Synergy and Cross media convergence

Media
Essay
Synergy and cross media convergence

Media question: How do companies use cross-media-convergence and synergy to promote media products and to what extent does that cause a film to be successful?

The use of synergy and cross media convergence used throughout numerous companies allow many films to reach its greatest potential. Big media producers such as Disney or Warner Brothers have some of the highest rated movies in the box office.

Disney has composed some of the highest rating movies historically. Avengers End Game grossed a total of $2.796 billion dollars in 2019 box office sales. Marvel studios spent an estimate of around $200 million dollars on advertising the film. This is a ridiculously absurd amount compared to a New Zealand film such as ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’, released in 2016, directed by Taika Waititi. This small indie film earned $12 million in box office sales and only had a budget of $2.5 million thus including the cost of advertising. This small indie film had a lower budget than most but still made a record breaking amount of sales compared to colossal global media companies.

The media's market share is largely owned by Disney subsidiaries. In 2019 Disney as a whole company accounted for more than 38% of the total U.S.’s media consumption. Through vertical integration, Disney now has ownership of companies in the same phase of production . They have now gained businesses that edit and produce all of their movies. An example of one of their vertical integration businesses is ‘FOX’ media which Disney purchased in 2019 for a whoping $52.4 billion dollars in order to merge the two companies. One of Disney's largest synergy markets is Disneyland; this is one of the largest tangible uses of vertical integration and helps to not only promote a large amount of Disney films but also generates a large sum of capital per year. According to Disney’s 2017 annual report the Disney parks brought in an $18.4 billion dollar revenue. By having such a generous range of subsidiaries this makes marketing for films owned by Disney a lot easier as it can be viewed on numerous streaming platforms. Through Disney plus this has been one of the largest cross media convergence to occur for Disney. This is a new and innovative way of reaching different audience types whilst also maintaining their big budget name. A monthly subscription for this streaming platform is $9.99. Already this version of cross-media-convergence has earned Disney over $28.6 billion dollars. This is a large sum of money considering that it was only released on the 12th of November, 2019 (less than a year ago).

Disney infinity was an online/multi platform game that could be used on multiple gaming consoles, e.g. Xbox, Playstation. A $1 billion dollar revenue was accumulated from this small game which intrigued the public and had glowing recommendations. IGN reviews says “incredible they're not poseable but they are well-crafted colorful models with a distinctive style that really succeeds in uniting the diverse characters”. Music from films have made billboard charts for example ‘Let it Go’ from Disney's Frozen released on the 26th of December, 2013, made it onto the top 100 global chart toppers. Spotify recorded that the song ‘Let it Go’ is Disney's highest streamed song ever with 298 listens, followed by ‘How far i'll go’ from Disney's Moana, released in 2016. Dwayne Johnson starred in Moana as the character of Maui. This attracted a lot of attention as he is an a-list actor starring in an animated ‘princess’ spin off. This sparked many reviews from critics as they saw this high rated movie star in an alternative type of film compared to a lot of the action based movies that he usually stars in like Hercules, released in 2014.

Smaller companies / indie filmmakers have a limitation to the availability of advertising that large conglomerates such as Disney have. Their lower budget films only allow a certain amount of synergy and cross media convergence to take place. ‘What we do in the shadows’ was a lower budget movie directed by Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clements, released on the 27th of March, 2019. This film had a budget of $1.6 million USD but earned over $6.9 million dollars in the box office. Since having a smaller budget than other big time movies they had to improvise when it came to advertising. Using free platforms such as facebook and tinder were a sole focus in getting the name of their movie out to people. A free art competition was held to generate publicity for the film enticing kids. In order to target the older generation, they created fake tinder accounts being the characters seen in the film. Crowd funding was given the green light in order to create this film but it had to be done with Jermaine Clements fan base since Taika Waititi failed to deliver promises that he made during the last film he made that was generated through crowdfunding, ‘Boy’ released in 2010. In order to create hype for the movie not only did they use immersive marketing to a high extent but they also changed the ‘Wellington’ sign to ‘Vellington’ this caught the eye of not only locals but many tourists, breaking out on news feeds and other tv channels.

Through the internet, films are able to advertise their content a lot easier compared to having to physically promote the movie themselves. Social media is one of the largest platforms for media consumption. An estimate of over 2.59 billion people used or owned social media. In 2019 Disney launched a viral Twitter and Facebook campaign that allowed fans to become loyal subjects of the red queen, the white queen, or a disloyal subject of the mad hatter. The group with the largest congregation of followers would then be awarded with special accesses to an exclusive trailer that no one else could view. It was an immediate viral sensation and to this day the facebook page still has up to 10 million fans. This was the same as ‘The Dark Knight’, this was one of the largest viral campaigns ever made. The crusade had an estimate of 11 million participants that spanned over 70 countries. The movie had the highest amount of pre sales recorded yet earning $25 million in pre sales alone then made an amazing revenue of $1.006 billion US dollars in the box office worldwide. Youtube helped blow up the film's trailer and generated more than 12.5 million views within the first 24 hours. Alone the film has been pirated (illegally downloaded) 19 million times, and is easy to be made available on demand, specially seen on streaming platforms like DIRECTV and Hulu.

Hobbiton is a big tourism attraction for New Zealand. This would be one of the largest examples of direct synergy that New Zealand owns / is home too. The hobbit is a film that put New Zealand on the map and opened the country up to new filming opportunities. The hobbit had a total budget of $180 million US dollars and was released in 2012, with sequels, The Hobbit: The desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The battle of five armies. The first Hobbit movie made $1.021 billion USD. This was a change for normal New Zealand movies. Having a big budget, the renowned director definitely helped with the publicity of the film and set the quality, making the audience assume that it would be a decent film based on Peter Jackson's past film and books. Audiences of New Zealand compared to big countries like the US or China is minimal. According to some 2018 studies, 3.5 million Kiwis are active media users and they spend an average of 1 hour and 53 minutes on social media networks each day. This is a miniscule amount compared to the U.S. who have a mass scale of nearly more than 80% of their population being active media consumers, this is out of their current population which is 328.2 million.

Big Hollywood blockbusters have large amounts to spend on advertising, but does this necessarily determine the success of the film? Many people today are basing their movie preferences on big budget movies that are seen advertised on tv channels and across multiple social media platforms and often big billboards will be placed in busy areas to generate hype for the film. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a good example of a small town film with a small budget that ended up doing really well. Its availability on tvnz on demand helped to increase the streaming rates of the film, a downside is that kiwi residents may be able to access the film with ease but internationally the film is unrecognised and is deprived from the comedic journey that takes place. Even though the film more than quadrupled its original budget it still came no where close to big budget films like Suicide Sqaud. This movie was released on the 1st of August 2016 and had a budget of $175 million US dollars, it then went on and grossed $746 million dollars worldwide. Although this film had a much larger budget than the small “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” movie, it was still had a higher rating on google with 94% liking the film compared to the big budget “Suicide sqaud” with only 83% of users liking the film. Medium.com says “The visuals — trailer, posters, casting, etc. — compensated for a terrible film, to be blunt”, posters and online advertising blew the public away creating mass amounts of hype for the film. Big A-list actors such as Margot Robbie and Will Smith were active roles in the film, but even still audiences were let down with the narrative and overall storyline, disappointing many fans.

Web 2.0 had a global impact on the way the world consumed media. This was the second phase of the internet, there was no way of social interaction or leaving something so simple as a comment on a post or article. The second stage of development of the internet was characterised by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user generated content and growth of social media. Slowly, on demand videos were made available on tvs, laptops and smartphones. The introduction of technological convergence changed the ways in which we consume media. Before people would rely on a small box radio that came on maybe once or twice a week in order to get their dose of information. In 2011, 86% of New Zealand were online in some way or another whether it may be through smart tvs or laptops. Globally 4.57 billion people were recorded to be ‘online’ users. Films such as Paramounts ‘Paranormal Activity’, released in 2010 made the film for just over $15000, yet still grossed more than $150 million in box office sales. This is because they generated a facebook colony challenging fan requests asking the public to see how high they could get the numbers. The freedom of sharing media is so simple where at the touch of a button an entire film can be sent from one person to another. From this advancement in technology it has allowed snippets of films advertisements to be largely advertised by the public alone as they do most of the ‘sharing’ between each other, relieving media companies of some of the hassle.