The importance of audience.
I'm a regular viewer of US-based talk-news shows like millions of people all over the world. Thanks to The Late Show (Stephen Colbert), The Daily Show (Trevor Noah) and Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) I've over the years learned to see news as the best companion to comedy (maybe even vice versa).
We've all gotten used to the format and all it's staple elements - the host talking into camera, the on-screen animation, the LIVE band and the off-screen studio audience laughter.
The format is so widely popular and in-demand that it's not needed an overhaul in decades. They've survived and thrived on all the wars, sports, culture, politics and technology the world has to offer without having to change their format in decades. The ongoing pandemic (Covid-19) though has made one such fundamental impact on all these shows that has made me see realise something fundamental about media.
The pandemic took away the LIVE audience.
Leaving the hosts to deal with the entire responsibility of carrying the show.
Was that already not the case though? Were the hosts, the one on whom the camera is pointed for most of the time, not single-handedly carrying the show anyway?
Apparently not.
'Studio audience absence' sounds like a minor inconvenience that could be fixed with some camera trickery, post production and pre-taping.
That, however, is not how simple it's been for these shows.
In the past week I've watched a traumatised Stephen Colbert dealing with his empty seats by doing a rambling monologue crutched on alcohol and way more reliance on LIVE music than usual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPbVN_Rbw
Trevor Noah did an actual song for farewell to studio audience to acknowledge how incomplete the show is while also addressing head on the (absent) elephant in the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgmr9zVUD2A
Most jarring, however, was John Oliver's latest set (done in a new location) that made me cringe every time he paused where there would have been audience laughter originally, as if silently pleading the universe to intervene with a laugh track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_066dEkycr4
As a marketing and communication person, this has made me appreciate the 'importance of audience' in a new way.
Even for purportedly audience-sensitive disciplines like advertising and content creation, a lot of our industries practices are surprisingly blind to the emotions and desires of the real audience i.e. the audience that exists in the real world and doesn't live by the rules that work for marketing.
Biggest culprit is the rush to put work out which reduces audiences to graphs and dots on a matrix.
It's most apparent in the limited number of emotions most advertising, effective and otherwise, seems to work with.
Uncomplicated 'happiness'
Quick 'tears'
Excited 'agreements'
Easy 'moments of realisation'
That's the only few ways (name a few more if you can) the audience's/consumer's presence is limited to in all of advertising media, just like the studio audiences are limited to disembodied laughter in talk shows.
In the case of US talk shows, with their forced absence, the studio audiences have taken away their limited humanity that magically puts all the life in the monologues of talking heads in the box.
It's a moment of learning that all content and all media is only as effective as the humanity it contains.
No matter how smart or how evolved your work is, devoid of humanity it doesn't speak to humans.
By extension, the bigger the distance between the creators and the audience, the less real viz. less effective the creation will be.
Close the excel sheets.
Shut the laptops.
Go have a chat with the garbage man.
Then, write / make the media plan / define the strategic insight.
