Digital Literacy and Information Fluency

The task for this question was to look at an analysis the Animal Planet website that was created for the series Mermaids discovered which was a "documentary" that animal planet released on their channel. Firstly the purpose of the official website is to build attention and hype around the event which was the airing of the first part of the series as well as show viewers some short clips that will be seen within the film.


The response that the series got was both negative and positive both from the scientific community as well as that of the public who both had very different views for example; The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) gave a statement of their official website saying that there as been no official evidence to back up the fact that aquatic humanoids (mermaids) have been found. Where as the public thought differently or at least were very curious about the stories that Animal Planet had a series out showing that mermaids have been discovered. Animal Planet had its highest viewer rates of the channel during the airing of the series with an average of 3.6 million viewers for the series. The last time Animal Planet reach such a higher viewer count was for the memorial of Steve Irwin which got 2.7 million viewers in September 2006. In my opinion the show got so many viewers because of the way that Animal Planet marketed the show by creating a whole separate section on their website with different clips and articles about mermaids and related topics which got people interested and curious about if it is all true or not which caused them to tune in a what the series, which in the end is what Animal Planet wanted was a high number of viewers for the show but which also gives the channel publicity which was their goal with the series.

In my opinion Animal Planet and their website did exactly what they intended for it to do and did it very well. The task of the site was to bring publicity to the series that animal planet would be showing. Which as stated earlier had a record number of viewers for the series in the channels history.

References

Animal Planet, (2012). About Mermaids. [online] Available at: http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/mermaids/about-this-show/about-mermaids/ [Accessed 17 May 2015].

de Moraes, L. (2015). Animal Planet clocks biggest audience ever with mermaids. [online] Washington Post. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/animal-planet-clocks-biggest-audience-in-network-history-with-mermaids-documentary/2013/05/28/4e126474-c7e8-11e2-9245-773c0123c027_blog.html [Accessed 17 May 2015].

DNews, (2015). NOAA Denies Existence of Mermaids : DNews. [online] Available at: http://news.discovery.com/history/noaa-mermaids-120629.htm [Accessed 17 May 2015].