Netflix: What’s Next?

Posted on 7th December 2023 by Sammie Ma

Online over-the-top streaming platform Netflix gained its popularity in Hong Kong and even around the world as it is not geographically and device-limited. The easy accessibility of the large library of contents and archives across different genres and countries allows users to deeply engage with any media content that suits their preferences. Being a cinephile, subscribing to Netflix can be much cheaper when compared with purchasing tickets at the cinema, and the feature of a family-sharing plan can also provide users with a more cost-effective way of consuming media content.

With the large archive of media content, finding suitable movies and shows can be as hard as finding a needle in a haystack. Indeed, as stated on the official website, Netflix has managed to collect user preference data through recommendation algorithms. This significantly helped Netflix to sort out users’ interactions with the platform and hence prioritise the best content for them. While on the other hand, users will receive tailored playlists or series thumbnails that favour their taste. For instance, your favourite actor may appear as the thumbnail of his starred drama series, as the platform has captured your previous viewing data of the same actor.

Netflix suggests mainly Asian content based on my viewing experience

Online streaming platforms have become the trend in viewing media content not only because of how user-friendly the platforms are but also contributed of the media convergence that allows people to seamlessly access various media contents through a single device. As Henry Jenkin mentioned on his personal website, Convergence allows a migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.’ The invention of smartphone has accelerated the interaction between various media forms, while people are allowed to download applications with distinct media forms and converge into one single device. Netflix as a downloadable application also allows users to access media contents via phone, which makes the overall viewing experience much more dependent on users.

‘Watching the movie was the best part of going to a video store, the worst part was driving back and forth. So, let’s take away all the barriers and use tech to create joy.’ -Ted Sarando, The Media Show

Weekly Top 10 lists of the most watched TV in Hong Kong

Users can search for movies and TV series of various genres and topics on Netflix in Hong Kong, yet it is obvious that there has been a domination of Asian content, in particular South Korean content recently. Take the top 10 most watched TV dramas in Hong Kong from November 20 to 26 as an example, South Korean content has accounted for 4 positions on the list, while ‘Squid Game: The Challenge: Season 1’ can also be regarded as K-related reality show as it was inspired the award-winning drama ‘Squid Game’. This proved that viewers in Hong Kong were tempted to use Netflix as their major source of accessing K-contents. For instance, the drama ‘Castaway Diva’ and ‘Strong Girl Nam-soon’ are on the top 10 list for weeks, with ranking at the Top 10 in TV in 25 countries on Netflix. News reported in April this year revealed Netflix’s decision on investing 2.5 billion in the coming four years in light of producing more K-dramas, movies and reality shows.

Titles which made top 10 in other countries around the world

While this seems to be a great business opportunity for Netflix to invest in its market in East Asian countries, some Netflix supporters who once subscribed to the platform for its Western content started to feel repugnant of Netflix’s shifting attention to investment. Along with the rise of more streaming platform competitors like Disney+ and Amazon Prime TV, users have more choices in selecting the perfect channel that suits their preferences. Netflix no longer dominates the market and can barely engage their long term users. A survey revealed that in 2022, long-term subscribers had accounted for 13 percent of cancellations, and the total cancellations reached 3.6 million people at the end of the year, and also have an increase from 2.5 million cancellations in the previous five quarters. Some complained about how Netflix ended the license of some of the popular content from its archives while attempting to increase the subscription price of the platform along with more restrictions in terms of family sharing, for instance, the Netflix Household.

The launching of Netflix Household has affected my user experience on TV (photo taken on June 2023)

It is undeniable that Netflix is facing a hurdle in minimising its churn rate recently, with more competitors to fight with, yet the shifting trend of people to consume media content from TV and cinema to online streaming platforms still poses positive effects on the platform, and at least lazy people like me will continue to pay for a Netflix subscription in the following year in return for a more convenient viewing experience.

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K-drama’s Scene-Stealer: Subway

Posted on 7th December 2023 by Sammie Ma

When casts of a Korean drama were deciding where to have their lunch date, have you ever made a correct guess of having Subway be shown in the next shot? It is never uncommon to see this American fast-food franchise appearing in numerous blockbuster K-dramas like ‘Crash Landing for You’, ‘Guardian: The Lonely and Great God’ and more. While this should not be a coincidence of how scriptwriters set their scenes, the convergence of the brand in a drama is a form of product placement, an indirect advertising strategy which in Korea, is abbreviated as the term ‘PPL’.

Screenshot of drama ‘Guardian: The Lonely and Great God’ and ‘Descendants of the Sun’

“Product placement was a relatively cheap way to get us brand awareness” – Colin Clark, Country Director for Subway in South Korea

Having the first Subway store opened in 1992 in South Korea, it expanded its Asian market to 548 Subways up until now. Colin Clark, director of the South Korean market, has witnessed the opportunity of how product placement in K-dramas could highly increase brand awareness on screen in a more cost-effective way. With the popularity of Hallyu around the globe and the recent switching of media viewing from local broadcasting channels to online streaming platforms, K-drama is likely to reach more international fans, exposing its brand globally. Also, famous actors can create a huge impact on their fanbase while consuming specific brand products in the drama. Celebrity effect can be constantly seen in the consumer market, where certain products go out of stock right after it launched for a minute.

Jonathan Hardy mentioned that there is a shifting power from communicators to consumers in marketing communication, this implies that people nowadays are aware of how they are actively and unintentionally being consumed. They are eager to be more independent on how and when to reach the message. Some may apply ad avoidance strategies like ad-blockers to filter away advertisements. Nevertheless, PPL in drama can never be filtered while viewers are watching the content unless they simply skip the episode. So, this marketing strategy can provide seamless promotions to the brand and at the same time maintain the dominance of brand power.

The Evil Scene-Stealer

https://youtu.be/lBABxCHvmgA?si=IeJCrtkmGin8gYen
John Oliver discusses how Subway uses product placement to engage overseas consumers, particularly in K-dramas.

The New York Times has once calculated that Subway appeared in 17 K-dramas, winning its title as the ‘scene-stealer’ in Korea’s entertainment industry. Yet, more viewers are conscious of the excessive use of Subway’s product placement in shows, leading to a sense of fatigue when viewing different contents with the same ‘Subway scene’ appearing. Some even pointed out that PPL is now the ‘scene-stealer’ that steals protagonists’ attention while obstructing their viewing experience and directors’ storytelling. This could also explain Hardy’s viewpoint of how ‘editorial independence and creative autonomy were influenced by the emergence of advertisement to media contents.’ Disappointedly, the failure of a K-drama is now not determined by creative approaches, but by the interference of PPL. Moreover, audiences started to slowly aware that they are commodified while viewing content even if they are paid for the subscription of online streaming platforms. The integration without separation has blurred the boundary between advertisements and media contents, consumers are hence involuntarily consuming advertisements during their leisure time.

The Revolution of PPL – ‘Lovestruck in the City’ (2020)

With the perception of people’s reaction towards excessive PPL in K-drama, the industry did not stop adopting this market strategy but turned crisis into opportunity. In 2020, KakaoTV launched its original drama series ‘Lovestruck in the City’. This drama had played with the explicitness and awkwardness of PPL in normal K-dramas, and tailored drama scenes particularly for the PPL. The use of a direct and undisguised way of telling audiences that ‘this is PPL time!’ has surprisingly gained support from audiences, as it managed to create a sense of humour that allowed viewers to laugh. Although the success of the unique PPL insertion in ‘Lovestruck in the City’ could be attributed to its style of pseudo-documentary storytelling where protagonists in the story were always facing the camera and being interviewed in the story, we could not deny that it made a clever decision in successfully blending PPL into the drama content.

I am not saying that Subway could try the way ‘Lovestruck in the City’ presented PPL on screen, as the brand has adequate exposure in K-contents. Yet it is noticeable that there is a shifting trend in how the Korean entertainment industry integrates media content and commerce, and Subway should therefore in future also find alternative ways to maintain its title of ‘scene-stealer’ in a positive way.

Learn More: Subway integrated K-drama content into recent advertisement, a reverse strategy of PPL

‘Extraordinary Attorney Woo’ main cast Kang Taw-oh acting his role in drama in Subway’s advertisement
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Do You Support #SupportIsEverything ?

Posted on 7th December 2023 by Sammie Ma
Photo Reference: Adidas Official Website

Scrolling through Instagram for besties’ latest social updates, a photo of 24 female naked breasts popped up out of the blue. That was Adidas’s campaign promoting its sports bras in early 2022 which went through an absolute viral over the world. Emphasising the diversity of shapes and sizes of female breasts, the brand hoped to promote its latest sports bra with up to 43 styles that could fit any desire.

“All women deserve the best support”  

https://twitter.com/adidas/status/1491411609180327942?s=20
Official Adidas X account posting unblurred breasts advert

Alongside the hashtag #SupportIsEverything on this ad post, Adidas not only meant to say that their product provides comfort and support to women’s breasts but also shows support towards women and feminism. Pushing the message forward, the ad encouraged women of any race and background to be their true selves, while the visual display of explicit nudity of women’s breasts delivered direct and clear denotation to audiences.

The concept of inclusivity and attempt to test audiences’ bottom line to visual advertisements have drawn massive attention to Adidas. Some showed support for the brand, appreciating its way of promoting body positivity and mutual respect for the human body, specifically to women. As stated on Adidas’s official website, the company emphasises engaging the female consumer community. Not only does it manage ‘Adidas Women’ accounts on various social media platforms, creating tailored content for women, but it also expands the attention to women from external stakeholders to internal talent recruitment, welcoming more female representation in management positions, in the hope of achieving gender balance in the company.

Official Adidas Hong Kong Instagram, with breasts being blurred

Showing the company’s full advocacy for women’s rights, Adidas made a bold attempt to launch the #SupportIsEverything campaign, being the pioneer to extend advertisement’s possibility of explicitness. However, some heavily criticised the censorship of the advertisement, leading the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to receive up to 24 complaints, resulting in the advert being banned from being displayed on social media elsewhere in the UK.

One of the significant complaints that the authority received was how the advertisement has commodified women’s bodies while reducing females ‘just to body parts’. Women were dehumanised and their bodies were used as a ‘tool’ to generate revenue for the company in this advertisement. They seemed to be consumed by the objectification of the advertisement. This even led to misogyny, a sign of hatred and prejudice against women where people viewed the advertisement as over-emphasising women’s body parts, yet paying less attention to the product itself.

Adidas Breasts campaign billboard

Outraging comments regarding children being ‘forced’ to view large billboard posters displayed in public also drove concern about whether the ad would cause distress to teenagers. Because of that, the ASA announced that the ad should not be displayed anywhere near schools or sensitive places like religious venues, and was required to carefully target audiences to avoid causing any offence to viewers. With all the bans and restrictions issued by the authority, this brings us back to the discussion of advertising media as a form of public resource. Companies should maximise the reachability of their advertisement to reach the best capacity of target audiences. Yet, when inevitable restrictions are holding the effectiveness of the ad back from positively promoting their product, is it still worth bearing the risk and creating such a challenging campaign?

Untargeted media like most of the advertisements is not only responsible for promoting a brand’s product value but also acting as a mediator to connect a brand and their customers. Adidas’s sports bra ad brought out the topic of feminism, making it visible and reachable to consumers. While Sarah Banet-Weiser pointed out that ‘The dynamic between consent and resistance is a key mobiliser within popular feminism’, media visibility of advertisements in offline or online areas allows people to like, leave comments or even report. All the discussions have brought popular feminism under the spotlight, and ‘redirects what “empowerment” means for girls and women.’ While Adidas has made its valiant step forward in putting the topic of women being individually and mutually respected, it has successfully stated itself as a ‘supporter’ of the women’s community, and its products are the best evidence to prove and tell.

Learn More:

Related Campaign – London Catwalk celebrating body positivity

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The ‘I Never Knew’ Stories in Hong Kong

Posted on 7th December 2023 by Sammie Ma

– One hashtag, One momentary connectedness –

“I Never Knew” User-Generated Content Campaign–Stories about Hong Kong

In 2016, the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) launched the #DiscoverHongKong UGC campaign in the hope of engaging people to share ‘I Never Knew’ Hong Kong stories by posting pictures or videos taken anywhere in Hong Kong with the hashtag #DiscoverHongKong together with a caption including the term ‘I Never Knew’. The campaign was initiated with partnerships with famous influencers like ‘Fung Bros’, a well-known travel keen opinion leader (KOL) to call for their worldwide fans to follow their steps and discover this more than a picture-perfect city.

‘HKTB is at the cutting edge of social media by embracing the concept of “Social First” to inspire travellers with powerful and unconventional content and perspectives’. – Anthony Lau, Former Executive Director of Hong Kong Tourism Board

While HKTB as a destination marketing organisation has made a new revolution in promoting Hong Kong to worldwide, the use of UGC has undoubtedly created a positive brand image of Hong Kong, showcasing its connectivity and bonding between people and the city. It allowed bilateral interaction between stakeholders, bringing out the message that every individual in Hong Kong plays an equal and significant role in contributing to the tourism industry. The ‘Social First’ approach could also increase the city’s competitiveness and reputation to the world as it showed the willingness to engage people and have a positive power relationship between the government and citizens.

Photo Reference: Hong Kong Tourism Board Official Website

The campaign generated more than 10,000 peer-to-peer recommendations with 5 million views for Hong Kong in just 4 weeks. While driving nearly 4.2 million people to navigate the campaign site over that time, this UGC event increased the user flow rate across the platform, and at the same time collected free content generated by participants. Adding on, HKTB collected free data generated by participants, like the most welcoming places and hidden tourist spots in Hong Kong, which allowed them to make reference to these data and decide on future campaigns based on people’s preferences. The company can even discover hidden photographers or content creators inside the pool of content, and make the search for future partnerships much easier.

The 2.17 million fan-based influencer Fung Bros had a paid partnership with HKTB, being the pioneer and starting point of the campaign. Their ‘MOST EPIC HONG KONG TRIP EVER!’ video dedicated to this campaign had driven over 8 million views, with over 10 thousand likes and up to 1 thousand comments. Setting their role as a visitor to Hong Kong and introducing the best to-go spots around the city, Fung Bros had exposed themselves to the local community, and at the same time to their international fanbase.

Comments show viewers from all over the world sharing collective memories about the city

While KOL brightened up their brand image while engaging in the campaign, ordinary participants had also huge incentives while joining. What made this campaign attractive was its reward-based strategy, where participants might have the chance to win prizes ranging from shopping vouchers, five-star hotel rooms and theme park tickets by posting with the hashtag. The task was simple and open to any form of creation, which provided creators with have maximum level of freedom in their works, with the only criterion of exploring Hong Kong.

‘Travellers trust other travellers.’

Everyone around the world can be a consumer of Hong Kong, the brand that HKTB was promoting. #DiscoverHongKong was a peer-to-peer campaign that produced social relations in human networks. As Michel Bauwens described P2P is an ideal system in which human beings can put effort into the creation and maintenance of a shared resource, the creators have expanded the resources to visitors and travellers, providing them with a source of references when they visit Hong Kong. Rather than trusting tourism spots stated in a tour guide book, the unpaid content with generous and sentimental emotions tended to be more trustworthy.

All in all, who benefited most of all in #DiscoverHongKong? You may argue that HKTB as the government-subvented body was ultimately achieving the purpose of portraying a pleasant image of Hong Kong to the globe, while in a sense taking advantage of people’s engagements in the UGC campaign to accomplish their goal, but we could never oppose the fact of how the #DiscoverHongKong hashtag had brought a ‘momentary connectedness’ online, allowing broad audiences and people to cluster and co-exist within the same topical network, and to connect. I would rather take the side of concluding that this UGC campaign benefitted the most to every individual in the world who had discovered Hong Kong’s never-known stories.

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Does AI Really Care?

Posted on 7th December 2023 by Sammie Ma
‘Ai: Who’s Looking After Me?’ at Science Gallery London (photo taken by author)

‘Ai: Who’s Looking After Me?’ gathers a variety of integrated works with multiple disciplines ranging from healthcare, justice system, pet care, and discusses how these aspects were shaped differently with the use of AI. One of the artworks that drew my attention was ‘Does AI Care?’ by Sofie Layton, who worked with young people who suffered from cancer at an early age while sharing their experiences and evaluating whether AI could provide care to patients during their hard times. The work simulated a patient’s waiting room at a hospital, with an audio combining young adults’ reflections on topics about AI, care and cancer with an AI generated response.

(photo taken by author)

AI is widely used in the medical industry, for instance in medical imaging, radiotherapy, and surgery. AI can provide precise and professional support to doctors in making life-changing decisions, but the topic of whether this machine can emotionally support patients is still a big debate. Most people show strong resistance to the fact that AI could replace doctors, as they believe human interactions are where patients gain hope and care. Yet this artwork has brought me new thoughts of thinking that the sense of ‘care’ may not only merely come from human warmth, but also from detailed prediction of the disease that AI could provide to patients. The objectivity of information that AI equips may in a way calm patients’ uncertainties and unknown worries.

S male voice 0:59 ‘If cancer was something it’d be like the Mariana Trench, just a deep abyss that we don’t understand, or like a black hole, just- we can’t see into it. And if it was a sound, I’d say it’d be silence – because we don’t hear it coming. It just… happens.’

One of the young participants who joined this project raised his terrifying worries about how cancer can be a silent bomb without any omen and forecast, and AI could act as the role of a carer predicting the future. Nevertheless, what if patients are over-reliant on AI? And what if the ‘care’ from AI is just an illusion that gives false hope to patients? In the audio that gathered young adults’ cancer experiences, one raised the concern of how AI is more advanced and complicated than in the past when humans were unable to understand AI language. As a result, who would bear the responsibility if medical malpractice made by AI occurs? If that is doctors’ duty, yet doctors cannot understand AI, what can doctors do to justify themselves? The adaptation of AI in surgery has degraded the power of humans and lost the dominance of decision making in a way that is too complex for humans to conquer.

AI Chat 3:43 ‘AI can provide certain types of care. But it is important to understand that AI is not a substitute for human interaction and empathy. ’

In this artwork, Sofie Layton tried to mix and match AI responses with human responses towards the same topic. At first, I was unaware that one of the responses came from AI generated response. Right after listening to the whole piece and rereading the description, I was surprised how AI chat has perfectly blended into human response. We often assume that AI can only provide objective information to humans, yet it contains subjectivity as it is made by tech designers where bias from humans is unconsciously coded into algorithms. In the above response from AI regarding the topic of AI and care, there were also stereotypes and opinions about whether AI can substitute human interaction. Similarly, Safiya Umoja Noble suggested in her book ‘Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism’ that Google’s search engine contains biased search that favours the company’s economic interests and profitability. Algorithmic bias does exist in a superficially objective search engine and AI. Hence, how Layton tried to merge AI and human responses into a single audio has cleverly addressed this issue and obscured audiences’ minds.

‘If care were a colour, it would be light blue.’ (photo taken by author)

I have yet to find the answer to whether AI could provide this ‘Caring Blue’ to patients or not, and I doubt that the cold, digital machine can show emotional and sentimental care to the ones who are suffering from diseases. Nonetheless, one thing I believe is crystal-clear is that AI and human can co-exist at the same time, where both can work on their talents and paint a rainbow in the gloomy medical industry.

Photo reference: https://london.sciencegallery.com/ai-artworks/does-ai-care

Read Full Transcript of audio piece here

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