Back in my Fall TV Preview post, I mentioned my interest (and complete disinterest) for several new shows. While I’m still on the fence about one show in particular, I decided that I’m going to watch a few more episodes before I give it the axe. So I wandered on over to the network site to see when the next new episode would air.
This proved to be a very unnecessarily daunting task.
When you create a web site (micro, mini, etc.) for a movie or television show, it needs to follow a certain mold – it needs to contain certain things: cast bios, character bios, episode guide/recaps, upcoming schedule, etc. Most, if not all, show-specific web sites do this and they make it easy for the user to find the information.
Let’s check out a few:
All of them contain the necessary information needed to find out what you want to know. Do they all look the same? No. That’s fine, as long as the information is there and prevalent.
But what happened in ABC’s world? Lost’s page looks fine. So does Desperate Housewives.
Tell me why Invasion’s page is total crap. If you look at the actual web address (http://abc.go.com/primetime/invasion/blog/index.html), it appears that you’ve just reached the “blog” page. Fair enough, but if you try going to http://abc.go.com/primetime/invasion/, you get re-directed right back to the totally cool looking blog page – complete with missing banners and hard to decipher navigation (meaning I didn’t figure it out right off the bat).
What’s more troubling is that this is the “blog” of the paranoid brother-in-law. In the show, he doesn’t have computer access at home, he records his thoughts on a tape recorder. So how does he have a blog? And even if he had electricity, why is he blogging about “next episodes” and “episode recaps?” This is not a very good marketing tactic from ABC. Rather, I should say that this is not a very well executed tactic.
First off, this blog shouldn’t be the default Invasion home page. This series was just picked up for an entire season, surely, with all the money they spent the filming of all the episodes (they have in the can already) and marketing, wouldn’t they already have a nice accompanying web site to go along with it?
Secondly, the Lost and Desperate Housewives pages aren’t anything spectacular. All we need is a decent landing page to get our information from.
Third, why not make this blog more hidden? Host it at Blogger or TypePad, make people find it. Remember the success of OceanicFlight815.com and Oceanic-Air.com?
Fourth, if dude only has a battery-powered tape recorder and is taping his thoughts... how about you turn that into a podcast? Booyah.
Hello, ABC... you guys rocked it for Lost and this show is supposed to ride the coattails of that success. Let’s start doing that.
+ original post date: October 26, 2005 11:42 AM
+ categories: Television
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