Measuring quality
- Measures of popularity as commercial success, sales revenue, ratings, etc.
- Commercial quantitative measures.
- Check out ratings for the television program
- For Liz Nice, she mentions that sales for teen magazines dropped significantly. To respond, they made many alterations—change in size to make it bag-sized, content changes, etc.
- Measures of critical success or quality of talent: positive reviews, word of mouth, duration in the market.
- Word of mouth is nice free advertising.
- Duration in the market (does youtube count for the daily show?)
- Measures of social quality lie in producer’s intention, audience reception and meaning
- We have to ask a lot about the audience, but we can make some preliminary assessments about the producer’s intent. Sometimes the intentions are explicit. Intention of the Daily Show is to poke fun at politics.
Marketing & Branding strategies
- Keep these separate from advertising
- Why increased marketing and promotion of media products? (reading number 3)
- Decline of TV watching.
- So marketing tries to bring them to specific shows so that they can bring the audience to specific ads. (e.g. embedded ads during a football game)
- Increased efficiency of ratings data
- Marketing execs know the next day how many people watched their program. Thus, they can act quickly to increase their ratings.
- Fragmentation of the market, specialty channels
- We can choose from a wide array of channels. We would probably pick the channel that has all the glossy, heavy duty ads that interest and dazzle us.
- Increased production costs and increased competition.
- Print production costs of gone up a lot due to the decline of readership causing lower economies of scale.
- Film and television markets are saturated
- Lots of film and television content, and multiple versions of them
- E.g. we see the same show on 2 different channels, occasionally at the same time.
- Decline of TV watching.
Types of Media Product Marketing
- Stylistic innovation through multiple forms of multimedia/multi-platform delivery.
- Allows media products to be sold over and over again
- Using corporate convergence to cross-promotion & ‘repurposing’ media content (e.g. multiple versions of Harry Potter books and films)
- Even though Time Warner didn’t have the original book rights, but they had the movie rights, so they later published Harry Potter books that were based on the movie.)
- Work closely with advertisers through product placement & licensing deals with advertisers.
- Merchandising possibilities – Harry Potter socks, cups, shirts, and a whole load of other crap.
Advertising as Entertainment?
- “as the wall between advertising and content erodes, the aptitude required to understand the functions and design of media content becomes more complex. Techniques such as product placement makes movies and television programs less ad-free, and may even alter the ideas available in these forms. Advertising itself begins to appropriate the icons and formulae… (McAllister)
Social Values and Media Products
- As shared culture in the public sphere, should media products be protected from complete commercial control?
- Given the social impact of media goods, we need to consider positive and negative externalities or benefits.
- They have impacts outside the market. Education as a public good, transportation, etc. Simply put, their positive and negative social impacts.
- Externalities are the rationale for government intervention in media industries
- In Canada, for instance, we see the media industries as being heavily regulated. They are considered to have a positive externality because these regulations promote Canadian content. Any Canadian film or television program has benefited from this.
- Canadian media subsidies, regulation of content
- How has the product benefited from government regulation?
Comments are closed.