HBO’s Flexible Gold (original) (raw)

HBO: Brand Management and Subscriber Aggregation: 1972-2007

This is a copy of my PhD thesis, completed in 2011 at the University of Exeter. It represents a new history of Home Box Office, and particularly considers the importance of analysing the early history of the company for understanding its later success as a quality programming brand. As the thesis was researched and written between 2007 and 2011, its historical scope only goes up to 2007, with some mention of later series. It doesn't cover Game of Thrones or other recent HBO series, but I'm happy that certain trends identified in the thesis are still going strong. Feel free to contact me for questions about the thesis.

This is not Marketing. This is HBO: Branding HBO with Transmedia Storytelling

This article deals with the way HBO promotes its shows today using strategies of 'transmedia storytelling' (Jenkins 2006). The US pay-per view cable channel has a history of creating a specific promotional system around its programs. Its famous slogan 'It's Not TV. It's HBO.' accompanied the introduction of narrative complexity in shows like The Sopranos (HBO/Brillstein Entertainment Partner, 1999-2007) or The Wire (HBO/Blown Deadline Productions, 2002-8) for example. Transmedia Storytelling, as theorized by Henry Jenkins, is a way to extend stories across multiple media platforms in order to create a coherent storyworld, giving information on characters or insights on the plots and the narrative universe. This article analyses how HBO is developing strategies of transmedia storytelling. I will focus on two specific television shows, True Blood (HBO/Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, 2008-) and Game of Thrones (HBO/Television 360/Grok! Television/Generator Entertainment/Bighead Littlehead, 2011-), in order to understand how HBO managed to promote these shows and expand its brand in the American and international television landscape. I use a dual methodology, first presenting an analysis of the transmedia strategies related to the universes of the shows. Then I will draw on interviews with the creators of these strategies in order to understand how they are included in the promotion of HBO.

The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand

Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2002

The Family Racket: AOL Time Warner, HBO, The Sopranos, and the Construction of a Quality Brand This paper examines HBO's The Sopranos in the context of several industrial factors. I begin with the series'generic inscription. As a gangster program, The Sopranos comes to us in the form of a pedigreed pre-sold product, a television text of esteemed cinematic lineage. This leads to the examination of branding. In order to corral The Sopranos into the slogan, "It's Not TV, It's HBO," HBO seeks to differentiate its product from lowest common denominator, broadcast fare. The separation results in the construction of the "quality" brand, a problematic concept academics have linked to demographics. HBO's branding strategy has also intensified the claim of competition between pay cable and broadcast television in popular discourse. This claim is problematized by the ratings gathering methodology of A.C. Nielsen and by AOL Time Warner's tiering strategies. By examining the aforementioned strategies, I uncover the materialistrather than auteurist-foundations of The Sopranos.

Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era

Alongside computer games and video games, a more experimental ludic form emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century: alternate reality games (ARGs). This essay explores ARGs in relation to digital media and finance capital through the case study of Speculation, a game that we directed and cocreated with students at the University of Chicago and Duke University throughout 2012. From cryptographic puzzles and online simulations to live performances and geocached dead drops, Speculation incorporates a wide range of media to imagine a transmedia world based on the culture of Wall Street investment banks and the context of the 2008 global economic collapse. Because gamification (a design strategy that uses motivation-oriented game components to promote consumption, labor, and education) and convergence culture (the flow of content across multiple media platforms) are already core components of contemporary capitalism, Speculation’s ARG format offers a platform for thinking within and through our contemporary information economy. The game appropriated the strategies and logics of capital in a medium already caught up in the contradictions of neoliberalism and explored the relationship between contemporary finance and convergence culture through a process that we call “derivative worlding.” This term entangles the futures projected by financial derivatives with the derivative nature of collaborative storytelling inherent to the ARG form. Building on practice-based research methodologies, Speculation blurs conventional divisions between creators and consumers, producers and players, artists and researchers. In the process of discovering, decoding, remixing, and remaking Speculation, thousands of players transformed the game into a collaborative platform for speculating on the future of finance capital.

Meet the predators: The branding practices behind Dragons' Den, Shark Tank and Höhle der Löwen

The TV industry has traditionally relied on advertising and subscription fees for revenue. Recently, brand extensions and co-branding strategies have been rediscovered as income sources. A prominent example of such a strategy is the TV format Dragons' Den, which has been locally produced in many different countries. We use this intriguing case to explore the extensive and intricate co-branding relationships and brand extensions in the business-to-consumer and the business-to-business settings of TV companies. Our paper analyses global adaptations and cultural branding of Dragons'Den; in particular, brand extensions and co-branding strategies.

Plugging Back Into The Matrix: The Intertextual Flow of Corporate Media Commodities

Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2007

This article argues that The Matrix franchise provided global Hollywood with a model for channeling revenue and fans through different multimedia revenue streams via linked commodity narratives. Building on previous theoretical concepts of the expansion of corporate media texts, the article discusses The Matrix as "commodified intertextual flow" where various consumable forms were marketed as narratively necessary purchases for Matrix fans. Ultimately, The Matrix as a narratively integrated brand expanded the marketing strategies for commodity-oriented media texts and undermined the original film's critique of consumer culture. The integration of DVD technologies, release strategies, and ancillary licensing constructed a narrative necessity and "community" of fans who may have felt compelled to buy into the complete multicommodity narrative.

In the Market for Symbolic Commodities

Nordicom Review, 2002

GÖRAN BOLIN Historically, the broadcast media in Sweden and the Nordic countries have been organised around strong public service institutions. In a European perspective, Sweden, together with Denmark and Norway, has also been among the last to abandon the public service model and open the system to commercial competitors (Hultén 1996 p. 10). However, since the late 1980s the Nordic countries have seen deep and thorough changes in their radio and television systems. The deregulation of the public service monopolies in the wake of the introduction of transnational networks via cable and satellite, and the fragmentation that has followed from the enormous increase of new media technologies and content, have shaped the Nordic countries into multimediatised electronic landscapes. This has naturally changed the structures of media organisations (cf. Curran 2000), and has affected output structures both quantitatively and qualitatively (cf. Asp 2001 for a Swedish example). These changes have involved radically changed conditions for the production of broadcast content, perhaps especially for television. And it is probably not overstating the case to say that social and cultural effects will continue to follow in the wake of these processes, and that the consequences of these changes are yet to be discovered in full. Quantitatively there has been an increased output in the broadcast media: more channels, more programmes, more possible viewing hours, etc. The demand for programmes to fill radio and television schedules has, firstly, speeded up the production process, to the benefit of productions that can be serialised, in the system of production that John Ellis (2000) describes as demand-led. A second consequence of the new media geography, and the quantitative increase in output, is the rise of new genres and programme formats. One such new format that was launched when Sweden got its third terrestrial, national, and for the first time commercial, television channel (TV4), was Bingolotto. The introduction of TV4 in 1991 meant that viewers in all parts of the country could watch commercial television. Bingolotto allowed Swedish viewers to take part in a game and entertainment show with a level of prizes that had been impossible to air on the public service channels SVT1 and SVT2. The Bingolotto show, originally produced for a local television network in the Gothenburg area with the aim to help local sports associations financially, has since its start on

"Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality Television in the Age of Its Direct Delivery"

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equityeven as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed "quality" diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.