First off, I'm excited about joining this group. The gods released me from purgatory about a day or two ago, and in my time there I read about people's views about credit crunches, scrolling banners, and other annoyances on GSN. One group feels that these practices are wrong and should be stopped, while others do not feel that they are a problem.
I feel that when the issue is viewed from an ecomonic and a public-relations stance, the topic becomes much less personal and much more objective. My statements here will cover only the PR stance, because I admit to having no knowledge about niche-market television economics. (Or any other economics, for that matter!)
From my personal experience, GSN is not good at PR. My wife and I finally got cable for the first time last July or August, and the cable company picked up GSN during late fall -- I admit, a much shorter time than many of you have had GSN. But even in that short time, I have seen all sorts of distractions from the game shows: the credit crunches (tolerable before, much worse after the network/name change), scrolling banners, and obvious speed-ups. (To their credit, I like their new bug better than the old one.)
What makes the distractions frustrating is that they seem unnecessary. Perhaps GSN needs to plug "Gimme Games" every chance it can get. Fine. But does it absolutely need to shrink the credits that small? Better yet, can a more creative solution be found that allows new shows to get their proper attention while the credits run fairly unimpeded? I certainly don't lose any sleep over not seeing the credits, but if they are still part of the show (especially in the case of LMAD), it looks better on the part of the network to present its shows as they were meant to be shown -- as close as is reasonable. Because the image of the network is involved, this makes it a PR issue.
Another distraction that seems unnecessary are speed-ups, although the only show on which I notice them is Press Your Luck. Once again, perhaps GSN needs to fit in n minutes of commercials during the show to make it marginally profitable. Fine -- better than not having it at all (many will disagree!). But the speed-ups always take place during the Second Money Round, the highlight of the entire game. With a bit of creativity, one could fix this by speeding up the contestant introductions, question rounds, and the winnings at the end. If that's not enough, speed up the First Money Round too -- it's not quite as important as the second. Once again, no sleep lost, but it seems like such a simple fix, and it should keep GSN and its sponsors happy.
This next part is really not fair, because I'm going to talk about a different network with a different budget and different agenda. I'm speaking of Cartoon Network -- particularly their Adult Swim block late at night. But the people at Adult Swim seem to really enjoy cartoons. It may all be an act, but it's great PR! Between the transition from program to commercial or back again they run bumpers that are nothing more than text. I mean, they look cheap (but good). These bumpers might talk about the staff at AS, or about a new show coming up in the coming weeks, or about a particular episode that's coming up next (with the episode title!) or messages taken from the "mailbag" on Thursdays. As a result, there is a connection between the network and the viewer; I feel that AS actually cares about me. They probably don't, but the feeling is that they're one of us. I wish that GSN would look less like it was run by attitude, and more run by the love of the games. GSN should not put AS-style text bumpers up, but they can do little things like show the original air date in the corner for a second or two (a few people have suggested that idea before).
The GSN website can really help with PR in many ways. Putting future schedules on their own website for instance, so that I don't have to go to other websites to see what GSN is doing in the future. Adding episode information to the schedule online, with original air dates, or the episode number, or the names of the contestants. Making news about the network more accessible -- recently I tried to find more information about the Mother's Day special on their website, but had to wait on the news ticker for the article title to come up, and then had to click it before it changed to a different article. This is bad Web design, which makes GSN look bad by association, and thus bad PR.
So to conclude, I can understand why people complain about the bugs and annoyances they find, but I can also understand why it does not bother others. But I feel that these problems have created an image problem for GSN. It may hurt them economically at some point; it might not. But there are so many things that GSN can do to vastly improve its image while keeping its new vision of gaming. And speaking of public image, I'll try to keep my posts shorter in the future!
