Do focus groups just not exist anymore?

What does any of that have to do with focus groups? If you wanted to whine about sympathetic villains, you can just do that. We do it at least once a day.

So if anything the modern version of a focus group is not pitching an original concept to a large group of people its normalizing a stupid concept among a group of people who're indifferent to it but not indifferent enough to say thats a terrible idea and even then it doesnt even matter because as the animation industry has demonstrated there is so much lack of quality control they just skip the "focus group" part entirely and wonder why their show was a failure.

phoneposter

Kill yourself

Because both these problems are connected to one another. You need to understand this is a symptom of everyone in the industry copying off each others homework to where you not only see the same storylines over and over you also end up creating knockoffs of pre-established characters written worse but youre suppose to believe these two different characters are going thru 2 completely different problems despite it being the opposite. It becomes so consistent after awhile you start to wonder if this is now just a rule that needs to be enforced now.

what do you think silicon valley farms through their faggot social media sites? every time you share an opinion on some millennial faggotry, the people who used to run focus groups, they get a little mark on a page of statistics.

Huh… maybe that’s because that younger age range is when the imagination truly runs wild, makes sense to me

But I would argue while that might be true there is also an agenda being enforced where they simply want to quantify data no matter how small in their market that doesnt exist. They use the vocal minority as if its the biggest demographic of people possible then throw their horrible concept out to the consumer public despite knowing this is not what they want. I hate using the term ESG but it really does feel like people only want to promote shitty concepts not because they dont understand why its shitty but because they know its shitty but they dont care since they dont have to love the concept just normalize it as something that happens in their way of life now.

cartoons are bad because they aren't listening to focus groups enough

Or at all or theyre deliberately bringing in stupid people who were given the one purpose of normalize a concept they know is stupid but its not their place to point out why it is.

Test audiences are focus groups.

Yes but where is any of the data to prove these test audiences ever existed at all. I remember when Anon Babble was reading up on the development history of Green Lantern the animated series where they were going over all sorts of different ideas on why kids didnt resonate with the product while ignoring how that show came out in 2012, literally the peak where Shounen Anime was so hyper normalized among society that action cartoons were out of their depth entirely thinking any child was gonna pick something like this when the alternative was better.

cartoons are good because they mashed everything into interchangeable sludge with no key demographic appeals

If focus groups weren't a thing there's no way we would've gotten the ultra bland, clearly revised 10,000 times until it was palatable for every audience Super Mario Bros movie. Focus groups and test audiences are how we get Take on Me in a movie that doesn't need shitty licensed 80s music.

Kys faggot

I think its moreso these shows were happening for economic reasons in regards to make a concept that can be made as cheaply as possible but develops an audience.

Yep. twitter isn't reality and never has been. Algorithms skew the results, bot accounts flood the polls, and and (most shocking of all) people say things online they don't actually mean or act on!

I think the funniest example of corporations getting screwed by Twitter feedbakc is when Morbius booked an extended release schedule in theaters despite the fact that it was trash, everyone knew it was trash, and no one wanted to see it. Why did they do this? Because 'morbing out' memes were hot on the internet for a few weeks, so there was a lot of morbius related posts on social media that somehow they convinced themselves meant that zoomers would flock to see it in theaters if only they were given the chance to watch it ironically. When anyone with two braincells to rub together could tell you that while there was certainly buzz around the movie the fact that it was all *making fun of the movie for being dogshit* was the important part, not whatever statistics they were getting fed by the social media consultants or whatever.

phoneposter

Love yourself

Wouldn't surprise me if they no longer exist considering that cartoons simply don't cater to boys anymore, maybe they were a necessary evil after all.

Reminder:
youtu.be/XPZbXWb4TmE?t=168

I highly doubt that was the result of focus groups. Most 6-11 year old boys would've preferred the original DK song over take on me in that scene.

If anything the LACK of focus groups was why that song was there, because they wanted to appeal to the parents who can't fucking let the 80s go. Not to mention shigeru miyamoto is not as smart as people say he is.

This focus group was completely biased. I could understand most of this train of thought making sense in something like the 80's and 90's but this show came in 2012, an era where CN just had its most unprofitable couple of years under Synder before Miller came in and made the company worse in a different way

See the real reason this focus group failed is because it was easier then ever before now to find anime and watch it without needing something like Toonami as a middle man.

In fairness to Morbius that movie was never going to be good considering how it went thru as many reshoots, script changes and failed test results as Captain America Brave New World did and that was all during both Pre and Post Covid.

Not really, they just look at Twitter trends now.

And that's why the media is so shitty now, they think twitter's opinions are the majority. And this goes beyond politics, keep in mind that they were shitting on Avatar 2 and yet it ended up making two billion dollars.

No, they artificially create twitter trends then pretend it was the most organic thing to ever happen. Even now its becoming more obvious this is also applying to E-Celeb culture because there is now an entire sub genre of hollywood dedicated to tard wrangling this upper middle class group of people into doing their bidding the way modern hollywood uses itself as a means of spreading a political agenda.

Also its a spiderman villain without spiderman, but who is counting?

Point is, they spent more money because they let twitter bamboozle them and lost every penny they spent on doing extending the run.

Yes, they exist. And whatever schizo shit you're babbling about has nothing to do with anything.

It also doesnt help how Morbius also came out when Marvel Fatigue and Superhero Fatigue as a whole has made people no longer find the concept interesting but since Disney bet the horse on the Marvel brand its less about trying something different and moreso refusing to admit no one is interested in Capeshit anymore.

Not to mention how they also have every intention of franchising the absolute hell out of Avatar when it only works as a one movie concept.

Focus groups shouldn’t be the be all end all but completely ignoring the tween/teen male demo and exchanging it for twitter upboats is much worse. Calart loretoons have a specific appeal more similar to yuri works in Japan, it can’t carry the whole industry. We need more shows for boys, they always consistently have higher cross appeal if they aren’t grossout fartfests. A niche is running the asylum. Solid attempts to market beyond that like TADC or Invincible do really well.

source on that image, and what is it about?

Its about why Green Lantern the animated series was cancelled after only 1 season.

Kids want edgier stuff and yearn for horror.

is there more to it?

They ignore those demographics because theyre investing whatever money they have into products that arent being backed and marketed by the people willing to sell them. The whole "we cancelled this show because it doesnt sell toys" is the worst excuse possible since kids nowadays pretty much refuse to play with toys unless those kids are dumb enough to not operate a smartphone yet. Smartphones are the modern toys.

There is. It goes over in detail all the reasons they felt like the show didnt test well from how the animation was off putting and how kids arent interested in complex plots just action figures punching each other. Case in point, Shounen Anime.

What would you pitch to 8-12 year old boys today? Could be resurrecting an old IP, or something completely new. The main thing is a cartoon (and tie in merch) that unabashedly is meant to entertain and appeal to young boys.

Fightchads and rule of cool always win. You can have endearing characters and pretty girls but fightchads ALWAYS win.

We have multiple threads right now about how test screenings hate the upcoming Superman movie.
For several months we've had threads about how BNW had to do constant reshoots and delays cause evert test screening deemed it bad.

Shounen also has its own series of problems as well but you can only really quantify those if you're a regular consumer of it. See most kids are content with watching maybe a small handful of Shounen anime and basing their whole world view and consumer tastes on it so anime companies then try to make something that is the next version of "x" instead of making something that is good enough to be good on its own merit. Thats why a lot of Shounen wants to be either DBZ or Naruto much like how DC wants all the success that Marvel had out the door.

Ninjago did really well, I could see resurrecting Bionicle.
Or a backrooms inspired action adventure series with horror elements, but between the horror have cute stuff too.
Not calarts is a big start, put something aesthetically interesting out there.

According to Glitch, the demand for stuff like Amazing Digital Circus is what the consumer public wants. Easy to consume media with well designed characters that has enough bite in it where your brain can create concepts for the show without the show actually acknowledging them like how Viv writes all her slop.

Focus group testing is what ultimately killed the Casagrandes. The show went from being about Ronnie Anne to focusing on Carl and the talking parrot because they tested better.

Never. Its too labor intensive to mold the plastic for Bionicle sets thats why the Lego movie made fun of Bionicles for having a very dedicated set of fans but they dont have the disposable income to justify their continued existence.

In fairness, shows like Loud House exist long beyond the use of "focus testing" because its the ideal show that Nick wants. A non-stakes show full of wacky adventures that are insane for the Ep they happen in and then we never have to mention them again. Its the show equivalent of eating a slice of birthday cake for breakfast. I hate shows like these but I understand economically why execs want to flood the market with content like this. Its the show equivalent of sensory overload thats why stuff like AT keeps getting more content made for it every couple of years.

I found it
comicsalliance.com/green-lantern-the-animated-series-giancarlo-volpe-focus-group-comic/
that didn't seem to be the point, the point seemed to be that the focus group "experts" seemed to be malicious

If you actually look at what kids are into, the direction is surrealism, and horror, but with a nostalgic or friendly atmosphere.

Backrooms

Mascot horror

Liminal spaces

Skibidi

TADC

Roblox

Weirdcore/Dreamcore

Beyond that, the tried and true action and/or cool shit still works. OG Powerpuff would work today.

Adventure Time. Im not even kidding and it makes me angry because Surrealism was the whole selling point of shows like Chowder, Flapjack, Regular Show and especially Adventure Time. So what I am understanding here is people are nostalgic for the time between 2009 to 2012.

Skibidi is proof boys action cartoons is still a viable genre. How unhinged am I if I think it would do really well on cartoon network

This is so stupid. When I was a kid I loved both action and romance, meanwhile my sisters weren't the biggest on romance.

Like did none of you guys remember your school years? You don't remember the really gruff tough girls, or the overly friendly kind boys? You all expressed interest in hypermasculine and ONLY hypermasculine toys? you never met a tomboy as a kid?

I'm not saying boys don't love action and scary stuff but this idea that they HATE anything remotely girly and that's just an inclined reaction is a manufactured one. boys are SCARED of being seen as openly girly but that's not the same as actually hating femininity. I liked powerpuff girls as a kid but i was scared of being seen watching it.

Most kids raised in healthy environments prefer both masculine and feminine toys, shows and themes.

uhmm, I met a tall asian once

this proves asians are not short!

take THAT chuds!!

AT is the closest but it’s still too soft. The kids yearn for darker. Weirder. That’s what they seek out. AT is too friendly on the face of it.
youtube.com/watch?v=1mTX4WJBba4
This is how TADC got so many views.

Most kids raised in healthy environments prefer both masculine and feminine toys, shows and themes.

and I assume you have decided the proof of wether a household was healthy is based on your arbitrary opinion how it produces/ not produces gender neutral children? what if your idiotic belief I wrong, how in the world could such evidence be produced when you just arbitrarily decide, "uhm, children are supposed to gender queer". you marxist piece of shit

They hate stuff that is clearly not made for them and only has appeal to 20-something former tumblr browsers. PPG sold because it was a boys cartoon with the aesthetics of a girl cartoon. It was radical.

What’s funny is weirdcore still slightly skews female because of all the OCs and shipping dynamic fan animations. The roblox generation all likes this strange stuff though.

This is cope. The unisex strategy doesn’t work if you take the sex appeal and action out of girl shows. Boys don’t care about working through trauma if that’s all you have, you gotta make it cool or they’ll move to Fortnight.

This is why magical girl shows like Precure succeed. They are girl shows with emotion driven storytelling, but the fights pack a punch and boys can enjoy it for the action.

It turns out that "cute girls kicking ass" is pretty much the perfect overlap point for all demographics.

Yep. Magical started out girls only but the pretty girls led to some otaku crossover and they adapted. Now there’s a spectrum of girl to guy appeal that keeps those BDs and figures selling.

I thought you all were JUST arguing that "boys don't like girly shit", Now you're saying they'll like precure? Make up your minds.

Boys want cartoons geared at them, especially in this landscape where there is so little.
They will cross over to some girly shows if there is appeal for them put in those shows (just like Powerpuff).
This isn’t complicated. Put some more teeth in your cartoons, give boys what they like, and they will come.

Boys don’t watch precure, only girls and adult men. A boy would watch Madoka or Sailor Moon or Nanoha though.

Rule of thumb: don’t be gay and lame.

Focus groups have largely been replaced with data farming algorithms. Execs will literally just pull up spreadsheets with analytics for how many times people are posting keywords on tweet or how many retweets a new series is getting and base creative decisions on that shit. And the problem is twofold because all of this shit is easily manipulated by bots or influencers, so the data they're basing decisions on isn't even necessarily accurate.

So skewed.

Focus groups have largely been replaced with data farming algorithms.

Which makes for a horrible replacement because data farming algorithms only look at engagement and fall for the old bullshit idea that any publicity is good publicity, which is obvious bullshit to anyone with a brain.

It also massively over-represents the sort of people who make posts online in the first place, which lets be honest are going to mostly be terminally online autists. Not, as it happens, the target audience for your kids show.

There are those autists that align more closely with other demos, who are fine with little winks and appeal as a secondary audience (smart to market to), and there are those who only want to see tumblr fanfiction put on to screen (dumb to market too outside of individual niche projects).

Its more like the people manipulating the data believing themselves to be the only people who know what people want believing what they actually want isnt what they really want its like someone making that decision for you and telling you its a good thing. There are many examples of this happening but the animation industry is the most glaring example of it with the other being the gaming industry. What the Gaming Awards prove every year is that people are tired of game being like interactable movies because the people who work on them want to work for Hollywood much like how the people who graduate from Cal-Arts either want to work on live action slop or anime.

It also kinda makes things harder on the writers themselves. Off the top of my head just using it as a common example, HB and HH. Viv made Adam to be as extremely unlikable as humanly possible but only by her own personal standards and all it resulted in was making him the most popular character in the show. People tend to like the thing theyre not suppose to like because the other alternative is terrible. People like Vaggie and Charlie for goon brained reasons only and it never excels past that. All the same you can make many more examples of this like how you're morally obligated to like Princess Bubblegum despite the fact she does objectively terrible things because no one is brave enough to call her out on it.

So all I am hearing right now is that they dont actually want to hear actual feedback on their terrible ideas just normalize them enough to wear you hate it but dont question why the animation industry has been so focused around it. Its like the opposite of trying to re-invent the wheel.

They do have stuff that is geared for them its called Anime. Granted, it is a consumer good but it never started off as a consumer good for everyone it just became that and when something international is outperforming everything on a worldwide level you're left to wonder how on the domestic front things got this bad. It reminds me how making a billion domestically simply wasnt enough for Disney something could only be truly profitable if it made both a Billion domestically and another Billion internationally. Its why the Fast Series became a franchise that overtime became a complete parody of itself going from a series about racing to a series about international espionage

Anime is great and all but we’re talking about how best to angle cartoons.

Not entirely wrong. A recurring consequence of media conglomeration is that focus shifts to tricking the audience into accepting what you have decided that it is most profitable to sell them. When the audience doesn't line up with your optimistic projections, punish them until they learn their lesson and condition them buy up your slop next time without protest.
In a Anon Babble related example: DC doesn't want to make new heroes, it wants you to keep buying its 100 year old ones. DC doesn't want to put in the work to make its timeline make sense or have coherent stories, it wants you to buy the low quality slop it has for sale. They have decided what you will want, and if you don't like it too bad go find another hobby.

Any time I see someone posting a screencapped post from within the last few days I assume it's just them reposting their own shit like they had some awesome mic drop moment and every time, without fail, it's either really banal or really stupid. In short, fuck off oxygen waste.

NTA, but under the circumstances it would be foolish to not at least attempt to learn the lessons behind why anime is currently successful and western animation is not. As we have seen, the answer is not purely 'anime is cheap'. The cheapness explains why it is *profitable*, it doesn't explain why the *audience* likes it better. And if the cheapness is such a big factor, well, there are a lot of lessons you can learn from the directorial tricks that anime uses to keep its costs down. You don't have to do sweatshop labor to learn their animation-saving techniques that rely on expert direction and scene composition over wasted frames. Evangelion has whole sequences where people just talk over still images for a minute at a time, and those shots have become iconic and people are still watching it 30 years later. You don't always need 120 frames a second of constant motion for the sake of it.

Its like that one Anon Babble copypasta about the Vaccine die offs and the sunk cost fallacy of how the only thing that happened after Covid was everyone got really fucking poor because Inflation happened.

Cal-Arts people are very aware of why Anime is better then the shit theyre trying to imitate because why would anyone want something that is like Anime when Anime in its current state is more available then ever. Its like saying why do you want the knockoff brand cola if it tastes like shit when the regular premium brand is right there?

You're basically describing the overall state of the gaming industry Pre and Post Gamergate and the effect of it is still being felt to this day entirely out of spite.

You're right that its the same phenomenon in both industries, but you're wrong that is a result of spite. Thats an easy narrative to concoct that makes it about *you*, when the reality is that its a result of everything being increasingly owned by the same handful of companies and their subsidiaries.
As studios that are designed around artistic ventures are bought up by conglomerates whose only goal is to maximize their portfolio, those studios over time are forced to become interchangeable blocks on the spreadsheet, which prioritizes financial consistency and growth over anything else. If you can make more money making a bad product than taking a risk on a good one, by god you will make that bad product in spades. The profit-focused logic that makes sense to the executives up the chain gets imposed downstream in big rubber stamps wielded without care or thought to any of the industries individually. They don't know the difference between a video game studio, an animation studio, and a company that makes shoes. They want them all to work the same, and resent any implication that this cannot be made reality.

A good example of this in on the Anon Babble side of things where an ex-EA executive is in charge of Hasbro now, and keeps trying to make Dungeons and Dragons into an always online live-service game with fucking FOMO seasonal content. An idea that is UTTER LUNACY for a game that is played around a table with fucking books and dice. But hey, it makes money when you do that in video games so why not apply it to DnD? Same thing, right?

More like suits in the industry have become much more risk adverse, so they just latch onto whatever the safest or most popular investment is.

Disney still has them with their pilots for their shows

Which in this case in Spongebob because even with Nick being the worst its been in years the only thing keeping that network even remotely on course is Viacom getting a nice chunk of investment back from Spongebob alone even with the people who used to be big supporters of it no longer appreciating it to the level they used to before. AT ended up becoming CN's solution to SB and that was because they straight up bought it from Nick.

Look no one is denying this. You lived long enough to see Naughty Dog go from a respectable gaming company to being so far beyond a shell of its former self that it flat out states it wants to be a movie studio now. Its way more direct compared to someone like Kojima who makes a nice middle ground between "video game" and "movie game"