanding the audience or understanding the viewer? If you're dealing with synthetic data, generative AI, I mean, like, what, what are the protocols? What's what, what's the ethics there? And also how does it shift meaning? So to me, like, that's a huge. That's. That's a huge issue is understanding how generative AI will not just impact workflow and product, but will impact method in a way that is profound. So that's one thing that, that I'm interested in that I'm working on. The other that I'm interested in is, as you're saying, Pete, we have this film studies connection too. So I'm a big fan of the period of the new Hollywood, which is from basically late 60s, 2001, Bonnie and Clyde through say, Star wars or Heaven's Gate, late 70s, early 80s. And really, in my mind, that's where I live, Pete. I'm still engaging with all those movies, all those directors. One of my favorites is Robert Altman, who is probably most famous for mash. And when I came back to academia, I gave a lecture at University of Michigan, and they had opened pretty recently, the Robert Altman Archive. And the archivist said to me, I know you're just here to give a lecture, but would you like to see boxes from one of his films? I said, well, sure. Nashville from 1975 is, in some ways his most classic film. I said, I'd love to see what you have on Nashville. He brought me seven boxes, Pete. I could have spent six months just looking through these seven boxes and thinking about them and thinking about all the narratives and all the stories and what I would learn about industry and creativity and authorship. And so I've become like a little mini Robert Altman factory of scholarship. In the last few years, I've edited a book on his later films with Lisa Dombrowski that came out four years ago. I have a BFI Film Classics on Altman's Three Women with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek that came out last year. And then in February, I have a book called Robert Altman's Nashville An Archival Exploration that's coming out from University of Michigan Press. Each chapter in the book is based around an archival artifact. And really, it's kind of how you can understand the film and the functioning of the film through each of the artifacts. Oh, wow. So it's kind of. It's sort of this experimental way of doing film analysis based around the archive and what I found in the archive. And because Nashville as a film I saw when I was 11 years old, it was so profound to me that. And it's now 50 years old, that the writing of this book, the archival exploration, became a very personal endeavor. So the first chapter is actually a preface, is quite long, like 25 pages. It's all about my personal investment in the film. And one of the things I'm interested in now, too, in terms of film studies, is laying bare somebody's personal investment. Like, why, Pete, did you choose to focus on this film? What is it about the film that made you engage? And that's a topic that I've become more and more interested in as time's gone on. And also, I feel like by laying bare your personal investment in a film or media product, it's a good frame for the analysis so people can understand why you chose to analyze these topics or these artifacts based upon your personal history. In a way, too. The other thing I found with the Altman work that I've been doing is even at my advanced age, I feel like My voice as a writer is finally coming through, so I'm proud of creating the viewer, and I think my voice does come through there. But I'm proud of these Altman books too, because I really feel when you read the books, you'd be like, oh, yeah, that's Justin. Or I understand Justin more. Or I could understand the image of Justin creating the Justin from reading the books. You know?
- [64:50]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. I find that when I do my media industry work, I'm often writing as a teacher, and when I do more film criticism work, I'm often writing as a cinephile and exercising those different voices. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Justin. It's really been a pleasure to speak with you and to learn more about your work and about this book. The book is. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
- [65:13]
Justin Wyatt
No, you're very welcome. I really enjoyed it, Pete.
- [65:16]
Pete Kunze
Thank you. The pleasure was mine, for sure. The book is Creating the Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem, available now from the University of Texas Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze, and this has been New Books and Media on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.