Audience expectations

Jonathan M. Shiff explains that a children’s audience is not any different from any other audience except they are probably a lot more critical – they are a much tougher audience, a lot less forgiving, and you can’t mess them around. In Australia, the standard of children’s television is a lot higher than the bar set for prime time drama and so the audience has high expectations in terms of the production values – they don’t differentiate between the Harry Potter movie and what they watch on television, even though the budget differs (Shiff, 2008).

Generation Y and ‘the millenials’, as described by Geoffrey Long, are ‘the first generation to grow up with high-speed internet connection and social media.’ Children of this generation will grow up with a highly developed knowledge of social software and networked media. And so we are seeing that because of these Changing Media Literacies, audience expectations are also beginning to change. As Shiff notes:

“I can tell you now, that a lot of the children’s audience globally wherever there’s the net, is drifting away from traditional television. And certainly our audience is no longer driven by schedules - People work their television on demand … in a heartbeat there’ll be no such thing as scheduling. Its on demand content, if people want to watch the Jonathan show, they’ll dial it up … and where they watch it will become more and more their choice”

the move towards digital and transmedia storytelling could be seen as the result of children’s media producers being under more pressure to create content that will satisfy the expectations of a highly technically aware and socially networked generation. Long relates transmedia story telling to a, ‘anti-passive consumer culture,’ especially for children, who are most likely to participate in the narrative and extended content which surrounds a story. In Transmedia Storytelling - Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, Long cites Henry Jenkins, explaining that the generation who grew up with the transmedia experience of Pokemon will now expect the same things from the media they watch as they grow older.

Shiff can be used as an example of a children’s media producer finding themselves under pressure to come up with new ways to recapture this technologically advanced audience. Shiff explains:

“I’m constantly brainstorming and trying to think of ways to improve what we’re doing because I feel that we’re out of the step technologically, I feel that we’re loosing audience off television to the net. I feel that the challenges as producers, as creators of content is to try to get out there and recapture that audience. I’m very concerned about all that, I don’t think I’ve broken that code but it provides a constant challenge .. and that’s only occurred in the last two or three years, where the audience is drifting from television – the bus has kind of left you in the dust and you have to run and catch up to the bus and run ahead of it a bit”

However, Shiff believes that above all, children have high expectations of storytelling, “Whether its children’s television in the present media delivery format, or on the net, or on mobile phones, or hologramatic experiential television, its all about good storytelling”.

LINKS

 * (see Audio of Interview with Jonathan M. Shiff)
 * (back Investigation and Research (Section 2))