You can easily make the case that The Walking Dead (TWD) has marketed itself better than any TV drama ever. In part one of this analysis, we took a look at what makes the show so successful and able to continually excel going through its seventh season. We talked about the fact that even though it isn't the most popular TV drama, it has the largest social media presence.
Most of our discussion focused on TWD itself. But how does the show stack up against its peers? Let's compare the second most popular TV drama (TWD) to the most popular one, Game of Thrones (GoT).
As mentioned in part one, TWD does better than GoT on both Twitter and Facebook. The Walking Dead has a smaller budget and waaaaay less famous actors to make up its cast. Comparing the two serves as proof that The Walking Dead team actively work to constantly keep people talking about the show, and do so incredibly successfully. Absent any effort to market shows, we would expect to see the most popular shows, or the most critically acclaimed, be talked about the most and also have the largest fan base. As mentioned, that isn't the case. Let's take a closer look.
Here's the same chart, but instead of showing social media activity for TWD, it shows how the past five years have gone for Game of Thrones.
The Game of Thrones chart looks cleaner, but that's about the best you can say for it when you're comparing it to The Walking Dead. For any show, you're going to see huge dips in social media activity whenever the show isn't in the middle of a season. That holds true for both shows, but not to the same degree.
The drops in the first graph are a lot less dramatic. The Walking Dead enjoys significantly more consistency throughout the year. Also, look between seasons for the Game of Thrones. The horizontal lines between seasons are long and almost flat. Conversely, TWD experiences some relatively small spikes in activity between seasons. Their continued activity between seasons pays off too. TWD boasts very strong season openers. The beginning of each peak tends to be larger than the rest for the Walking Dead (especially the most recent one). That means they created a lot of excitement and anticipation for the show before their seasons start. As you can see, Game of Thrones doesn't do as well at that.
Don't get me wrong, Game of Thrones is my favorite show. It even does a really good job of marketing itself, posting to Facebook almost daily and making sure its actors regularly stay in the public eye. But that isn't the point. The point is that despite not being as good of a show by a lot of measures, The Walking Dead is still talked about more.
TWD has set a new bench mark for how TV shows can market themselves. However, nobody's perfect. Despite its success, TWD still has some flaws. To get a more comprehensive understanding of how the marketing of the show is going, we can do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
Strengths:
Most of this analysis has covered the strengths of how TWD markets itself. Since that's the case, we don't have to beat a dead horse here, but one point is essential to remember: The reason The Walking Dead is so popular, and is talked about so much, is because they enlist the groundswell to help. As a reminder, the groundswell is when people come together with their collective voice to make one incredibly powerful voice. TWD aims to have that voice talking about its show.
You can expect to find posts like these on any TV show's Facebook page.
Strengths:
Most of this analysis has covered the strengths of how TWD markets itself. Since that's the case, we don't have to beat a dead horse here, but one point is essential to remember: The reason The Walking Dead is so popular, and is talked about so much, is because they enlist the groundswell to help. As a reminder, the groundswell is when people come together with their collective voice to make one incredibly powerful voice. TWD aims to have that voice talking about its show.
Every show promotes itself and tries to get people hyped up for their upcoming episodes. The Walking Dead though, does this and more.
Remember that drawing contest we talked about in part one? There's a friendly reminder the deadline is coming up to enter the contest. Pretty good drawing right? Some lucky fan is ecstatic that 16 thousand people like his/her picture online, and you can bet other artist-fans are eager to have their picture posted too.
The next three screenshots were incredibly easy to find. Logging on to The Walking Dead's Facebook page yielded on of these pictures after about two whole seconds of scrolling.
"Predict Carol's Fate." "Weigh in on the show's most shocking moments." "Where's Sasha (not me) going?" Posts like these, and how often they appear, make it clear that TWD is making a constant effort to facilitate a groundswell. Sure, any comments section on its own helps facilitate a groundswell, but no other TV drama makes such a concerted effort day-in, day-out to explicitly ask fans to talk amongst themselves.
Finally, it would be wrong to not mention The Talking Dead. These are three random screenshots, taken at different times throughout the week, reflecting activity surrounding The Talking Dead, according to Social Mention:
Again, The Talking Dead is a show about The Walking Dead that airs after every episode. Look how consistent their activity is. Those screenshots are from a Wednesday, Friday and Monday, respectively. They have almost identical numbers throughout the week. Also notice the posts. They're all JPGs. It might be fair to assume that most of those pictures are entries to the art contest the show promotes so much. Or maybe, they're entries to be "the ultimate fan".
Once a season, The Talking Dead will invite a fan on to be part of its panel. Throughout the "season" they will continually prompt fans to enter materials online that prove they are the show's biggest fan. In addition to that, once a show, they'll invite a fan from the small audience to ask a question to the panel. The fan is then always gifted a couple of props from the episode that aired earlier that day.
The show is completely about the fans, making them feel as much a part of the show as those directly involved in it. They share several of the top tweets from fans, conduct live quizzes (which can be accessed online) and display fan art. To add to the profile of the show, they also regularly invite celebrities on.
Let's compare The Walking Dead's "post-game show" with Game of Thrones' (It's from their pilot episode so you don't need to worry about spoilers).
Again, Game of Thrones is awesome. Most shows don't even have material about each episode. GoT's "Inside the Episode" does draw a Stark (pun intended) contrast in terms of the show's commitment to the groundswell when compared to The Talking Dead. Both shows have producers discuss the meaning of the episode as well as insight into characters and plot. On Inside the Episode though, the fans are nowhere to be seen. It's completely about the show. The Talking Dead is much more about the fans and their input on the episode. If the groundswell focuses on Game of Thrones after an episode, its not because they were asked to. Walking Dead fans, on the other hand, are relentlessly nudged to talk about the show.
Weaknesses:
It's a lot harder to find material for this section. The reason we're looking at The Walking Dead here is because they set a standard for how show's should promote themselves.
One could make the argument that TWD's social media activity damages the integrity of the show. It can be said that involving fans so much makes the show less serious. It isn't about the drama as much as it is about the spectacle. In a sense that's true. "Inside the Episode" is a lot more serious than The Talking Dead. GoT is critically acclaimed and considered a classic drama. The Walking Dead is more of a cult show. The acting isn't always great and there are plenty of corny moments to go around.
That's kind of the point though. The Walking Dead isn't trying to be a masterful piece of art. It's for the fans. In that way, it isn't a weakness. However, this does account for why Game of Thrones is a more popular show.
Opportunities:
Maybe we can look at this as a weakness, but it makes far more sense to think of it as an opportunity. In part one, we looked at how The Walking Dead is doing globally.
It was very surprising to find Chile at the top of the list. It was perhaps even more surprising to not see the U.S. even in the top five of the list. To be clear, the search term entered into Google Trends for the above chart was "The Walking Dead". Look what happens when you trade that "W" out for a "T" (The Talking Dead):
First of all, there aren't even enough countries to make a top five. Interestingly, The Talking Dead often has better numbers on social mention than The Walking Dead. The Talking Dead is consistently in the 80th percentile for strength. The Walking Dead often finds itself with those high numbers, but sometimes the numbers look like this too:
When we look worldwide, the story is different. What do the countries in the above chart have in common? They're all English speaking countries. Why? Because unlike The Walking Dead, The Talking Dead doesn't have subtitles and isn't dubbed.
You can call that a weakness, but did anyone really think TWD would be so immensely popular world-wide? This should be thought of as an opportunity to make the show even bigger than it already is. The reason it's important to note The Talking Dead's superior Social Mention numbers is because they show promise for how the show can grow. Imagine if those superior numbers extended to non-English speaking countries (which make up the top five countries in that earlier Google Trends chart).
Obviously it's difficult to arrange TV deals to put The Talking Dead on air in other countries, but it would probably be worth the effort. At the least, the TWD team could facilitate Youtube shows in other languages (or something comparable). A quick search online shows that there is a desire for this to happen. Fans of the show are usually hungry for more after each episode, there isn't a language barrier for that. The Walking Dead has a huge opportunity to boost its international profile either by adding subtitles to The Talking Dead, creating new talk shows in different languages, and/or just involving international fans as much as they engage their English speaking fans online.
Threats:
Including the groundswell offers a ton of perks. There's always a downside though. If you invite the world to talk about you, you can expect that not everything being said will be positive. The comments above were the top two comments on that post. Those posting the comments got a fair bit of support too. As you can see, they're pretty critical of the show. More importantly, is the way they're critical of the show. They aren't dismissive of the episode or critical of the show entirely, they're offering feedback. Their criticisms demonstrate a deep knowledge of the show. Yes, they're critical, but these fans are also clearly invested in the show. Rather than being concerned about comments like these, one can see them as an indication that the effort to engage the groundswell has been working.
As another example, season 4 had a lot of fans complaining about the show. If you look at the Google Trend graph, you can see season 4 (the second set of peaks) was the weakest in the last five years. The Walking Dead, taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, naturally kills off a lot of characters. This presents a challenge for the show-runners who have to part from fan-favorites and chase story lines for newer characters that fans haven't taken to yet.
Many fans haven't been pleased with one of the show's newest characters and main plot points, Negan.
Personally, I think he's a great character and actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan does an amazing job in the role. Given the way the show engages the groundswell, fan animosity towards certain characters or plot points can be problematic. Because TWD works so hard to create a perpetual groundswell, it's made quite a powerful one. The danger is that said groundswell can turn against the show. Now, again, obviously fans make a fuss about the show because they care. One threat though is that the show-runners feel pressured to make changes to the show based on these complaints rather than following through with their narrative and artistic visions. The show would be unlikely to do that now given the current season's ratings, but another showing like season four could pose some problems.
Conclusion:
If you're afraid about the success of your TV drama, take some notes. No TV drama engages the groundswell as well as The Walking Dead does. It may not be the best show out there, but damn, its popular.
To recap, the most important thing TWD does is constantly keep the fans in mind. Everything they do to market themselves aims to make fans feel as though they are a part of the show. Art contests, competitive quizzes, a fan-centered talk show and inclusive social media posts, TWD has it all. There's a ton we can learn from this show.
We also discussed the opportunity for the show to grow its non-English speaking audience. Making the show available to international fan-bases is a great start, and its clearly paid off. There is a clear demand though for extra content in addition to the show. If TWD acts on this demand, it will likely grow even more.
We should expect to see many TV dramas do much of what was discussed here in the future. The success of the measures TWD have taken to promote their show can be demonstrated with ample evidence. It's only a matter of time before others catch on.
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