Glee and Digital Media: A Comprehensive Summary
Glee: Targeting Youth in the Digital Age - Wee
Abstract
The television series Glee premiered on FOX in 2009.
Broadcast television networks were struggling to remain relevant to a new generation of youth.
Youth preferred the interactivity and creativity of digital media.
Glee emerged as a (multi)media text/product that found some success by harnessing digital technology, especially social media.
Audiences were encouraged to search for “the biggest [self- professed] Gleek,” spread Glee clips and fan-created content, and interact with stars.
This article examines how the digital age has reshaped network television and the interactions between traditional and “new” media by examining the Glee phenomenon between 2009 and 2015.
Keywords
Fans
Media literacies
Television
Introduction
Glee (2009–2015) tracked the daily lives of teenage misfits in the William McKinley High School Glee Club.
It blended humor, drama, and musical production numbers with contemporary pop hits, Broadway standards, and classic rock.
Aimed at a youth audience, Glee emerged when the U.S. television industry was grappling with audience erosion and concerns about remaining relevant to millennial youth (born between 1995 and 2012).
Glee consciously sought to cultivate a relationship with digitally distracted youth who had largely abandoned traditional television for online activities.
These youths were increasingly active in adapting and fashioning their own entertainment texts.
This article uses Glee as a case study to examine how FOX exploited digital technologies and a digitally engaged North American millennial youth demographic to support traditional media content and formats.
By 2009, interactions between traditional and “new” media had begun to affect media consumption, promotion, fandom, and audience behaviors.
This investigation considers how the digital age has steadily undermined the cornerstones of broadcast television, including appointment viewing and delivering consumers to advertisers.
Attracting an elusive youth demographic and delivering that audience to advertisers was increasingly vital to FOX’s bottom line.
FOX’s strategy revolved around:
Exploitation of digital platforms and social networks to promote Glee and mobilize fan activities.
Careful use of Twitter to reinforce interaction, community, and engagement between Glee’s stars and fans.
Use of digital media to attract youth back to “appointment” television, which depends on ritualized viewing on a network-controlled schedule with regular exposure to advertisements.
FOX acknowledged that the youth demographic was more interested in participatory, community-oriented, interactive experiences commonly found online and on social networks.
Commercial Media Entertainment in the Digital Age
From “Traditional”/Analog to “New”/Digital Media
The turn of the 21st century coincided with the widespread adoption of new digital media communication systems.
This gave rise to social networking sites, online video distribution platforms, and mobile media service providers.
These innovations have raised significant challenges for the previously entrenched “old” media industries.
The “old” media industries are characterized by a “closed” system with high barriers to entry and content consumed on regulated schedules, in specific venues, via distinct devices and technologies.
New media are perceived as “open,” “democratic” technology with low barriers to entry, enabling interaction between content users/consumers, producers, and distributors.
New media give users/consumers greater independence, choice, and agency.
Media consumers can easily acquire and consume entertainment at their own convenience, circumventing content provider/ distributor-imposed broadcast or release schedules, and avoiding disruptive advertising.
Traditional advertiser-supported, mass-oriented, television broadcast networks have suffered a steady decline in their audience share in the digital age.
Television in the era of digital delivery platforms and media convergence is characterized by interactive exchanges, multiple sites of productivity, and diverse modes of interpretation and use.
Digital technologies have reshaped the relationship between audience/consumer and media text/product.
Contemporary audiences had embraced the freedom, independence, and agency offered by digital technology and were emerging as active users and consumers of media.
The Rise of the Digital Media User-Consumer-Producer
New media’s “democratic” access encouraged the growth of a new generation of media consumers who are increasingly involved in media-oriented creative and (re)productive activities that are often outside corporate and industrial control.
Viewers, users, and fans have historically “poached” copyrighted media content, using and transforming it to serve the users’ own purposes and pleasures.
Going digital allowed viewers to evolve into amateur media producers who actively embrace the opportunities to “customize,” create, and distribute the resulting (re)media(ted) products via online platforms that are accessible to a global audience.
The proliferation of such activities attracted scholarly attention, resulting in the growing adoption of portmanteau terms such as Axel Bruns’s (2008) “produser”—a blending of “producer” and “user”—and Tappscott and Williams’s (2006) “prosumption”—“production” and “consumption”.
The rise of the “produser” and acts of “prosumption” related to the evolution of digital technologies and user-friendly software cannot be divorced from the emergence and heightened popularity of both video sharing websites (including YouTube and Vimeo) and social networking sites (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter).
Social networking sites first emerged on the Internet as online communities of people brought together by specific shared interests.
By 2005, the online social network landscape was increasingly dominated by Facebook and MySpace.
Digital youth embraced the social media experience and the popularity of blogging and webcasting as forms of communication and personal expression, marked by active engagement and creative activities characterized by hands-on production, connection, and interaction.
The median age of the FOX viewer had risen to 44 years old in 2009.
Unlike previous generations weaned on a largely passive consumption of professionally produced media, members of a growing segment of digitally savvy youth expect to have control over when and how they access, consume, and experience their media entertainment.
In 2006, a Pew survey revealed that 65% of Americans aged 18–29 years deemed a personal computer a necessity, while less than half (47%) of the same demographic did not consider it necessary to own a television.
A majority (60%) did not consider watching specific networks a daily necessity.
Digital youth’s preference for seeking out entertainment via digital technology portals that offer heightened opportunities for active prosumer participation is a new challenge that traditional media producers and exhibitors must grapple with in their bid to retain audience attention (Watkins; boyd).
Network television’s struggle to attract young viewers has steadily threatened the networks’ profit margins.
Viewers/consumers are crucial, as is delivering the “right” audience.
Younger viewers are especially sought after since they possess disposable income and the time and inclination to spend it, and as they have become more elusive, advertisers are usually willing to pay a premium to reach them.
Glee’s parent network, FOX, initially found success as a network broadcaster by deliberately targeting a younger demographic, specifically audiences aged “12 to 34,” with a particular interest in the narrower “12 to 24” segment, when it was first launched in 1986.
FOX initially found success with American Idol (2003– 2015), the reality-show singing competition that foregrounded audience participation and engagement by having viewers “control” the results by voting for their personal favorites, ensuring that contestants with the least votes each week were eliminated.
FOX then sought to leverage American Idol’s popularity with youth, seeking to develop a series that would retain Idol’s youth audience into the next broadcast hour (Trakin 2010).
The result was Glee.
The Glee Phenomenon
In creating Glee, FOX blended key features from American Idol that seemed most appealing to youth audiences with typical elements that characterize youth-oriented television.
Like Idol, Glee—a show about a group of teenagers who overcome personal and institutional challenges to form a Glee Club—featured musical performances covering popular songs, revolved around notions of talented unknowns and underdogs pursuing their dreams of acceptance, popularity, and success/fame, and offers an exuberant celebration of hitherto untapped or undiscovered star potential.
These elements played out against a backdrop of traditional youth-oriented prime-time television conventions.
The study focuses on FOX's multimedia strategies to connect with digitally oriented youth.
FOX’s promotional campaign founded on the effective exploitation of social media to discover “the biggest Gleek”.
FOX’s commitment to building a Glee(k) community on Twitter by mobilizing tweets from Glee’s stars and the franchise’s creator.
FOX’s use of online digital media stores (such as iTunes) and social media’s interactive/participative potential to (re-)institute appointment television.
FOX.com’s Search for the “Biggest Gleek”
FOX’s marketing and promotional strategies for the show were more innovative, particularly in its harnessing of digital media—in particular MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.
Digital media platforms and social media were a dominant part of FOX’s promotional game plan when Glee premiered in 2009.
FOX ran the “Who is the Biggest Gleek?” contest on FOX.com, directly involving social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
FOX’s “rallying call to Gleek-dom” reveals the discourse-oriented and structurally organized strategies that FOX embraced to engage with youth.
The media industries began to recognize digital and social media’s potential for connecting with and attracting audience interest, prompting entertainment production teams to begin “positioning their creative texts to plug into pre-formed fandoms and pre-established online cultures and communities”.
The promotional copy of FOX’s online campaign/contest was peppered with exhortations that directly addressed digitally engaged, socially networked youth.
These exhortations functioned simultaneously as a call to action founded on recognizing this youth generation’s power, agency and influence, while also acknowledging its members’ facility with digital activities—thus subtly exploiting their potential for fan-driven promotional behaviors.
FOX’s campaign/contest opened with an invitation-cum-challenge-cum-rallying cry to youth, asking, “Who is the biggest Gleek?”.
The term “hails” references Althusser’s ideas on how ideological state apparatus, in this case the media, function to interpellate individuals into a socially and, in this case of Glee and FOX, media-constructed subject identity, specifically that of “the biggest ‘Gleek’” (Althusser 1971).
These competing and complex entreaties combined to construct a distinct “Gleek” identity, one that was inextricably linked to the show’s teen characters who were consistently ridiculed and ostracized by the more popular cliques in their high school.
Standing up to peer pressure and ignoring the derisive judgments of their peers, these marginalized teens instead choose to band together and pursue their interest in music.
FOX.com’s quest to discover “the biggest Gleek” clearly encouraged fans to align themselves with the show’s characters, values, and concerns.
The adoption of the portmanteau word “Gleek” (a combination of “glee” and “geek”) mobilized a range of complex and contradictory associations that functioned to carefully construct a unique subject identity that FOX hoped would resonate with, and appeal to, its target youth demographic.
In contemporary culture, the term “geek” identifies someone with an overriding and excessive interest in, and mastery of, an often nonmainstream and esoteric field or topic.
In addition, the term historically carries negative connotations of social awkwardness, marginalization, and isolation.
In contrast, the term “glee” connotes joy, exuberance, energy, and youth: positive ideals that might seem irreconcilable with concepts of “geekiness” except (seemingly) within Glee(k)-dom.
In doing so, the show attracted youth audiences by acknowledging their feelings of (perceived) alienation and isolation, while also offering them an appealing sense of belonging to a larger Gleek community, one that (ironically) makes “being unpopular,” popular.
FOX’s “Biggest Gleek” contest also encouraged activities that centered on the cultivation of a Gleek community structured around, and supported by, the activities of self-professed Gleeks on social media networks.
There is an obvious contradiction in effect here, as these references to the fans’ friends and the implicit acknowledgment of the fans’ influence over these friends clearly run counter to the Gleek identity they are encouraged to adopt, an identity associated with the show’s unpopular and ostracized characters.
By consciously and carefully taking advantage of new digital technologies and the increasingly transmedia environment, FOX was clearly embracing what Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) refer to as an engagement-based model in its interaction with and incitement of fan activities.
FOX’s engagement strategies clearly extended toward the exploitation of fan labor.
FOX’s tactics support Lothian’s observation that “media producers have explicitly sought to solicit fan participation as labor for their profits in the form of user-generated content that helps build their brand”.
FOX offered “Gleeks” an appealing identity to embrace, one that acknowledged their agency, their technological and creative skills, and their commitment to the show, its characters, and its values.
The Gleek identity thus encompassed a measure of the atypical (and contradictory) in blending together notions of marginalization and separation from mainstream values and interests, contained in the term “geek,” with a sense of joy and celebration, encapsulated in the word “glee.”
The “Gleek” identity also invited fans to embrace the (ultimately appealing) role of the downtrodden underdog who would eventually have its day.
All these concerted efforts at attracting fans and directing their activities and behaviors were aimed at encouraging youth viewers to return to watching network-scheduled television on the TV screen, a point foregrounded by the reminder to “watch Glee this Fall.”
Glee’s popularity with younger audiences helped lower the FOX viewer’s median age to 41 in the 2009/2010 season (Herrera 2009).
Glee was the top-rated show in the crucial (and lucrative) 18–49 years female demographic during the 2009–2010 broadcast season
Cultivating the Glee Fan Community on Twitter
FOX continued to exert leverage on social media, Twitter in particular, to continue cultivating a Glee fan community revolving around interaction and engagement between fans, cast, and crew.
FOX and Glee benefited from an increasingly complex web of Glee-related Twitter messages exchanged between Glee stars, production personnel, and invested Glee fans, all of which combined to weave a sophisticated tapestry of connections.
FOX’s activities were largely directed at cultivating and feeding that segment of the audience/fandom who enjoyed this form of engagement—though (in something of a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” type of situation) it is also worth recognizing that FOX’s activities helped cultivate this fan desire by actively inviting fans to engage and interact.
I previously highlighted, the most common use of social networks is as a means to connect with others and maintain friendships and relationships.
As Ellcessor notes, “Internet celebrity is founded … firmly on illusions of intimacy … [T]hrough perceived access to private, backstage behavior … the authenticity of a star’s self-representation … [is] experienced through the possibility of interaction” (2012, 51).
A brief examination of tweets from Glee’s stars reveals the degree to which they cultivate the impression of access and connection to promote their upcoming appearances and hype future Glee-related projects.
A random sample of tweets from various Glee regulars includes tweets (often with attached photographs) announcing and commenting on upcoming guest stars appearing on Glee.
There are also numerous tweets and exchanges between the Glee costars.
Importantly for fans, the stars acknowledge and even occasionally respond to fans’ tweets, thereby evoking the notion of equality and interaction so appealing to fans.
One example was the chorus of tweets that immediately followed Glee co-star Amber Riley’s win on the live-broadcast of Dancing With the Stars.
One example was the chorus of tweets that immediately followed Glee co-star Amber Riley’s win on the live-broadcast of Dancing With the Stars.
These tweets, with their heartfelt and immediate expressions, were shared among the stars, their fans, and followers, effectively communicating a sense of shared grief and community over the event.
Reinstating Appointment Television
Glee also sought to reinstate “appointment television” by exploiting digital media sites such as iTunes and Twitter.
One such strategy involved boosting fan anticipation for new episodes weekly by releasing each new episode’s songs on digital media stores, including iTunes, a week before the episode aired on television (Donahue 2010).
These carefully timed weekly releases were promoted as “premieres” in themselves and worked to generate curiosity and interest in the new song covers, while also teasing and promoting the new episode.
Viewers could then develop a scheduled habit of visiting iTunes to look up, listen to, and purchase these songs, in anticipation of then tuning in to FOX during the scheduled broadcast to watch the new episode.
FOX attempted to inculcate the habit of watching traditional, scheduled, broadcast television by strategically “piggybacking” on the marketing and distribution of Glee’s music via digital media sites.
In these instances, viewers tuned in to the scheduled episode—usually a repeat to ensure that viewers can multitask without missing out on crucial plot developments—and submitted tweets in a live, real- time, direct response to the events occurring in the episode as it aired.
These tweets typically ran along the bottom edge of the television screen.
Glee music releases on iTunes, followed by watching the related episode during its broadcast, and tuning in to episodes to participate in live tweeting all constitute “appointment TV.”
FOX clearly hoped to raise its viewership ratings, introduce younger viewers to the habit of watching television in the traditional sense, and thereby lure youth back to broadcast television.
Conclusion
Glee premiered at a time when broadcast television networks were beginning to acknowledge the crisis associated with audience erosion and a growing irrelevance to a new generation of youth that continues to abandon traditional television, eschewing its passivity for the interactivity and creativity of the digital media interface.
Glee’s varied social media activities worked to create a growing impression of intimacy, access, and interaction between the show’s producers and their fans.
The success of the 2009 Glee marketing campaign resulted in the expansion of the text into a (multi)media franchise that successfully appealed to and attracted the youth audience, at least in the show’s first few seasons.
This illustrates traditional broadcast television’s ongoing difficulties in navigating the evolving technological landscapes, predicting (and directing) audience behaviors, and ultimately, the unresolved vulnerabilities of broadcast television’s traditional structuring activities.
Regardless of Glee’s later (mis)fortunes, the activities examined here are important as they represent the series of increasingly complex negotiations crucial to contemporary media culture evolution, negotiations that acknowledge the tensions (and complementarities) that exist between different media; and between industrial and fan production; between shifting levels of creative agency and activity; and the increasingly ambiguous distinctions between the cultivation and exploitation of fan labor. These new media strategies carefully addressed fans as active participants in the Glee experience while working to reinforce the fans’ intimate relationship with the show, encouraging a sense of directly ensuring the continuing success of the Glee family to which the fans belong.