Telenovela in Multimedia Platforms: analysis of a Brazilian experience

Abstract

This work aims to analyzing the strategies of a Brazilian television broadcasting corporation when it promotes the interaction between a fictional product and the social networks that are weaved around its plot and characters, including its actors, screenwriters and directors. The topic was the Brazilian telenovela Viver a Vida broadcast by Rede Globo de Televisão in 2010, and which, in the current context of convergence, has its storytelling overflowing into a multiplatform scenario, fed both by the producers’ strategies and by the audience’s behavior. Following the trend of expanding the storytelling by using the Internet, Viver a Vida used several publicity strategies for its plot, and narrative events often merged with extra-narrative events in the production of content about the narrative, pervading various media: official and unofficial websites, social networking websites, and blogs, as well as the traditional media. The result is a dialogue between media and society, which was triggered also by other companies and journalistic content, generating news not only about the plot and its characters but also about the themes approached within the narrative. The telenovela producers have thus invested in crossmedia strategies to expand the fictional narrative beyond television and its consumers produce their own content and exchanging their impressions about the telenovela via Twitter, which has generated a great real-time conversation. Online social networks have therefore become an important stage for the interaction among the spheres of audience and production, thus enabling the former to have a direct channel through which they can expose their opinions about the narrative, whereas the latter has obtained a “thermometer” about how the plot has been consumed.

Keywords

• convergence
• Brazilian telenovela
• crossmedia