- Often as much money can be made from the related products marketed alongside a major new film as the film itself.
- Usually not produced by film studios themselves but franchised out.
- The planning, marketing & coordination of release dates along with tie ins & spin offs are crucial aspects of modern media activity. For example, Sherlock Holmes, a British made film, that had a game available on the social networking site facebook, before the film was put on general release, raising awareness of the product.
- EG Harry Potter world, this is called syngery & is crucial to media institutions success.
Diversification
- When companies diversify into different realms, sometimes by taking over or merging with other companies
- Horizontal intergration, when companies expand sideways, eg, Sherlock Holmes game to promote film. British Film Industry tends to be more horizontal intergration more about collaboration. The King's Speech, all different companies worked together.
- Vertical intergration, when a company takes over all the production & distribution, eg murdochs news international owning sky, times, sun etc. Fixed, permamnent - long term. One company owns lots of other companies. American institutions tend to be more vertically intergrated. Large, world famous studios etc.
- Demographics react differently to the same products.
- Early studies of audiences tended to focus on passive, non discerning, mindless viewers accepting what is fed to them.
- Now we realise audience theory is more complex than this.
- Audiences are capable of a high degree of self determination.
- Audiences are now active, their own experiences, their own expectations of product.
- For Example, 'The Boat That Rocked' - different demographics will interpret it in an active way. People who were there at the time, could enjoy the film on a nostalgic level, will interpret it compared to how they remember it, in the 60's and so on. Other audiences such as younger audience, alternative audience, would not have been there etc.
- The King's Speech, to an alternative audience could interpret it as a historical documentation of events, so they will have different expectations.
- Consumed in different ways.
- Noam Chomsky is a theorist who contends that the real product is the audience itself.
- he says that media institutions should be seen as businesses who are engaged in driving audiences to the real drivers of media activities, the advertisers.
- He claims that programmes and films are made to deliver audiences into the advertisers hands.
- with product placement as well as adverts becoming more ubiquitous this theory gains mor ecredibility.
- http://www.chomsky.info./
- All about making money and delivering audiences into the hands of the advertisers.
- The media is one big institution, all driven my idea of making a profit.
- Could get more profit by increasing product placement (quite an American thing to do)
- Indentifies three main perspectives from which audiences can read texts.
- preferred or dominant readings - those that are closest to those intended by the producers.
- negotiated readings - female watching a male protagonist.
- Oppositional or resistnat readings - audiences own life experiences are at odds with the text. Eg, crime drama watched by prisoners.
- Hall's essay challenged all three components of the mass communications model. It is argued that meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; the message is never transparent; and the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_ (cultural theorist)
- Gauntlett developed the theory of web 2.0 first devised by Tom o'Reilly in 2004
- in 2008 Gauntlett proposed the Make and Connect agenda', an attempt to rethink audience studies in the context of media users as producers as well as comsumers or media material.
- this agues that there is a shift from a 'sit back and be told culture' to a 'making and doing culture' and that harnessing creativity in both Web 2.0 and in other everyday creative activities will play a role in tackling environmental problems.
- these ideas are developed further in 'Making is Connecting'
- hhtp://theory.org.uk/david/
- he argues that the traditional form of media studies teaching and research fails to recognise the changing media landscape in which the categories of 'audiences' and 'producers'
- Technology has enabled audiences to become more active - should be involved in the creativity, should the film institutions address this.
