Guessing Games - Building Audience Engagement, Masked Singer-style

I love The Masked Singer.

I’m as surprised as anyone that this is the case. I hate reality TV, loathe Saturday night entertainment; have been known to skulk away into another room when my wife (and more recently, my daughter) line up the snacks for a night in with Craig Revel Horwood and the Strictly dancers.

But The Masked Singer... The Masked Singer is wonderful.

For the handful of people who haven’t seen it, read about it in the papers or had unsolicited links to its YouTube content land in their inbox, the premise is this: 12 celebrities, some trained performers and some not, disguise themselves as animals, plant life and mythical creatures and - their faces obscured, their speaking voices digitally disguised - sing and dance their hearts out for a panel of judges, a studio of real-time viewers and however many million people might be watching at home on any given weekend. The judges take a stab, after each performance, at who the person behind the mask (or monster suit, or unicorn head) might be; at the end of each show, the one perceived to have the weakest vocals gets the boot, departing the stage with a swansong - but not before pulling off the mask itself with a flourish, the judges and spectators baying for them to “take it off!” with all the gusto of a Roman amphitheater audience in a Spearmint Rhino.

And that’s it.

By the current standards of reality TV, it’s an unusual premise. But it’s also a straightforward one, lent weight by thousands of years of theatrical tradition: the players (Queen Bee, Unicorn, Monster, Fox and the rest) disguise their true identities in elaborate fashion; they sing a few bars and say a few lines for us, the viewers; we (and our proxy-selves, the judges) guess at who they might be, really, under the mask.

The anticipation this guesswork builds - the excitement, the waiting, the gap between thinking that Tree might be Jamie Redknapp and ultimately knowing, once the mask is off, that he’s another member of the Euro ‘96 squad altogether - is undoubtedly part of the show’s appeal, for me at least. But it’s not all of it, not the whole story. So I thought it might be worth digging deeper, to try to understand what, exactly, The Masked Singer is doing right for me, as an avowed hater of all things unscripted.

More to the point, for the purposes of this article: I thought there might be something to learn there. For brands, media industries, entertainment producers... or anyone looking to engage audiences that wouldn’t usually be interested in what they have to offer. And I wanted to understand what that learning might be.

Re-watching the show yesterday evening, it struck me that there were at least two other elements at play:

Point 1: The Masked Singer makes us play detective.

Unlike many other reality and competitive reality shows, it asks viewers to do some light-touch detective work, a very small amount of cognitive heavy lifting - to sniff out clues, gather evidence, make deductions and, ultimately, put their own figurative money on who is - and who isn’t - the soul singer dressed as an oversized flower, or the man in the prickly hedgehog suit. It’s a little bit like reading a murder mystery to guess whodunnit, and a little bit like gambling, with none of the risks of actual material loss.

Many, even a majority of the competitive reality programming on prime time - Bake Off, The X Factor and Strictly in the UK, The Voice and Dancing With The Stars in the US - construct watching as a passive experience for the viewer. We might make judgements, as we watch - on whose voice is most powerful or most commercially-viable, whose paso doble is sharpest, whose Victoria sponge we’d most like to cram in our mouths. We might have favourites, choose people we want to win - even take a bet on who we think will win. But we’re not, generally, asked to investigate, to detect. 

Even though - as the enduring, runaway success of the crime fiction genre demonstrates - the opportunity to play Miss Marple is endlessly attractive to viewers, readers and listeners, in the UK, US and elsewhere.

So the takeout here, perhaps, is: The Masked Singer works because it asks us to think. Not about anything weighty, or anything of any real consequence, but to form an opinion, and to substantiate that opinion with some sort of evidence - even if that “evidence” amounts to, say, a side-by-side comparison of Duck singing Livin’ On A Prayer with two or three tracks from Skunk Anansie’s Stoosh.

And the ubiquity of digital social channels means, of course, that we’re not doing this thinking in isolation - the way we might have been, perhaps, reading a paperback copy of Evil Under The Sun in the 1940s. We’re talking about our deductions, and not just with our exasperated spouses.

We’re watching and listening; we’re thinking about and reflecting on what we’ve seen and heard; we’re drawing conclusions, and then we’re sharing them, recounting the evidence and the inexorable conclusions it leads us to like an army of Poirots in the packed drawing-room of the internet.

If that isn’t audience engagement, I don’t know what is.

Point 2: The Masked Singer is inherently nostalgic. 

Or, maybe more accurately, it’s a catalyst for nostalgia, at least for people in my age bracket (late 30s/early 40s) - something that doesn’t just get us thinking, but gets us thinking about the cultural materials we remember from the recent (and less recent) past.

As I’m writing this, only four contestants have been unmasked. But all four of these, arguably, reached their career peaks in the 90s and 00s: Patsy Palmer/Bianca from Eastenders (initial run: 93-99), Blair/Brown-era Cabinet Minister Alan Johnson, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, footballer Teddy Sheringham (who played for Manchester United and the England squad between 1993 and 2002). And the ones yet to be unmasked are also firmly associated with past decades, at least according to the hive-minds of Reddit and Digital Spy and the Metro - Duck is track star Denise Lewis (or Skin, or Mel C from the Spice Girls); Unicorn is John Barrowman (or Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters, or one of the cast of Glee).

Which is to say: none of these contenders, or possible contenders, are exactly of the now. It’s probably not Billie Eilish or Skepta in that Duck suit.

(This isn’t a complaint, by the way: the original Korean version of the show may have snagged Ryan Reynolds, but I’m just as happy with my 90s stars – as, I suspect, are a lot of the viewers who’ve grown up with them).

And so it comes to pass that, the Sunday after the latest episode of The Masked Singer is broadcast, I’m sat on the sofa with iTunes open, poring over tracks from albums like Stoosh (1996) and Paranoid & Sunburnt (1995) and investing each husk and vibrato of Skin’s voice with a significance I haven’t since my A levels.

Why does this matter? What’s the relevance of my trip down mid-90s memory lane for brands, media providers, entertainment producers?

Because I was engaging, emotionally, with the show and its possibilities. More than that, I was invested in its outcomes - my own past interests and enthusiasms, and all the pleasures afforded by the memory of them, sparked by The Masked Singer and the extra-textual conversation it’s created.

Suddenly, I cared.

To sum up, then...

If you’re looking to produce content that really engages audiences, including the ones who pride themselves on not caring, it might be useful to:

1.    Encourage them to think - and not only to think, but to guess, make deductions, show their workings. Invite them, tacitly or otherwise, to Be More Marple. 

2.    Get them to project onto the content - their own memories, their own feelings, their own nostalgic impulses. This doesn’t mean explicitly rooting narratives in specific historical periods, Call The Midwife-style; I’m not advocating anyone develops some sort of 50s take on Pop Idol. Rather, it means creating a space and a format that encourages the audience’s imagination to do its own work - to lose themselves in their own rose-tinted memories, and then imprint some of the positive associations of those memories onto the content they’re watching. 

Both of these things, of course, ultimately mean that the content of the content doesn’t really matter at all. What matters is the journey it takes the audience on, at the moment of broadcast and after.

It’s not about you, the content; it’s about me, the viewer.

And FYI: she might be Denise Lewis, but Duck is definitely not Skin.