Sensory Regimes in TV Marketing: Boardwalk Empire’s Chromatic Enhancement and Digital Aesthetics

Abstract

Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this paper offers an empirical investigation of the multisensory appeal of HBO’s marketing of Boardwalk Empire, taking it as an example of a hyperaesthetics strategy of audience capture. To this end, the paper looks at the trailers for the show’s first season, as well as to its titles sequence and character posters, arguing that their chromatic enhancement, obtained in colour grading, invites a sensorial response, also contributing to confer a distinctive identity to its channel. In this light, hyperaesthetics is taken to stand for both an innovative approach to digital design, as maintained by Peter Lunenfeld, and as a marketing strategy of sensorial mobilisation, as theorised by David Howes. A look at HBO’s partnership with Canadian Club Whisky demonstrates the multisensory appeal of Boardwalk Empire’s campaign and its goal to brand the show as a lifestyle event. Even before we consume the actual show, this promotional strategy aims at embedding us within a semiotic and affective chain that prompts a variety of effects. The sensation of unqualified expectation and even excitement that is thus generated points toward marketing’s anticipative logic whereby hyperaesthetics generates affective attachment to as-yet unaired productions.