B-television

 ( Film And Video Terminology ) 

In her article Schumacher mentions Amusing Ourselves to Death by an American cultural critic Neil Postman, who formulated the thesis of television programming as a derivative of advertising, creating "a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".

Like Postman, Schumacher notes that contemporary television advertisement often chooses to reinforce brand loyalty rather than promoting product. This reverse marketing approach is used by television broadcasters to advertise the stations themselves. Schumacher lists three specific principles: grabbing the viewers' attention, establishing emotional involvement with the audience, and maintaining the viewers' interest as the cornerstones to acquiring and maintaining market share. A commercial RTL Television station described such a building of viewers' loyalty in positive terms: "RTL has discovered something entirely new for television. The viewer".

The strategy of creating viewer loyalty through emotional sensations is reflected in scandalous "special news" that "favor sex and crime topics and employ highly affective commentary style, a clip aesthetic as well as a musical accompaniment borrowed from the crime film genre". As an example, Schumacher mentions Real Personal, a talk show about human sexuality that was televised by NBC five times a week during 1990s. "The title itself encapsulates the message of 'B-TV': real people and their 'real' problems are the focus here", contemplates Schumacher.

Mentioning the highly successful entertainment programs of David Letterman and Jay Leno, Schumacher proclaims that a talk show host, seen daily on the television screen, becomes almost a part of the family. "Spreading not only inanity, but also a sense of security", the host "provides a fixed portion of our daily routine" along with a daily soap opera, daily infotainment show or a daily game show.

"Appeals to viewer emotions and the active participation of the consumer enhance the ability of 'B-TV' to exploit the market", concludes Schumacher.

"We looked at the things people share, and we came up with three categories that were interesting to us: first, people expressing a part of their identity. The second is emotional gifting. The third is social information 'Hey, we were talking about this the other day'. The information is already known, it is not new, all it does it helps resurfacing a known entity inside of a social connection. ... How do you use it? If identity can be expressed with content, what kinds of identities you can come up with? ... And then you make a crapload of content ... Our studio makes almost a 100 pieces of short form videos a week. ... In you have to capture as large audience as possible and program for this audience, because the number of attention slots is finite. This means that 'niche' becomes a pejorative, and many people are left out of media conversation and have no chance to say: 'oh, my god, this is totally me'. The new era of allows us to multiply across these different experiences". This approach worked and brought BuzzFeed millions of views and shares.

Going forward, BuzzFeed realized that a shareable video carrying branded content message can reach a wide audience for a fraction of advertising budget used for traditional advertising campaign. "We are applying the same general strategy: what are the values the brand is trying to communicate, and how they fit with the nearest social values that we know are fundamental to the consumer. ... We had a campaign for new lightweight kitty litter. The national campaign shown on broadcast television had people throwing litter into each other. It was beautifully shot, but it did not align with a single social value I can think of. Throwing litter into each other has a zero chance of being used to connect to another human being. So we took a step back and made a video which is more about relationship with cats, and we used the same kind of general idea of voice-over, and the video did really well".

While Schumacher and Postman regret the prevalence of "advertisement television" with low informational and social value on commercial TV stations, BuzzFeed intentionally produce personalized videos with capacity for sharing. Unlike traditional television, where viewers consume the content passively, users of internet video platforms share the videos they identify with, multiplying the effect of an advertising campaign.