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

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.

This Follow-on Funding will have an impact on Red Bee, Crystal CG and the digital media promotion sector more broadly; it will also enhance the activities of the British Film Institute and demonstrate the value of promotional screen forms to the wider public that engage with its services.

In a speech at Lancaster House in 2011, Secretary of State for Business, Vince Cable, said that the creative industries are paramount to the UK economy, referencing Crystal as an example of the kind of company that the UK attracts. According to Gilles Albaredes (MD Crystal CG International), the UK is the leading hub in the world for the creative industry sector of digital media design. Red Bee Media is indicative here; it is the largest UK company in a developing sector that stimulates both inward and outward investment.

Through knowledge exchange with Red Bee based on a shared research agenda, this project will facilitate industrial self-reflexivity about the ways in which Red Bee is positioned to respond to the need for media companies to be increasingly agile in their working practices and their promotional outputs amidst the rapid changes and uncertainties presented by the digital media environment. By offering analysis and reflection on the ways in which agility impacts on the creative work and outputs of this sector the project will foster Red Bee's global economic performance and enhance the quality of their creative output. The responsive knowledge exchange between Red Bee and the University of Nottingham enabled through this project will enhance Red Bee's 'thought leadership,' a key resource for a company working in 'a volatile climate, [where] trusted thinking and expert foresight can be gold dust.' (Red Bee, 2011). The knowledge co-production meetings scheduled across the project will enable initial benefits to be realised and responded to through the course of the research, summarised within the final report for Red Bee.

The impact of this research will be extended to other UK companies (including British Telecom and Atomic Media) through a hothouse focused specifically on the status and possibilities of social television. Social television is an emerging area that exploits new technologies to create mediated social experiences around television viewing. By bringing together key industry practitioners with academics from a range of disciplines (arts and humanities, computer science, business), the hothouse will generate new knowledge around the possibilities of social television that will inform professional practice and foster the economic competitiveness of UK industries in this growing field.

The research will also be disseminated more broadly across the industry through the Promax conference, the SCMS and MeCCSA conferences (which are regularly attended by practitioners) and at two public events at the BFI which will be marketed to those working in the industry, as well as the general public. The BFI hold the most comprehensive accessible archive of television programmes, with statutory provision to preserve the output of the UK's commercial terrestrial broadcasters. As most of its television collection is acquired through off-air recording it has a unique record of the interstitial promotional material shown between programmes. This project will facilitate new interactions between the BFI and key practitioners in the creation of such material (including Red Bee and Crystal CG) and will demonstrate to the BFI the archival and curatorial value of promotional artefacts in their collection. In addition, the events at the BFI will provide public access to promotional materials that are not widely available, building on the growing public interest in promotional screen forms. It will also facilitate dialogue and exchange between the producers and consumers of promotional screen content in order to enhance the broader cultural understanding of the role of digital media design and the processes of its creation.