TV and Digital Promotion: Agile Strategies for a New Media Ecology

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This project investigates the emergence of new kinds of promotional culture for the television industry in the digital media era, engaging with Britain's leading media and broadcast design company, Red Bee Media, and other media and communications companies, to explore the priorities and challenges of a key UK creative industry sector.The development of a multichannel, multiplatform television environment has created new challenges for TV channels and media brands. With viewers able to choose between, and move across, a wide variety of digital channels, platforms and online services, the television industry has been obliged to find new ways to reach and engage increasingly fragmented audiences. Within this context, a burgeoning creative industry sector has emerged, specializing in brand communication, promotion and design. In seeking to capture and manage attention within a competitive media landscape, promotion has become a major component of TV output and broadcast design. This can range from promos that trail individual programmes and idents that brand channels/networks to new forms of branded and interactive content. TV and digital promotion has become a particular area of creative industry strength in the UK. However, as a sector, it has been conspicuously overlooked in arts and humanities research. Red Bee Media is one of the world-leading companies in broadcast and digital media design, creating logos, idents, trailers, promos, on-screen graphics and interactive entertainment for TV companies and media brands in national and international markets. Formerly part of the BBC, Red Bee is unique in combining technological and creative services to broadcasters and brand owners. It was responsible in the 2000s for the brand identities of BBC One and UKTV, numerous international and digital channels, and the entire Olympic branding of the 2008 Beijing Games for the Chinese broadcaster CCTV. Red Bee is strategically positioned - and positions itself -as a company particularly able to respond to rapid changes in the media environment. This project engages in knowledge exchange with Red Bee in order to address a series of shared research concerns about media promotion in the digital age. Through analysis of Red Bee's creative work practice (following the company's BBC Olympic work in 2012 among other case examples), the project facilitates industrial self-reflection about promotional work and Red Bee's creative leadership in the field. More specifically, the project explores the way that 'agility' is being sought and pursued in promotional terms. Agility has become an operative term for the way that TV/media brands, and the companies that sell them expertise, are striving to navigate viewers through a rich and complex media terrain. This will be further explored through workshop activities drawing together academics, telecommunications and digital media companies focused on the emergent (and agile) promotional form of 'social television.' Finally, the project will curate two events with the BFI that bring Red Bee together with Crystal CG (the company responsible for the digital promotion of the London Olympics) and other key figures in the production of television's promotional materials to open out public discussion about the artistic and cultural value of TV promotion and digital media design. The Olympics provides a topically relevant lens through which to explore promotional screen culture as digital and multiplatform strategies are central to the promotion of the London Games.Following on from previously-funded AHRC research on branding and promotion in the film and television industry, this project will encourage a range of interactions between academics, industry practitioners and public audiences, generating knowledge and understanding about TV promotion as a professional discipline, as a form of screen content, and as a source of UK creative industry leadership.