The Psychology of Audience Engagement: Balancing Fan Desires and Producer Vision in the Age of Entitlement

Digital Hollywood Panel Summary & Musings, Tuesday, October 18, 2016

The Psychology of Audience Engagement: Film/TV, AR, VR and Real Time Media - Balancing Fan Desires and Producer Vision in the Age of Entitlement

Left to right: Cynthia Vinney PhD, Independent Researcher, Audience and Fan Psychology, Alumna Fielding Graduate University; Lara Hoefs MA, StoryDisruptive, Audience Insight Analyst and Strategist, Alumna Fielding Graduate University Media Psychology Master of Arts; Pamela Rutledge, PhD, Director, Media Psychology Research Center, Faculty Fielding Graduate University; Moderator: Jerri Lynn HoggPhD, Director, Media Psychology PhD Program, Fielding Graduate University; Jason James, Chief Digital Officer, The Recording Academy (not pictured above).

What are the biggest issues and challenges in audience engagement?

We began from the premise that the media landscape has changed the audience's fundamental assumptions. During pre-social media times, the audience had little expectations of voice. Social media unleashed all kinds of activities that created a delight in sharing opinions but with little accompanying anticipation of a response. Now expectations have increased to where audiences expect acknowledgment, demand respect and feel entitled to having their demands or point of view be addressed. The audience now has teeth. Engagement has become entitlement. This is especially prevalent where audience members have an emotional and identity-based investment in entertainment properties. Cynthia Vinney saw this during her dissertation research exploring the eudaimonic response of fan experience. She found that fans were highly vocal about the choices she made in the curated media that was the prompt for her study.

Drawing on his wealth of experience from soap operas in daytime television and comic book fan communities, Jason James discussed the evolution of technology—from reading Superman to being Superman—and noted that this talking back was not a new phenomenon—fans from highly invested communities have long had high emotional engagement with characters and storylines. They just weren't so loud. He has long used this added insight to “reverse engineer” behaviors from fan communities through design decisions.

Evidence suggests that we are seeing an escalation in how fans express opinions and expect to be heard due to social connectivity across social media and the amplification of voice due to the psychological phenomenon of collective agency. As Lara Hoefs pointed out, this shifting environment has changed the balance of power between producers and the audience. Cynthia also noted that producers need to recognize this perception of power. Even though producers hold legal rights to a property, fans develop a sense of psychological ownership through the personal investment of time, emotion and often content.

We continued to come back to the fact that knowing your audience is of paramount importance—going beyond demographics to the psychological points of engagement. Psychographics needs to go deep and really focus on the “why” motivating behavior. This demands much more than quantitative measures. This is the rationale for persona development, as Jerri Lynn Hogg and I teach in one of our courses, and really digging into the community experience—whether through ethnography, qualitative research, or focus groups. We advocate actually spending time in the community and learning the dynamics, not just pulling a few people out of context. Nevertheless, focus groups can give you some good ideas of where to explore. 

Also important is the story you are telling--both within the property and recognizing how each fan’s story intersects with the product or property. Embracing a story is what turns audiences into fans.

Audience Engagement and VR

VR was a dominant theme at Digital Hollywood 2016.  Thus we asked: given the rapid development of augmented and virtual realities, what are the implications of these technologies for audience engagement?

The success of any new technology depends on adoption. Intriguingly, Jason argued that the winner in the VR race will be the company who can leapfrog current uses and commoditize it; turning VR into a tool of creation for the masses. At present, given its shiny penny appeal, I believe that there is a danger in companies investing in VR designed for the subculture of early adopters. By definition, this group has a different psychological profile that the market as a whole, attracted by novelty and more willing to bear risk and uncertainty to achieve information and status. This approach has two inherent problems: 1) content designed for this profile won’t have wide appeal and 2) this psychological profile won’t be back again after they see what you have to offer. VR has a high ticket price, so re-exploration has to be part of the business model. I also wonder if VR alters the shift Lara proposed between producer and audience. Does the level of complexity, access hurdles and cost move the power back toward the producer?

The neuroscience of virtual environments doesn’t get adequate attention from my perspective. The audience has more control over the direction of attention, but not over the experience of immersion--which triggers visceral and emotional responses out of conscious control. While this has obvious implications for the storyteller and the need for signposts and context that provide the cognitive framework necessary for the story to progress in a way that satisfies the viewer, it also means that the user will feel less "safe." Our brains are hardwired to seek certainty because that is how we survive.  Thanks to our neural structures, ill-equipped for distinguishing between virtual and real events, our brains play it "safe" and trigger somatic and emotional responses if they were real. Our evolutionary brains know it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to avoiding danger. Thus the pleasurable adrenaline rush from watching a horror film in a theater, where we can control our sense of immersion by eating popcorn or looking around, can create a completely different response in VR. Some recent consumer data from Nielsen showed a decrease in interest (relative to a norm) in using VR for genres that challenge our visceral sense of safety (thriller, horror, mystery), and greater interest in genres that offered aspiration and delight (fantasy) and exploration without a plot (travel).  For producers, this is an important distinction in development—and one where having a psychologist on board can help.

Everyone agreed that AR will see much faster adoption due to cost, ease of use and breadth of applications, but we also believe that VR offers great promise and has the potential to be extraordinarily compelling—when we figure out how to do it well.  However we all make this caveat: for widespread adoption, VR needs to be social rather than isolating. 

Nevertheless, VR has some very powerful uses without needing to solve the social element. The obvious examples are games and real estate investment (very big in China, as noted in this week’s Economist), but, as Cynthia noted, VR can also be powerful in social advocacy where it has the potential to engage empathy, a necessary component to gather supporters and influence attitudes. The UN is investing in VR applications to increase global awareness of human suffering in places like Syrian refugee camps.

This gets us back to the importance of knowing your audience so that both the producer’s and audience’s goals are aligned.  

Our takeaways:

Jason: Look for ways to commoditize a product or solution. Knowing your audience will allow you to “reverse engineer” a solution that fits their needs.

Cynthia: The guiding word for interacting with audiences is 'respect.' Understand that fans are invested in your property so they don’t see you as overstepping.

Lara: Make the effort to really know your audience and identifying the meaning they attribute to the product or property before you design strategy.

Pam: Use psychology. Every technology and platform has a different psychological experience that influences meaning, narrative and experience.