by Karima Rafes , published on 3.05.2010

Remember the series The Twilight Zone? The episodes all started the same way: with some regular guy or gal like you or me, till something went wrong…. And suddenly we could put ourselves in the guy’s shoes and were hooked on a story with no high tech, no hamming in front of the camera, no nudity. How come? The trick is to alter the viewer’s state of mind from indifferent to curious!

The Twilight Zone, likewise Stargate SG-1, succeeded in getting viewers to identify with the characters. How did Stargate do it? The narrative line is simple. The SG-1 team comprise a foreigner who wants to integrate and fighting to live with his family, a woman trying to make a place for herself in a men’s world, a father who has lost a child, a misunderstood genius, and so on. I’m not a psychologist but I think everyone can find something in common with one or more of the characters on Stargate!

Sames goes for Lost, which puts a representative sample population on an island. Heroes gives powers to anyone and everyone. The 4400 snatch up average folks and take them into the future. And Plus belle la vie holds up the same slightly distorting mirror to our lives.

The point is to capture viewers’ attention long enough for them to identify with the characters and really feel for them, for their ups and downs. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to turn indifference into curiosity: viewers nowadays multitask while watching TV and don’t always make an effort to invest enough empathy to really take an interest in what happens next.

If the program itself is no longer arousing enough empathy to hold that curiosity, it has got to generate it where the viewer is and put the program “on location”: if you won’t come to the program, the program will come to you!

Maybe on the viewer’s PC, on his mobile, on the beach? It all depends where the viewers you are targeting happen to be.

Imagine this: I’ve just made a series for teenagers portraying a sort of Big Brother on the net. OK, now how did I get them interested in the series?

My target is teens. Where are they? Mostly at their PCs. So I’m going to get at them on the net. But how do I pique their interest in Big Brother?

What makes this a little difficult is that not many people and still fewer teens have the feeling they’re being watched. Teenagers are often the most casual about disclosing personal information.

Hence the birth of the art of making them paranoid: you need only make them feel spied on. And to do that, you need only track them on the web by putting a cookie   on their computer, as all the ad campaigns on the Internet do. Then, by personalising the ad banners with messages targeting the teenager in question and disclosing to him personal information about his friends or others, his indifference will instantaneously metamorphose into curiosity before he knows what hit him…. And you’ve got him hooked, without the slightest empathy or other artifice! Simple & effective… perhaps too effective….

Daydream or reality?

Well, someone actually went ahead and put this transmedia scheme into action in Israel… His code name is DEUS and here’s the result:

Enjoy the video

Karima Rafes, Research Engineer Orange R&D