Kent’s Official Blog

Douglas said to me regarding the disappointing Quarterlife debut: it just goes to show that you can’t market crap (or something like that).

The online numbers don’t lie, the Quarterlife wasn’t really embraced online and now it’s been unbraced by TV too.

The folks behind Quarterlife are smart, but they did things too much in the old way.

The problem when you’re dealing with a scarce resource like a network programming grid, everything needs to pull its weight instantly.  It’s such a highstakes game that shows need a large audience and the ad dollars that follow it to be there immediately.

And if you can’t get that audience, then your show gets cancelled.  Quickly.

Cool quote from that last link:

ABC canceled the show not despite this huge investment but because of it. After all, if a massive holiday ad campaign and a big star couldn’t persuade you to watch the first episode, why on earth would ABC bank on you coming around for the second or third?

Online is somewhat of a different beast, but only in the fact that you know quickly if your show is gaining traction, and what is and isn’t resonating with the audience.  You can grow with your audience.

That’s why you should spend little, and see what’s working, and then change to better serve the show and the audience.

When we were still really learning about the Ninja character and show, each week was a honing in on what is and what isn’t the character.  We got there through our interpretation of instant audience feedback.

Quarterlife could’ve incorporated this sort of learning and iteration too, but they chose to be more studio-like in their creation and feedback model (having four hour long episodes in the can before releasing).  And then they poured a lot into PR and marketing in traditional media.

Odd considering the subject matter.

And that’s old Hollywood in a nutshell.  Market, market, market.  Get a good opening weekend, a good network debut, quality of the product be damned.

I think the biggest opportunity in New Media is to explore and push the boundaries and let the audience themselves tell you what’s good and bad about what you’re doing.  And then get better.

That process will then allow you to have something that’s quality so that when you engage the PR and marketing machines, it’ll be embraced by a larger audience.

My biggest hope is that the stillbirth of Quarterlife doesn’t set back the leap from web to TV for other folks.