A talk with a twist by the chief operating officer of Fremantle, a media company that serves high profile shows like X-Factor and Farmer wants a wife. “My adopted son is autistic.”
Mr. Carter’s talk started with an over the top emotional clip from X-Factor. “Programs like these are made because there is an audience for them. These audiences are segmented for series of target demographic groups. For prime time programs, these groups are often male and young. And these males are sold as ‘eye balls’.
A 30 seconds ad slot around the Super Bowl will cost 3 million dollars in 2010, says Mr. Carter. This is in part because of the sheer size of the group that watches, but also because of the gender and age of the group. And that represents economic value to advertisers.
“Even the very most emotional clips are developed by highly skilled creative people who have a very deep understanding of audience segments. And this understanding, that is expressed as TV entertainment, is economically motivated. As it is in marketing, governments and even in social policies.”
“We study and label everything. Demographics are one of the ways we construct the sense of who we are.”
By multiplying the emotion in TV shows, the program tries to create community. “We use heroic stories, and we maximize this. So everyone has an individual and collective emotional experience.”
Personal life
“My work life is different from my personal life. My son celebrates his birthday tomorrow and is thoroughly unrepresented. His appears only in tiny statistical niches.”
“He only appears in statistics for children with learning problems in the Netherlands. So, there are no television programs for my son.”
“He occupies tiny, unmeasurable niches. So he is invisible. He is defined by what he is unable to do, measured to the mainstream. And because TV programs and even education is measured that way, he slips further and further in invisibility.”
“Because he cannot be recognized he cannot be served, and because he cannot be served hey may never use his full potential. We design special cracks with individual outlines, before we push them in them.”
“It is possible that uniting differences extend further than demographics. I’ve come to believe that people live differently, because they are different. Rather than they are adopting a position relative to the main stream.”
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