Syndication buyers can repackage a niche show for broader audiences.

Evidence

When the syndication rights of 30 Rock were sold to Comedy Central and Tribune’s WGN America, each station was given access to this detailed database, and was also given access to the cast, in order to shoot original footage for its tailored marketing campaigns. 30 Rock is itself a very niche product, having struggled with ratings early in its run, later gaining a slightly broader audience following record-setting Emmy nominations and Fey’s notoriety from impersonating Palin on SNL during the 2008 election. Even without the ratings upswing, however, 30 Rock was a cherished property on account of its “upscale” demographic: it ranked as No. 1 among adults eighteen to forty-nine living in homes with $100,000-plus incomes. However, the DG Entertainment executive informed me that both Comedy Central and WGN America took the opposite approach, aiming their customized, CMS-assisted promotional campaigns at a broader audience. Rather than continue targeting a highbrow demographic with the show’s satirical edge, political humor, and obscure references, WGN America in particular has used the CMS to find more visual-gag-heavy and character-focused clips with which to market a broader comedy for more casual viewing. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 391

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: the CMS database as the material mechanism enabling a show’s ‘identity’ to be rebuilt by each secondary market buyer — content becomes fluid across distribution channels.
• DEEPTHINKING: The database of granular scene metadata decouples a show’s textual identity from any single authorial reading, anticipatory of how secondary-market finance treats content as fungible assets.