On a crisp autumn day in October 2019, you’re walking down the street in San Francisco when you encounter a bizarre advertisement:
“SEE YOUR OWN DREAMS RECORDED IN FULL COLOR!”
Complete with promises of real-time dream analysis from willing participants, this flier urges you to call the tear-able number or visit the website to learn more. You’re the curious type, so when you’re done providing a comfortable amount of personal information, you’re added to an email list where you then learn of the privately-funded foundation organizing this cattle call: The New Noology Network.
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The New Noology Network was an immersive art piece made in 2019 to promote AMC’s new anthological series, Dispatches from Elsewhere. Over the course of five months, participants were guided through emails to join livestreams, browse through websites, and record videos of real-life actions in order to piece together the puzzle presented by the game [¹].
The New Noology Network, or NNN, made use of an emerging medium that’s gaining mainstream awareness and traction: alternate reality games. An alternate reality game, or ARG, is a type of interactive multi-platform storytelling that involves participants interacting with real world elements in order to progress through a narrative. The NNN quickly caught attention due to its high production quality, which sometimes attracted upwards of 10,000 viewers to the livestreams held on Twitch.tv, and garnered buzz in several speculative online communities, including Reddit, Instagram, and YouTube [³].
Framed as a real-time analysis of dreams, these two-hour livestreamed sessions provided viewers with clues to crack the overarching mystery, and audiences were further enticed once the dream research itself was shown to be a hoax. This ushered in the second round of the project, which increased the amount of viewer participation in an intimate way. Namely, participants were often invited to share their real names and faces with the project, or required to record themselves committing absurd tasks, such as shouting strange things in public. The line between fiction and reality became further blurred with the third installment of the project, which featured participant’s real-life usernames or faces apart of livestreams. Initially, an actor associated with the ARG was planned to appear outside of participant’s homes, but this concept was scrapped due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the team behind the project to reroute the final leg of the game [⁶]. Still, that didn’t stop communities from coming together to determine the ultimate purpose of The New Noology Network.
Eventually, players began connecting it with a TV series that started to premiere around that time.
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Dispatches from Elsewhere premiered on March 1, 2020 on AMC in the United States, created by and starring Jason Siegel [¹]. The show was inspired by and connected to The Jejune Institute, another immersive art experience and social experiment from the mid 2000s in which some 7,000 players in the Bay Area were involved [⁷].
The show itself incorporated threads from the ARG. Once viewers were made aware that the two properties were connected, they sought after clues in the episodes. The finale of the series itself even used the real life faces and videos of participants in The NNN, in which participants mimicked a line from the show [¹].
With months of build-up to the premiere of the show, it’s no wonder that the series started strong. However, despite the seemingly explosive levels of success the project was projected to have, the show ultimately ended up becoming a blip on the map. What happened?
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The New Noology Network and Dispatches From Elsewhere both exist in a strange limbo of success. Each did remarkably well considering the specific audience it targeted, but how effective was The New Noology Network as a marketing tool?
Hexagram, the company responsible for organizing the game, and Brian Solomon, a member of one of the many teams who helped produce the project, stated in a write-up that The New Noology Network brought in a total of 500,000 players [²][³]. That is highly successful for an ARG; that is half a million potential consumers of a product. However, Dispatches from Elsewhere was operating on one rather large assumption:
That everyone who participated in the ARG would subsequently watch the show.
To an extent, they were right. The series premiered in the USA with 938,000 viewers, and nearly a million viewers for a barely promoted series aren’t bad numbers at all [⁴]. Especially with the context of modern broadcast television in the year 2020, when this show would’ve premiered, it’s impressive.
However, there was an incredibly steep drop off after the premiere- 586,000 viewers lost, to be precise [⁸]. A further 112,000 viewers dropped off after the second episode, to which the ratings finally stabilized to the 200,000 range for the duration of its run [⁹]. Only the finale dipped below that number, coming in at 198,000 television viewers, the lowest in the series [⁵]. While it’s hard to determine an accurate total number of viewers that account for both broadcast television and streaming, that is still a devastating drop in viewership between two episodes aired within 24 hours of each other.
So, where did they go? This circles back to the issue of using niche advertising. While there’s a better likelihood of encountering a stable audience when using these methods, there runs the risk only appealing to a select number of potential audience members from in that bunch, and banking on the fact that they will like B if they liked A.
The New Noology Network, and Dispatches from Elsewhere at large, started from 500,000 potential viewers [²]. Subtract from that the amount of players who became inactive in the ARG, and were therefore not made aware that the game was connected to a series. Then subtract from that the amount of players who were made aware of the show after reaching the ARG’s conclusion, but were either not attracted to the show, or only cared about the mystery of the ARG itself. Finally, subtract from that the amount of players made aware of the show, were attracted to the premise, but only watched the first episode.
When it comes down to it, that’s a very small sliver of people funneled into the show from the marketing campaign. That’s not to say this wasn’t an effective strategy, however. The utilization of this medium was clever for a show about skewing reality, and it assures that the show will attract at least a fraction of assured viewership. The problem is that Dispatches from Elsewhere had an overreliance on one exact type of marketing. It wagered that it’d receive the bulk of its viewers from the ARG, and failed to account for the viewers it could attract through regular marketing means.
To remedy this, it would’ve helped if Dispatches did not put all of its eggs into one basket and chose to bolster its potential viewer base through other forms of advertisement. AMC seems to primarily promote its shows on its own channel, but in the age of streaming and the fall of linear television, it would help if they ran social media advertisement promoting the show separate to the ARG. Because of the strange nature of the show, even a simple captivating banner ad or YouTube advertisement that was in a similar vein to The New Noology Network fliers would’ve effective.
Plenty of viewers are aware of the other ARG this is connected to, The Jejune Institute, but there’s hardly any mention of The New Noology Network. In fact, a large percentage of people discovered the show through other means. Even official publications like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian who reviewed the show don’t mention the game at all [¹⁰][¹¹][¹²].
This further backs the idea that a bit more standard advertisement would’ve potentially done the show some good by tapping into a mainstream market. While it’s important to preserve the mystery, The New Noology Network ultimately suffered from being a bit too far removed from the product it sought to promote.
Niche marketing is a very risky venture, and all things considered, The New Noology Network and Dispatches from Elsewhere were both very brave in committing to such an ambitious marketing campaign, especially concerning a show with a very hit-or-miss concept. However, where it could have resulted in a stronger marketing campaign is by utilizing standard means of social media marketing in order to reach a larger audience for the show. This would have preserved the mystery of the ARG while still attracting a larger potential audience for Dispatches from Elsewhere that may have resonated with the show’s premise more.
The New Noology Network may have faltered a bit as a marketing campaign, but this was as a result of an overreliance, not the campaign itself being unsuccessful. If used in combination with other marketing techniques that compliment this method, then brands wishing to enact a similar campaign can expect to see a positive impact in viewership if the correct precautions are taken.
Citations
[¹] “How an Actual Alternate Reality Game Helped ‘Dispatches From Elsewhere’ Pull Off That ‘Communal’ Finale.” The Wrap. https://www.thewrap.com/dispatches-from-elsewhere-ending-fans-arg-game-finale-jason-segel/.
[²] “Dispatches from Elsewhere / 2020.” Hexagram. https://www.hexagram.io/dispatches.
[³] “Behind the Experience: New Noology Network.” LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/behind-experience-new-noology-network-brian-solomon.
[⁴] “Top 150 Sunday Cable Original & Network Finals: 3.1.2020.” ShowBuzzDaily. https://web.archive.org/web/20200303152007/http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-sunday-cable-originals-network-finals-3-1-2020.html.
[⁵] “Top 150 Sunday Cable Original & Network Finals: 4.27.2020.” ShowBuzzDaily. https://web.archive.org/web/20200429003108/http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-monday-cable-originals-network-finals-4-27-2020.html.
[⁶] “NNN.” Sludge. https://www.sludge.io/nnn.
[⁷] “‘Dispatches From Elsewhere’ Is 2020’s Weirdest New Show.” Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/amc-jason-segel-dispatches-from-elsewhere-review/.
[⁸] “Top 150 Sunday Cable Original & Network Finals: 3.2.2020.” ShowBuzzDaily. https://web.archive.org/web/20200303211832/http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-monday-cable-originals-network-finals-3-2-2020.html.
[⁹] “Top 150 Sunday Cable Original & Network Finals: 3.9.2020.” ShowBuzzDaily. https://web.archive.org/web/20200311203358/http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/showbuzzdailys-top-150-monday-cable-originals-network-finals-3-9-2020.html.
[¹⁰] “On AMC’s “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” Jason Segel Plays with Convoluted Ways of Telling Straight Stories.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/on-amcs-dispatches-from-elsewhere-jason-segel-plays-with-convoluted-ways-of-telling-straight-stories.
[¹¹] “‘Dispatches From Elsewhere’ Review: A Journey Into the Weird Beyond.” Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/dispatches-from-elsewhere-amc-jason-segel-review-954779/.
[¹²] “Dispatches from Elsewhere review – Twin Peaks meets Alice in Wonderland.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/29/dispatches-from-elsewhere-review-jason-segel-twin-peaks.