Date: Monday, 06 October 2014

I remember our meeting fondly. He walked up to me, introduced himself, and said, "what do you do?"

I replied, "marketing."

"No, seriously, what do you do?" he said with a smirk. "Nobody really does marketing, they do sales or something else." 

It wasn't necessarily what he thought, just what he said. He wanted to provoke a reaction and he sure got one! Within minutes we were firm friends, and he was officially one of my first friends I had met since I had moved to Sydney, the big smoke. We both kind of got each other coming from small rural towns in Australia.

Once labelled a social experiment by its producers, Big Brother really is nothing more than a manipulative attempt by a network to win ratings. Unfortunately, for Channel 9 this 2014 incarnation is losing viewers. And any marketing expert will tell you there are several very apparent reasons why.

Firstly, if it is a social experiment, it is a failed one. The best experiments take time. They are designed so that empathy is created with a product or person; we develop a taste or distaste, we feel engaged, we want to see success and feel part of a character’s growth. In reality it takes longer than three months to be able to do any of this. I think most people are attuned to the fact the people within the house are potential DJs, or television hosts playing with a false sense of identity. Don’t try to tell us otherwise.