Hey Nerds! Hollywood is Watching: “Fanthropologist” Kristen Olson Studies Fans for Studios

Posted by Noah J Nelson on December 9, 2011

Photo by Noah J. Nelson

Not to get you paranoid or anything, but if you’re a fan of a TV show, video game, or movie series then there’s a fair chance that the studios are watching you; monitoring what you say about your favorite shows and how you reacted to the latest Avengers trailer or leaked picture from the set of The Dark Knight Rises.

But don’t be too alarmed. They just want you to like them. Really, really like them. Or more to the point they want to understand why you like Iron Man more than Batman, or why you’d rather keep up with a Kardashian than a “real” housewife.

Kristen Olson calls herself a “fanthropologist.” The title says it all: she uses the techniques of anthropologists to study fans and fandoms for the Los Angeles ad agency she works for. Olson’s job is to lay bare the inner workings of a given fandom so that studio executives can understand, and communicate with, the people who are passionate about their intellectual properties.

It’s a job made more complicated by the infinite hype chamber that the internet creates around media properties.

“The studios can’t tell the difference between the kind of hype that is economically generated by the need for bloggers to find something to hype,” Olson tells me, “and things that people are generally excited about. Which is one of the things that I do.”

Comic Con in particular has become a thorny issue for the studios over the past few years. As the event has become a giant promotional platform for studio creations, it’s become increasingly hard to tell what is going to be a real hit and what is a kind of summer fling for fans.

“Based on what we’re seeing coming out of it,” Olson says of the excitement generated by Comic Con, “it’s motivated by something more than simple love. [Fans are] looking for something to love.” Unfortunately for studio executives, that kind of enthusiasm doesn’t always translate into big mainstream audiences. The Comic Con audience fell in love with Scott Pilgrim, for example, but the film failed to live up to expectations at the box office.

Olson’s job runs in multiple directions. She likens it to being a plumber, but instead of water it’s information that she making sure flows properly.

“You’re looking at where the information is coming out and what you’re looking at is it traveling to all the places it needs to? What are people getting on the other end? Also another metaphor: telephone. Are people getting the message that you’re putting out? It’s tracing how the information travels and what factors are at play in what the end perception is.”

It’s a strange kind of mental wizardry. Analysts like Olson not only help media executives understand what the fans of their properties want, they help them speak the language of the fandom. To understand at a root level what fans get emotionally out of the property. Because a fandom is more than just a collection of information about a fictional universe, a celebrity, or a sports team. It’s a way of interacting with other people that colors the way fans see the world.

“People who are fans tend to continue to be fans of different things,” said Olson. “Once you’ve been drawn into a fan mindset you tend to relate in that pattern for much of your life. Not that everyone is as intense a fan for much of their life, or that they even stick with a fandom for their entire life because people move between fandoms all the time.”

For Olson unlocking a fandom can mean combing through thousands of message board posts, drilling down into the most technical of details to root out objections and concerns.

“I think at one point we were down to the color in the artwork,” she told me. “Fans were responding to it in a consistent way we thought they needed to address. There’s so many things that can arise subconsciously from the artwork.” She points to how the way a movie trailer is cut may imply elements that are not in the film, but become negative talking points in early fan reaction.

The alchemy of a given fandom can be a closely guarded secret. After all, if a studio knows what aspect a rival is studying of a fandom they may be able to infer what the wider plans are for a property. Yet despite the level of client confidentiality that her job requires, some of Olson’s clients do wind up knowing bits and pieces of the work she does for others. Not because of anything she says, but because they tell each other. Olson told me that referrals are a big part of her business, with clients laying out just what she does to their friends. Who then go on to stress confidentiality.

“Don’t tell the person who referred me what you did for me,” is one request she’s heard. “It gets very convoluted. So many people are so protective of their fandom, which I think is ultimately a good thing.

“The information I’m giving is so that executives can genuinely respond to the fans,” said Olson. “If the information starts to go around too much I feel like the response that [executives] make is less genuine and starts to become more standardized. If they’re going to study what other people have done in response to similar problems as opposed to look in a really narrow way at their fans and what they’re confronting I think it all gets really muddy.”

Which is where the passion of the Comic Con crowd comes back into play. While there are tried and true formulas for making a movie, finding the right combination of elements to make a Star Wars or a Twilight is far from a science. It is something that has to be felt through, and in places like Comic Con the fans gather, hungry for the next big thing.

“The fans are there because they want to find something amazing,” said Olson. Which is more than just an outsider’s perspective. Like many who study fandom, Olson counts herself as a fan. “I feel it the second I step on the floor or into a panel. I want it to be really amazing and I’m willing to give it a little bit of leeway because I want to be amazed so much.”

Whether that enthusiasm is the mark of something real, or just the matter of being caught up in the moment, is up to Olson and her colleagues to figure out.

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