How Al Jazeera America fluffed its lines

Where are drowning in choice, and Rob Long thinks that might have doomed Al Jazeera America

The main control room in the Al Jazeera America television broadcast studio in New York City. Stan Honda / AFP Photo

According to reports, the television news channel Al Jazeera America will shut down sometime in April. It was a victim of what the Qatari company calls the competitive “US media marketplace”.

The media “marketplace” is competitive, yes, but its most pertinent characteristic is its size. On my satellite receiver I get more than 600 channels, and I’ve often spent an hour or two just scrolling through them all, as if the endless grid is a show in itself. I’ll flop down on the sofa, watch 30 or 40 seconds of every channel I can, then call it a night and go to bed.

Like most viewers, I have developed subconscious strategies to deal with all of those choices. Often I find myself scrolling through the same 30 channels or so – maybe 10 here and then another 10 further there, and a final 10 down by where the movie channels are – creating a series of “neighbourhoods” I check out during each grazing period.

The other channels – almost 500 of them – I mostly just ignore. There’s such a thing as too much choice.

Researchers tell us that our thoughts and impulses create neural pathways in our brains – pathways that are etched into the tissue itself. As we age, it’s a smart idea to keep changing our patterns – take a new route home every week, say, or learn a foreign language.

That’s very close to how I see my television viewing behaviour: I’ve etched some pathways through the vast number of channels on offer, but the difference is, I have no interest in changing my patterns.

And that, more than anything – more than the competitive “media marketplace” – is what hurt Al Jazeera America.

Let me put it another way. Years ago, an American fast-food chain wanted an eye-catching and memorable advertising campaign. So they did what companies do when they’re looking for that sort of thing: they hired the most creative advertising agency around and told them to come up with something dazzling.

I wasn’t there, of course, but I can be fairly certain that the creative team at the chosen advertising agency were all dressed in fashionable outfits and full of studied nonchalance. As they walked into the conference room to deliver their new advertising campaign, I’d be willing to wager that there was an audible clicketyclack from their expensive shoes hitting the floor.

The campaign they pitched was clever and distinct. The Manhattan-based executives from the hamburger chain loved it. But the trouble is, the way those companies are structured, it was crucial for the individual restaurant owners to be enthusiastic as well, and they weren’t so sure. To them, effective advertising was simple: show a hot, juicy-looking burger, rotating in an appetising fashion, and run the advertisements in the hours just before mealtimes. The clever New York executives wanted something smart. The practical restaurant owners were convinced the New York sophisticates were overthinking it.

Which they were. The ad campaign was a flop. As memorable as it was, it didn’t get the job done, which was to make you hungry for a burger from that specific fast-food chain. Millions of dollars were spent without a corresponding rise in sales.

I have zero evidence to back this up, but I suspect that when the executives of Al Jazeera America hired an ad agency to craft a memorable campaign to launch the new channel, they too asked for something clever and eye-catching. And I have little doubt that a group of hip-looking sharpies clickety-clacked their way into a conference room somewhere to lead long-winded discussions about “brand identity” and “visual cues” and “emotional connection”.

When the channel launched in 2013, I recall seeing elegant advertisements all over Manhattan. There was a strikingly smart-looking billboard along a busy motorway in Los Angeles. There were magazine profiles and full-page newspaper ads.

What there wasn’t, in any of the advertisements that I saw, was any information about where exactly to find this new channel. The smart and sophisticated advertisements were too busy creating “brand awareness” to do the real job at hand, which was to get me to break into my neural television-watching pathways and add another junction.

The executives in charge clearly expected me to see the advertisements as I moved about my day, and then later, after I’d flopped myself onto my sofa and settled in for a good night’s channel surfing, to suddenly remember that I wanted to check out Al Jazeera America, and then go hunting for it throughout the 600-channel jungle, which at 8pm after a busy day is laughably optimistic. At that hour, after a long workday, I’m not leaving my television neighbourhood.

A new television news channel is always welcome – American television news, in particular, suffers from a certain kind of myopia – but sadly, Al Jazeera America fumbled the opportunity. They forgot the key to effective advertising: always show the burger. And always tell people where to find it.

Rob Long is a producer and writer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl