With the rise of digital and the age of active-participation viewers – those second-screening when watching TV – advertisers are thinking differently about TV as a marketing channel.
We're living in the age of the "active-participation" viewer.
Most, if not all, seem to regard their participation — permitting viewers to see their lives, judge their accomplishments, and witness their insecurities and failures — as a sacrifice for the greater good.
That said, this is charming participation, affording viewers a chance to do things like introduce, by way of renaming, the people sitting next to them.
"Mirror in a Cabin with Adaptives" (1996), by West, the sixty-year-old Austrian Pied Piper of audience participation, invites viewers to disport themselves, in front of a mirror, with odd and appealing constructions of lumpy plaster on metal rods.
A group of young artists – Huyghe, Parreno and Gonzalez-Foerster most prominent among them – started making work that challenged expectations about art's autonomy and often involved the participation of viewers or the creation of social situations: a carnival in a park, say, or a giant game of Pong that audiences could play on a light-up ceiling.
The Latina heroine still seeks the participation of viewers and continues to mix in Spanish words, but she is presenting curriculum that is aimed slightly older and is dealing with themes such as community service and friendship skills.
Participation by remote viewers, including throughout the greater DIII-D facility, can also be incorporated.
(Frieze was less impressed: "The viewers' participation is rewarded with some worthless gesture or rubbish souvenir").
Another 90s phenomenon, Noel's House Party, in which Noel Edmonds presciently invited the inter-active participation of both viewers and celebrities, also served exactly two American presidential terms.
He does not mean interactive in the manner of computer games, but in the sense that Blue's games require the participation of her viewers.
