Culture Decoder: For Real?

Former Oxygen Exec Puts Science Behind Development

By R.Thomas Umstead -- Multichannel News, 6/28/2010 12:01:00 AM

A former cable-network marketing executive is pitching programmers on an innovative study that promises to decode the truth behind the success of reality television shows.

The study, Truth Culture Decoder: Reinventing Reality uses a research methodology called semiotics — mostly used in consumer product development to study cultural trends — to help networks better predict the chance of success or failure of reality shows, said Linda Ong, president of independent consultancy company Truth Consulting.

Ong, a former senior vice president of marketing at Oxygen, said the semiotics approach goes beyond traditional consumer focus groups and qualitative study information by looking at the cultural trends that influence what viewers are watching. By “decoding” hidden cultural clues and patterns within successful shows, Ong said, the study — which analyzes over 200 reality shows that aired across the span of 20 years — provides certain dominant and emergent characteristics that can help predict a show’s success.

“Traditional consumer research is great at illuminating what people like and don’t like — it’s very reactive,” she said. “What they’re not good at illuminating is why people are saying what they say.

“What the Truth Culture Decoder does is complement all the existing research by creating a context for why people want to watch something.”Ong has successfully put semiotic-driven research to the test, developing Truth Decoder-customized reports that such networks as Animal Planet, Sundance Channel, MSG Media and Telemundo have employed in setting programming strategies.

Marjorie Kaplan, president and general manager of Animal Planet, said the network used Ong’s research to help develop and launch its “Surprisingly Human” tagline, and in developing reality series Pit Boss. The freshman series, about a group of little people who rescue mistreated pit bull dogs, is averaging 741,000 viewers — above the network’s 602,000 first-quarter primetime average.

“One of the cultural curves that they identified was the idea that people are looking to reconnect with their deeper, truer selves through the natural world, and animals are a medium for that,” Kaplan said. “That was very powerful research for us.”

Adapting her semiotics-focused research to the trend of Jersey-based reality shows such as MTV’s wildly popular Jersey Shore and Style’s Jerseylicious, she said the success of such programming is more about the unique characters within those shows rather than the broader trend of New Jerseythemed content.

“If people just listened to the obvious and don’t understand culturally what the subtext is and why something like Jersey Shore can emerge, they’re going to say, ‘Well, we did a Jersey show, and it didn’t work, so Jersey must be over,’ and that’s really missing the point,” she said. “It’s really about the microsubcultures that are interesting to people — people like [Jersey Shore’s] ‘guidos’ and ‘guidettes.’ It’s not about New Jersey.”

Ong is talking to several networks about implementing the Truth Culture Decoder: Reinventing Reality study. She hopes that it can be as a tool for networks to better hone into the trends that consumers are gravitating to on the reality front.

“Every network says they want to be relevant, but how do you know what you’re being relevant to unless you can connect to something in culture?,” she said. “It’s a way of looking at what’s going in society and using that to feed that back into the organization.”