Emerging Dynamics in Audiences' Consumption of Trans-media Products: The Cases of Mad Men and Game of Thrones as a Comparative Study between Italy and New Zealand

By Carmen Spano

Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multi-modal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers.

The research in the book is structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent non-dominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts. 

Game of Thrones and Mad Men have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. The methods employed for gathering useful data for the comparative analysis were both quantitative and qualitative. The first phase of data collection consisted in the production of four online surveys: two in English for Game of Thrones and Mad Men, respectively, and two in Italian. The second phase of data production consisted of the organization of the focus group sessions in, respectively, the city of Milan (Italy) and city of Auckland (New Zealand).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785275166

Book preview

Emerging Dynamics in Audiences’ Consumption of Trans-Media Products

Emerging Dynamics in Audiences’ Consumption of Trans-Media Products

The Cases of Mad Men and Game of Thrones as a Comparative Study between Italy and New Zealand

Carmen Spanò

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Carmen Spanò 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940786

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-514-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-514-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

1.Introduction

A Complex Media Landscape

Two Case Studies: Mad Men and Game of Thrones

Methodology

2.Rethinking Audiences in a Trans-Media, Transnational Age

The Importance of Researching Audiences

The Concept of the Audience

Audiences as Active Users: Interpretation Theories and Audience Reception Studies

Audiences and New Media

Audiences and Media Fandom

Comparative Audience Studies in the Convergence Era

Conclusions

3.National Audiences and Consumption Trends in Nondominant Media Markets

Respondent Demographics—Frequency Tables

Sample Composition—Contingency Tables

Main Variable: Nation

Main Variable: Show

Chi-squared (χ²) Test—Definition

Chi-squared Test Results—Significant Associations for the Main Variable Nation

Chi-squared Test Results—Significant Associations for the Main Variable Show

T-test—Definition

T-test Results for the Main Variable Nation

T-test Results for the Main Variable Show

Conclusions

4.The Peculiarities of Mad Men and Game of Thrones in the Trans-Media Ecosystem

Mad Men

Advertising the 1960s: The Notion of Nostalgia

Hidden Identities and Social Masks

Mad Men’s Truth: Between Nostalgia for A Place hat Cannot Be and Desire for a Time That Is Yet to Come

Official Trans-Media Structure of Mad Men

Mad Men and Its Centripetal Complexity

Game of Thrones

Between Fantasy and Realism

Game of Thrones’ Ambivalent Pleasures: All the Nuances of the Human Being

Official Trans-Media Structure of Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones’ Centrifugal Complexity: The Series as a Vehicle for Social Interaction

5.Trans-Media Storytelling and Fans’ Modes of Engagement: An Overview

The Trans-Media Issue

Mad Men Versus Game of Thrones: How Narrative Complexity Matters For Trans-Media

Where Do We Go From Here?

Appendix I: Survey Questions

Appendix II: Focus Group Topics

Bibliography

Index

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

A COMPLEX MEDIA LANDSCAPE

Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multimodal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed, to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers (Sandvoss, Reception 246). Audiences operate as active users of media content by exercising control over their viewing schedules, and by integrating the media texts they are interested in into their lives through new patterns of consumption. This freedom in the modes of accessing and engaging with diversified media material has also benefited from the development of trans-media storytelling. The expression refers to the increasingly popular delivery of related media content across a set of media platforms, resulting in a particular narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.) (Scolari 587). Movies, games, TV series, novels, webisodes, podcasts, comic books, fan fiction and many other media forms all come together in creating a rich, expanded story-world. In his seminal work Convergence Culture (2006), Henry Jenkinsasserts:

A trans-media story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of trans-media storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. (Jenkins 95–96)

Elizabeth Evans, who in 2011 carried out a study on audience engagement with online and mobile phone content related to the TV shows Spooks and 24, defines the same concept as the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms (Evans, Transmedia Television 1). The word industrial is important here. In the current mediascape rich in on-demand content, trans-media emerges as one of the most widespread strategies of media corporations (Scolari 590) for engaging audiences because it optimizes the transformation of imaginary worlds into expanded narrative brands. Brands represent complex discourse universes with a strong narrative imprint (Scolari 599).¹ The aim of the increasing transformation of TV series into fictional worlds is to build a solid relationship between the brand and the consumers by matching the brand’s values with consumers’ lifestyles.

According to Nele Simons, the television industry has been experimenting with new ways to secure its central position in the media landscape (2221) in order to gain viewers’ attention and devotion. Indeed, the proliferation of distributors and delivery platforms as well as viewers sharing content translates, among other things, into an ever more divided attention span on the part of audiences. One way to overcome this diffusion is to generate emotional investment (Askwith 3). Henry Jenkins has defined this strategy in terms of affective economics, or a marketing logic that seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumers’ decision making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions (Simons 2221). The concept of brands as virtual worlds in which individuals can immerse themselves constitutes the driving logic according to which the majority of today’s media conglomerates choose to promote and sell their products and services. Trans-media storytelling plays a substantial role in the achievement of this task since it "introduces a mutation in this scenario in which the brand is no longer inside the fiction, but rather the fiction is the brand" (Scolari 599). Characters, topics, aesthetic style, costumes, settings—all these fictional attributes contribute to the foundation of enhanced narratives whose specific traits can be transported across multiple platforms with the intent of offering a wide set of experiences. Audiences become actively involved in the exploration of these universes, mainly because they feel more free to select the best options—in terms of timeframe, contexts and device choices—for consuming media products. Trans-media texts, therefore, represent a useful tool for exploring the dynamics of today’s audience practices.

However, it is important to keep in mind that old media forms still exist and have not been removed from the actual contexts in which both producers and consumers operate:

A vast number of media products are still produced by media corporations, which are old top-down systems based on capitalist logics and not always in favor of the maximalist approaches toward participation and democracy. (Carpentier, Media and participation 207)

This means that media convergencebecomes a field of struggle between old media conglomerates and empowered consumers, whose freedom in participating and creatively managing the media texts they come in contact with is not totally free from hindrances and restraints. The main intent in the building of fictional worlds that can be freely navigated by fans is to provide forms of engaged consumption whose directions can, eventually, still be regulated and exploited by media conglomerates. These limitations help media companies to exert a significant amount of control on the ways their products can be used and appropriated by industrious consumers, and they also represent the lens through which the ongoing shift in the audience’s role has to be valued and understood.

To argue that audienceshave become an essential part of the media production system means that their actions weigh more in today’s media environment, and are taken into greater account by media companies. Indeed, audience members are offered various opportunities to manage their time in relation to the consumption of TV products, as well as to distribute their creative productions. Nonetheless, it is necessary to ask, is there a limit imposed on this freedom? Do media producers succeed in steering audiences’ consumption habits? And if they do, are audiences aware of this condition that aims to monitor their activities and take advantage of their creative works? As Terranova observes, free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of cultureis translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited (37).² It is in the balance between the embrace and exploitation of cultural products that originate from audiences’ free labor that the complexity of the current media scenario lies. Therefore, a proper examination of audiences’ behaviors in responding to the consumption options offered by trans-media franchises is indispensable for understanding audiences’ effective role in this cultural production circuit, as well as in the social and technological transformations of our times. In turn, these consumption practices also relate to and influence audience members’ sense of identity. As something under constant (re)construction, identity is affected by the daily experiences of making decisions, engaging with the world and reflecting on one’s own actions. The consumption of and investment in television programs have become a significant part of this set of everyday experiences, to the point that they affect individuals’ identities as well as their social relations.

The objective of this research project is to investigate the new forms of empowered agency possessed by audiences with reference to two particular television texts: Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The two popular American TV shows are highly successful products of the convergence era, which is marked by trans-media storytelling in which reception practices of a text within one medium need to be analyzed in relation to the inter-textual and inter-medial contexts of such a text (Sandvoss, Reception 246). Much has already been written about the significance of trans-mediality in relation to the Hollywood context, with scholars examining forms of trans-media intertextuality (Kinder), trans-media storytelling (Jenkins, Convergence Culture; Evans, Transmedia Television) and trans-media story-worlds (Scolari; Wolf), and others investigating the relation of trans-media to fandom (Hills, The Expertise; Bennet and Booth) as well as models of trans-media brand advertising (Tenderich and Williams; Freeman). This research has, so far, mainly focused on trans-media narratives and story-worlds, with the main goal being to conceptualize the central characteristics of the phenomenon, rather than to focus on actual audience practices. Multiple media platforms used by participatory audiences, however, call for new studies and theorizations.

The analysis of audience engagement with trans-media texts will disclose important information about the various ways people organize their lives around media as well as on how these activities help them to make sense of the world they live in. As Sandvoss has noted, the moment that the single text as a recognizable and identifiable category seems increasingly to disappear in a converging media environment is hence precisely the moment when reception aesthetics becomes an essential methodological and conceptual tool in the study of media audiences (Reception 246). The investigation undertaken for this study has been structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent nondominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts.

TWO CASE STUDIES: MAD MEN AND GAME OF THRONES

Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) and Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–19) have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. It is not about offering the same content in different media platforms, but it is the world-building experience, unfolding content and generating the possibilities for the story to evolve with new and pertinent content (Gambarato 4). The world-building experience is possible thanks to the employment of the core concepts of trans-media storytelling within the structure of the shows. During his talk at the Futures of Entertainment Conference at MIT in 2009, Henry Jenkins listed the following elements of trans-media narration: multiplicity, seriality, spreadability, drillability, immersion, extractability, world-building, performance.³

Multiplicity allows fans to have access to alternate versions of characters or parallel universe version of the story (Gambarato 6), whereas seriality involves the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple distinctive parts or installments not simply within a single medium, but rather spread out across multiple media systems (7). Similarly, Mad Men and Game of Thrones present multiple entry points (via different media technologies) for their followers, and this circuit of extensive content allows followers to actively engage in a process of reconnection of the events and stories through which they can also manage to detect gaps and excesses in the narratives. The function of these discursive strategies is to keep audiences’ thirst for more content and more explanations always alive, and at the same time to involve them in an endless, captivating discovery game. The opportunity that both shows give to explore, in depth, the content of narrative extensions offered by a trans-media story (Gambarato 6) is defined in terms of drillability: drillable media stimulate spectators to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling (6). This experience usually affects the relationship between the trans-media worlds and the audience’s everyday life, so that a vertical descent into a text’s complexities implies one’s immersion (Gambarato 6) into the fictional universe generated by the story. Apps, books, videogames, interactive features and online discussions populate the Mad Men and Games of Thrones’ trans-media apparatuses and are all means to this end. On the other hand, extractability refers to the possibility fans may have to take away with them aspects of the story, incorporating it in their everyday lives (e.g., memorabilia) (Gambarato 6); Mad Men and Game of Thrones’ extensive merchandise performs this exact function. In addition, a trans-media story is indeed a story-world capable to support multiple characters and multiple narratives across multiple media. Trans-media extensions often lead to fan behavior of capturing as many elements of the story as possible (7). In accordance with this concept, the world-building practice is a collaborative construction of charts, maps and concordances (Jenkins, Revenge of the Origami Unicorn), partly provided by producers (e.g., Mad Men summarizing videos, Game of Thrones genealogy lists) and partly created by fans themselves in order to fulfill their desire to map and master as much as they can know about such universes (Jenkins, Revenge of the Origami Unicorn). The production of user-generated content by fans and followers is another fundamental feature of trans-media, defined as the ability of trans-media extensions to stimulate fans to produce their own performances that can become part of the trans-media narrative itself (Gambarato 7). The so-called cosplay phenomenon,⁴ for instance, is an interesting example of the creative activities in which viewers may engage by taking inspiration from the setting, the costumes and the accessories of their favorite TV program. In a similar way, Mad Men fashion contests and online guides for making cocktails and organizing fancy parties inspire spectators’ creativity in finding their own direction in the re-creation of environments and ambience from the past.

In addition to the critical acclaim and complex structure that substantiate the prestige and the narrative quality of both Mad Men and Game of Thrones, the two TV series exhibit other relevant attributes that make them exemplary case studies for this research project. First, the TV shows belong to different genres, with Game of Thrones developing as fantasy whereas Mad Men is a historical drama. This diversity in content, styles and depiction of historical periods (allowing for the fact that Game of Thrones is fantasy-history) calls attention to a variety of tastes and narrative preferences across a heterogeneous sample of viewers, an aspect considered fundamental to the effectiveness of focus group sessions. Indeed, research participants who describe distinct consumption behaviors can stimulate discussion on an extensive set of perspectives and experiences. Second, Game of Thrones and Mad Men originate from highly different production realities. The former is an HBO creation with a wide and extremely active international fan base (de Castella); the latter is produced by Lionsgate, broadcast by AMC and has a smaller group of loyal followers. In New Zealand, both shows are broadcast by SoHo, a premium entertainment channel available to subscribers on SKY Network television. In Italy, Mad Men is broadcast by the free thematic channel Rai4, which, in the multichannel Italian landscape, targets a niche audience with specific tastes for movies and TV programs. Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is available to subscribers on SKY Atlantic, a new channel of the SKY platform. These facets emphasize the diversity between the two shows in terms of reach and level of engagement.

METHODOLOGY

The methods employed for gathering useful data