Narrowcasting for Slackers
Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block has been a moderate success for the network. Riding the momentum created by the cult late night Space Ghost Coast to Coast talk show, Cartoon Network created a niche for itself showing badly produced (or well produced to appear low budget) programming featuring drug humor and off color irreverent jokes. As this block of late night programming became more popular, the schedule expanded to weeknights, and then to a Saturday night themed more on anime, and now runs seven nights a week.
Unlike the other nights, which often feature shows as short as fifteen minutes in length, Saturday night is often completely half hour anime programs, dubbed into English. The night analyzed here included a rerun of Boondocks (a show originating from a comic strip about two inner city black children living in a quiet suburban or exurban environment), which interestingly started as a show for ABC’s Family network and was dropped unaired and then snatched up by Cartoon Network, the show Blood, the debut of a newly acquired show Death Note, and finally the classic of the genre’s second television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig.
The scheduled formula goes like this; abstract ‘bump’ promoting the block, show starts and runs uninterrupted for half the episode, seven or eight commercials, another bump, the rest of the episode and credits, then another round of commercials plus a content advisory, followed by another bump, then the next show. Every half hour this repeats. The bumps are typically innovative and unusual. Some are simply white text on a black screen while hip hop plays gently in the background as the texts harangues someone who posted on their web site or brags about ratings for a show. On of their shows, Robot Chicken was nominated for an Emmy. That was fodder for a whole week of bumps.
The block is clearly for animation lovers. The ads run indicate an internet savvy audience base, in need of fast food, interested in action and superhero DVD releases, who occasionally go out to eat or watch a World Series game (honestly, in seven years of watching this block, I’ve never seen another ad for sports). Likely white, middle class, 18-38 year-olds are watching this, which means disposable income, even if discretionary. There were two different ads run that promoted other shows in the programming block on different nights.
This block (treating the identity of the network as separate) sees itself as a purveyor of cool, hip, irreverent, and violent media. The advertising for a movie based on a program from this block resulted in the Boston Bomb scare, and I’m sure it did wonders for the show. I originally emigrated to the block because of the use of recycled animation from the glory days of Hannah Barbara 1970’s programming, feeling vindicated as they ripped into detritus from a cultural machine that fed me garbage on Saturdays and didn’t see fit to give me anything on Sundays except for a clay-mation show featuring a boy and his dog each week learning to be good Christians, proselytizing. They’ve responded to this too, serving up Moral Orel as an answer to David and Goliath. Admittedly, until Space Ghost came back, I had begun to think nobody else remembered those days.
Tags: adult swim, cartoon network
