Nobody is arguing the point about Big Brother being crap, but most of us like to know what comes out the other end as well as what’s going in.

Why, but, why, do we want it soo ?
Is it that we love comparing ourselves to other folk and want to watch other folk making turds of themselves so that we can feel that we are less shitful?

Or are we just lonely at home, or curious about why everybody else watches it, or really needing the insight into what comprises the immediate daily popular culture?

I reckon that when popular culture is widely recognised as poo . . .

. . . well apparently the untouchables in India who work in domestic tasks of shitkicking, shitstirring, and shit carrying, and recycling in general, are well paid.

Do we sit there watching a stream of recyclable personalities so as we know how everyone rates certain reactions, only so we will not put a foot wrong in the bar with the boss we might be hoping for a promotion from?

Maybe one day a guest appearance on BB, or putting in a week or a month with the housemates, will be obligatory in certain professions outside of the popular television personality industry.

I can just see it now, we’ll all have affordable internet streaming in our houses, and there’ll be a whole range of BB type houses, where folk have to go for retreat so as not to be demoted at work; with all of us watching.

That’s the basic idea of calling it Big Brother in the first place isn’t it?

Scary stuff, shit!

Not being familiar with his previous incarnations, I’m wondering how the Kyle ever gets any work. Deadpan or dead dull?

The extended daily show had a lot more (confected) drama than the eviction bit - I’m wondering if they’ve actually gone down the wrong track - dramatically - with this year’s vote to save setup. (Obviously, as Eye says, it makes them a ton of bucks).

Another interesting question is that Bec (and presumably other housemates) still refer to the “experience in the House” and a few of the HMs doing eviction votes referred to the dynamics. That seems outdated now and a residue of previous series - since no attempt at all really is made to represent those dynamics. The storylines and their construction are now far too forgrounded.

Glen’s question about how BB’s users experience it is a really interesting one here.

Rebecca voted herself out of the house. It was the highlight of the show, which is not saying much.

This show is headed for a quick demise. They’d better do something soon, or I’m tuning out.

Cool.

Now just imagine if the complex ideas about society we explore here on LP so resonated across the ‘class’* spectrum, that we realised that we were no longer speaking to the converted, but actually stimulating a whole new audience of people into the nuances of critical thinking.

And imagine if, rather than embedded advertising on this site, it was actually possible that broadcast media would pay to see us GeekFreaks on LPTV.

Imagine a blog that spun off its own show, not the other way round.

What an interesting cultural phenomenon.

*albeit an awkward term.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I dislike Big Brother with such a passion, as well as its being complete crap, is that it promotes nakedly self-centred, dishonest, opportunistic, stab-in-the-back values as admirable to an impressionable audience for cynical ratings-boosting reasons. Hence charming innovations like revenge “hand grenades”, “snap evictions” etc

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/05/18/cane-toads-and-shockjocks/#comment-272818

Lynx won’t really get you more girls

Really? No! Damn. You mean I’ve spent all this money on this foul smelling shit and still no woman. I’ll do anything for love (except shower, colour co-ordinate, refrain from belching in restaurants, listening and developing an interest in something other than rugby). .
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I don’t think you’ve derailed the thread at all. It’s very interesting. I reckon the two-tiered marketing thing will become more prominent and advertisers who can find a way to access the ’smart set’ will prosper. Given that they’re both propaganda resistant and probably have a tendency to evade profiling and any other info access the marketing industry’ll throw at them it’s not easy. I have a few ideas on the subject but I’m torn between the money-go-round and the prospect of furthering the cause of putting a dollar sign on everything.

The greatest tool against the world of advertising is education, for this reason…

There are sections of the Right who like to do away with the concept of an educated public. Ann Coulter for instance, I’d argue, does not believe in Creationism really I think she’s just using it in furtherance of the ‘public schools are Commie indoctrination camps’ schtick. Hence she gets the very people who’d benefit most from quality public schooling to eschew it of their own accord.
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But that’s off topic.

But thanks, Kim and Sublime and everyone. I am ultimately left to walk the same tightrope between the two-tier demos that the show is, and it’s always nice to have a “smarter” crowd catching on, too. So cheers for that!

The intelligence of the non-bogan demo, the “smart” factor, comes into play, based on a perceived resistance and savvy to marketing psychomechanics. The problem with smarter demos is that they are harder to con! They require substance - whereas less savvy demos are easily fooled by branding. Marketing is all about using branding to create an impression of a reality that doesn’t really exist (that works right down the line - Lynx won’t really get you more girls, etc). I spent last year working for companies who wanted me to make them look “green” (a quick panic trend within marketing, last year, that has now subsided because - whaddya know - people aren’t really that motivated to be green), but they weren’t really very green, at all. They were just creating an impression through branding. Now, everyday people would presume that’s right - a picture of the globe, a green leaf here and there, the word “GREEN” in big letters, and surely the product is saving the world.! A smarter, green-savvy consumer would want more info, they know how to assess whether a company really is green, so branding isn’t enough. So, these smart consumers are problematic for marketing because they demand a greater level of reality from a world all about fantasy. The greatest tool against the world of advertising is education, for this reason - bogans are conned by marketing because they really don’t understand the propaganda of it. They think it’s real. They think Big Brother is real - but there’s been a growing rebellion amidst it, and that’s partly why I blog it (it gives them a way in which they can understand the marketing, by joining the dots in something they follow religiously).

I think the marketing-savvy factor is a huge factor in Big Brother, now. So, yes, I think your two-tier observation will increase. It’s not even just that a portion of society are getting smarter to marketing - it’s that the marketing is being pushed and pushed to a point (the propaganda thresh-hold, in a way!) where it’s just too obvious for smarter crowds. It’s certainly a problem for BB. The bogans are still very easy to please (I usually end up with 100,000 of them on my blog, but that leaves 900,000 I can’t reach, unfortunately!) - and they’ve maintained that audience, at the end of the day - but the smarter audiences turned off (as did the press turn on the show - another important factor they are now trying to fix by offering the Big Mouth format, where journalists will be so desperate to be invited onto TV, they will start being nicer about the show).

So the different aspects - class, tastes and concerns, politics, intelligence, etc - all come into play, really. But demos are defined by the chemistry between them and the marketing - “what works for these people?”. So it’s really just, “This is my audience - my target demo - how do these people be successfully persuaded - by what?” All else follows - whether that demo can be categorised by the music they like, or the social class they come from. That’s how the cruelty increased in the show - their demo loves it. They realised the greatest ratings and marketing responses were coming during periods of cruelty. We sit here and call it “bullying”, etc (and it is), but to them, it’s entertainment. Whereas the smarter demos don’t like this element.

So with BB, you’ve got the smarter audience’s ability to see through marketing, and that annoying morality where they don’t like watching people be victimised. Then, you have the “bogans” who are very responsive to marketing and love sex and victimisation (they don’t even mind the sex and victimisation being combined). And this is really the battle of Big Brother, eight years down the track. Two tribes go to war.

Having said that, Big Brother does want to win the smarter viewers

Is kinda obvious tho’ .
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But on the topic of ‘bogans’ and class I’d like to know how the marketers of BB conceive of ‘bogans’. Is it a class thing, a smarts thing, a taste regime? Taste regimes? It seems to me that the cross-marketing angles share a lot in common with, say, breakfast shows and the like where, as you say, the whole thing is one big ad. In those shows the market seems to me to not so much be some target demographic but a generality. An aspect of the Great Mass. Sunrise is orientated around the family aspect of Suburbia. BB, like most reality shows, appeals to its schadenfreude.
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I’m wondering whether the future of advertising will split ever more into these two tiers based on the ’smarts’ of the market. The smart set being catered to with specific promotions targeted to their presumably higher incomes and possibly more selective and active way of receiving advertising. And then a general sphere in which advertising is hard wired into everything; where shows like The OC will be awash with product placement. This already happens with news and current affairs.

Hmmm …much like political party we once knew.

As far as the “bogans” go, their role is that they were tempted by sadism, because the show also realised that offering quite unsavory vicarious pleasure through mob mentality was a greater pull for that audience - particularly the young people (though not exclusive to). So you had something that now the main initiative was to market, having absolutely no moral compass as to what they used to lure those consumers in. Sex and sadism soon ruled the day. That’s why they make sure the women they put in there are particularly “good” for the fall. The public particularly enjoy the crucifixion of women (you can take that on a whole range of other discussions, of course!), and so they deliberately place a range of really screwed up young women in there, every year, many of whom have severe sexual issues (because they always provide “adults only” content, and succumb to the men rather easily).

I think someone earlier said something about looking not at the show, but what it “does”. And the problem with what it does is that it provides the thrill of the kill, without any context for introspection - it’s the opposite to introspection or observation… it’s impulsive, reactionary. Because those impulses translate well in terms of consumer psychology (they motivate people to pick up a telephone, in the case of the calls). Advertising isn’t about THINKING, it’s about impulsive ACTION. And the problem then, socially, is that it deliberately draws on darker elements of human and social nature, and - the argument goes - in the process, effectively legitimises them and reveres them. It encourages it; all the editing and design (of the “game”) is tailored to set up those crucifixions - whether it’s the Fat Lazy Aboriginal Girl (obsessed with food), The Little Princess (who suffers for being a slutty rich bitch) - whatever that bullying of the week is. In the beginning, the slogan and concept was that it would be a kind of “celebration of everyday people and diversity”, but instead it turned into plain old capitalising on social ignorances and counter-productive collectivist mechanics.

This is THE Eye from Eye on Big Brother Kim ‘n I have been linking too!

Welcome Aaron
Seriously.

So, there are a whole lot of things to consider, in regards to comparing ratings, etc, between free to air and Pay TV, and even between the shows, themselves. It’s not just about what is ‘cheaper’ to make, it’s about what is more ‘profitable’ in the end outcome (like any business).

I believe there’s also a profit sharing arrangement with respect to the voting call lines, yes? The producers and the station get a substantial cut of all those pay-by-the-minute calls?