Tiger Team TV show re-broadcast June 16th: Will TruTV use Social Media?

When we first created this show, we had visions of promoting it by tapping into the natural fanbase of hackers, geeks, and enthusiasts found all over the Internet. The uber-talented cast–Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie (Pyr0), and Ryan Jones–have friends far and wide both within the hacker community and beyond. That alone, with almost no effort, was enough to gain fan interest and much press when the show premiered last year. Within a few days we had a wikipedia entry, we were rising up on Digg, and other kinds of social and collaborative media were used to embrace the show, primarily because it struck a nerve with actual security professionals. They are so used to inauthentic portrayals of hacking, that when they find something real, they love it.

Ori Neidich (one of my partners) and I had talked about what we could do for TruTV (then CourtTV) in terms of promotion on the net. We knew that we could get a huge following for the show that would translate into big ratings for Turner Broadcasting, on a very small budget. All we needed was cooperation from them. After all, it’s a Faustian bargin when you sell a show–they own the rights!

TruTv/CourtTV had little interest in promoting the show at all, let alone allowing an Internet campaign to be associated officially with them. This, for a show that they told us was the highest-scoring of all of their test-piloted shows in the history of the network. What gives?

This may be indicative of television networks’ lack of understanding in general as to what online media can do for the marketing of a show, for very little investment. Grassroots campaigns are nothing new to Hollywood, but for this level of budgeting, they may not have realized just how much they could have gotten for free. Ori and I would not have charged extra for our time. Certainly Chris, Luke, and Ryan did an amazing job promoting the show on their own with no extra bucks–my hat goes off to them. Even when Chris sent the network a dossier on all that had been accomplished for free, the network barely responded and probably did not give it more than 2 minutes of thought. Really, Turner Broadcasting? Can you afford to turn away from social media and internet marketing in general? You’re ok with a little website that does next-to-nothing? Is that how you want to promote your tv shows, especially the ones that appeal to Internet-types?