Week 9 EOC--Network

While watching the film Network in class it was hard to miss the parallels drawn to all of the marketing research topics that we have covered throughout the quarter. Faye Dunaway’s character Diana was the most obvious example of the marketing research that goes into the everyday workings of a national television company. She was constantly asking for ratings, talking about getting a higher market share, and using then taking that data and turning it into a profit for the company by being able to charge advertisers higher rates during those shows. A company such as UBS uses secondary data that was collected by another company (usually Neilsen for television) who gather and analyze the data and then send it to UBS so that they may take the information and plan accordingly. We begin to see how obsessed Diana is by this information near the very beginning of the film when she notices that ratings for the evening news hour went up 5 points overnight when Howard ‘told the truth’ to the public. From there she went on a crusade to make the show more popular by investing some money into it and eventually turning it into a huge spectacle that was watched across the country and helped UBS to come out of debt. Without the research and data that was collected by Neilsen and reported in a timely manner she would have never been able to notice that there was a heightened interest in Howard that one evening and then would have never been able to turn him into the cash cow that he became for the network. It does become somewhat pathetic though as this data overcomes Diana’s life and interferes at all possible times, from the beginning when she first witnesses Howard’s show with her husband and then later on her romantic getaway with Max the ratings and scandals of the network are all that she can talk about. So while this information can be (and is) extremely useful, one must wonder, at which point does it become too much and we experience information overload that we cannot overcome.