Lost, I am not pleased with you. It has nothing to do with the smoke monster, the seemingly random lines trying to connect stories, lack of Dharma in season 6, nor the 100 new characters in the final season. Nope, I am not pleased because of your 8 | 7c episodes you are running… you know the pop-up video, cliffs notes edition.
At one point, the thing that made you great was there were two ways to watch:
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Watch for an hour every week. Great acting, interesting story, compelling enough to come back.
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[the way i did it] Watch every week, spend a few hours looking at screen grabs, discussing the meaning of everything, watching interviews from comic con, spend the year breaks between episodes playing your reindeer games, joining the dharma initiative, and buying your limited edition products.
The second option, reward the loyal viewers–the ones who kept the hype going for this long. It gave the loyal viewers a deeper experience with the show.
Many brands are going to struggle with this, especially with this little thing called social marketing. Scale. Brands love it. When do you make the exclusive experiences open to everyone, and should you? I say, no. And this is the consumer me talking.
You don’t have to keep it locked [I let the easy ‘locke’ joke go, almost]. However, respecting early users, or at minimum make new users qualify in some way, needs to be honored. If you are going to offer a deeper experience, don’t slap the loyal [who, lucky you, are also vocal online nerds] in the face by letting everyone in on the secrets so easily. Shame on you, ABC, it makes it hard for me to want to get involved in ‘V’ or ‘Flash Forward’ in the same way. Fool me once…
As a tribute, I have created a few new logo suggestions for you [and this is coming from someone who got through school using cliffs notes]:
or
the world according to schmogel. 