Teaching Media Convergence

Primetime. Must-See TV. Audience Flow. Counterprogramming. These are terms that describe the experience of television for most of today’s media educators, yet they fail to adequately capture the experience of television shared by today’s students. While past generations may remain locked in traditional viewing patterns and linear engagement modes, the current generation circulates and produces, timeshifts and placeshifts, blogs and vlogs television on their own terms: they engage with TV when they want, where they want, and how they want. Television is no longer simply just television for them, but an endless supply chain of properties and franchises, like Lost for instance, whose content can be watched live on ABC, downloaded through iTunes to a PlayStation 3, or played as an alternate reality game online or as a video game on a mobile phone. Television, the most predominant media channel of our lifetime, its economic models, and the stories it tells have been revolutionized by new technologies, new markets, new audiences, new genres, and new industries.

How might teachers adapt to what Henry Jenkins calls media convergence, an era “where old and new media collide,” where the distinctions between entertainment, advertising, and brands blur?¹ To help students explore the industrial, cultural, social, and technological shifts brought on by media convergence, I designed an undergraduate course entitled US Media Now devoted to the study of television, films, and other media-related events as they unfold when the class is taught. As a media industries scholar and teacher, I focus on issues such as corporatization, regulation, merchandising, and marketing and relate them back to issues of narrative, form, and ideology. Four topics—the Fall television season, branding and product integration, media censorship, and film distribution and exhibition—provide the skeleton for the course, which refreshes itself each and every semester. The Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident on FOX, Britney Spears’s performance on the MTV Video Music Awards, and ABC’s ill-fated Caveman show are just a few of the happy accidents provided by such a living curriculum.

To evaluate student learning in US Media Now, my assignments take the form of creative projects that simulate professional practices in the media industries. Students track one new television show and one movie block-buster through an entire semester, analyzing the aesthetic choices, marketing discourses, and industrial conditions from buzz to exhibition. I ask them to apply critical understandings of media convergence to their chosen texts using three of its key concepts: transmedia storytelling (the flow of stories, images, characters, and information across various platforms), participatory culture (the new ways consumers interact with media content, media producers, and each other), and experiential marketing (the brand extensions that play out across multiple media channels).² These assignments, I believe, capture the spirit of what Bevin Yeatman and Sean Cubitt call “creative theory”—an engagement with “how an object is put together, seeing what can be learned from its construction, and suggesting ways it could be improved upon.”³

In preparing them to write their “creative theory” essays, I ask students to design integrated, multi-platform marketing strategies for a television show based on the futurist approaches outlined in Joseph Jaffe’s Life After the 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising.⁴ Jaffe’s approach includes the internet, gaming, on-demand viewing, experiential marketing, communal marketing, consumer-generated content, and branded entertainment. I also provide students the following guidance regarding media convergence:

Remember, that your strategies should engage consumers in positive, relevant, engaging, and provocative ways to succeed in an incredibly cluttered media marketplace. Your competition is pretty much everyone: marketers, brands, media, and even consumers themselves. Be sure to choose your programming and advertising strategies wisely. Your ideas must provide added value and contextual relevancy for today’s consumer in order to foster involvement, commitment, and loyalty to the show and its brand. In addition, be aware that TV networks are usually subsidiaries of global media conglomerates. Synergy may act as a vehicle for cross-promotion and cross-pollination in your marketing strategies.

In fall 2005, I chose FOX’s Kitchen Confidential...