Audience and Institutions Essay

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 extent to which marketing through cross-media convergence and synergy is making a film successful is limited. There are many ways companies use cross-media convergence and synergy to promote a film and the extent to which it is successful depends on the marketing strategy and media ownership. Though let's keep in mind that the ideas of success isn't the same for each company. For example,  while Hollywood aims to be a dominating international film production company, NZFC ( a government agency)  has a more national aim of promoting NZ as a filming location and providing jobs to people in this industry. 

Disney is a massive conglomerate. It has four divisions to manage its cross-media convergence and synergy: Film (Walt Disney Studios), TV (Disney Media Networks- ABC, ESPN, Disney Channel), Theme Parks and Resorts (Disney World, Disney Land) and Consumer Products and Interactive Media (Marker Studios, Disney Store, Social Media).  Disney has vertically integrated with the television and radio network company called ABC  (American Broadcasting Company) as well as the cable company called ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) with Hearest Communications having 20% ownership. This has helped them significantly in the advertising department. It has many subsidiaries including Miramax, Capital Cities, Fox Family, The Muppet Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Entertainment & Studios, Lucas Films and Fox. The Avengers Alliance Facebook game developed by the Disney Interactive division uses social media to promote the Avengers film; this is a clear example of cross-media convergence. On Instagram, Disney has over 9m followers and uses this as an adverting platform to promote products at a young audience. Disney content is of high-quality and this is because of the high movie budgets that allows it. Already its original streaming service, Disney+, which was launched last year in April has 50m users compared to Netflix which started its first streaming service from 2007 with now 183m users. 

The internet has levelled the playing field in the sense that smaller companies are able to reach and engage numerous people on different media platforms. According to a survey conducted in 2019, there is a global trend of  4.4b people using the internet while in NZ 4.2m people use it.  The data showed there was a global saturation of 57% penetration which indicated more than half of the people in the world use the internet and 87% penetration in NZ.  This is advantageous for smaller companies as this means they have the opportunity to attract as much attention to their media product as a massive conglomerate could.  

The internet is an important source for cross-media convergence. For example, the film, What We Do In the Shadows (2014) directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, used social media to their fullest advantage which made their marketing campaign a success. They creatively used Facebook- NZ's 2nd most used social media -to reach NZ fans through using a humorous voice, TradeMe to sell products made by the characters in the movies and also engaging in  Q&A on the site and created dating profiles for the character on a dating app. Despite problems with crowdfunding because of Waitit's bad reputation of not following through his promise as he made in his other film, Boy, the movie manage to gross $6m worldwide. It was so successful that it was bought by 20th Television and made into a TV mockumentary with its location changed to being in New York. This has helped it gain even more attention as evidenced by the opening scene clip of the movie posted on youtube 5 years ago with 2.6m views and the current TV series clip posted last year on the same site with already 1.1m views.  Another film is The Dead Land (2014) directed by Toa Fraser which is being made into a TV series available on TVNZ on Demand. The TV series trailer was posted last year on youtube with already 6.3m views which shows the internet acts as an advertising circulator.  

According to the oxford dictionary, web 2.0 is 'the second stage of development of the internet, characterised especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic and user-generated content and growth of social media.' A 2019 global digitisation trend shows 45% of the world's population are active social media users. It is a large platform and lets filmmakers engage with the iGeneration; this is important because iGens are the generation of today that are practically surrounded by digital technology letting them stay digitally connected from early in the morning to late at night. The film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) directed by Taika Waititi, had a social campaign to create awareness of the movie. The competition was to post with the tweet #nzbush for a chance to win to meet the main actors of the film. The twitter page now has 6,258 followers and there are ongoing tweets to help keep the fanbase alive. Jurassic World has an account profile with a massive 9m followers on Facebook and 764k followers on Instagram. Fans are able to interact with the media by liking, sharing and commenting about the movie content increasing the transmission of audiences to being active participants. They are having important roles in influencing other audiences thoughts and opinions about whether they should watch the movie through sharing by virtual 'word of mouth'. This clearly supports and highlights the importance of the two-step flow theory. Social media allows viral marketing which is saturating the internet with immersive advertising for audiences which creates a buzz about the media product. For instance, the TV show The Choosen (2017) got the audience hype about season 2 to encourage crowd-funding to enable them to produce season 2. 

The NZ-made movie series, The Hobbit (2012-2014) directed by Peter Jackson, used cross-media convergence on aeroplane technology by making an in-flight safety video with Air NZ.  It was published on youtube 5 years ago with a massive 21m view and 193k likes. Air New Zealand has 87.9k subscribers on Youtube indicating that they were reaching 1.1m people globally.  Other possible ways NZFC uses cross-media convergence to promote films are by TV, social media and online reviews of the movie. Because of cross-media convergence and synergy, NZ-made films benefit from more NZ audience watching their content and thus, causes upward trends of interest in the NZ movie industry. The NZ government is interested in the development of local talent, however, because of the US massive population size of 328m (2019) there are more opportunities for NZ actors in Hollywood and this is causing loss of NZ talents. NZ-made films are doing a marvellous job in promoting the beautiful NZ scenery and this has led to increased tourism and local economic growth. Because of its beautiful scenery, New Zealand plays the mythical world of Middle earth and it is the filming location for both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and because of this, there are numerous tourism companies with set tours and activities showcasing New Zealand. 

 Though it plays an important part in engaging with current fans and reaching potential ones, no matter how good the marketing campaign it can be argued that if the quality of the movie isn’t engaging the film will not be much of a successful. Yes, if it the marketing was good it might have a high box office in the first weeks but it most likely would disappoint audiences who would write poor reviews about the movie on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes or IMB. In the future audiences might not even be interested in watching movies with the specific director or actors as they didn't enjoy the previous movie/s. 

 An example of cross-media convergence is posting music video including the original soundtrack sung by a famous singer and clip of the movie on youtube. To give an example, the indie film The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2014) directed by Stephan Chbosky already had fans because of the book readers. Yet, this movie wasn’t as successful as expected this is supported by the low gross of $33m it made. This is an example showing the importance of the quality of a movie. Blockbusters have a huge marketing budget such as the film, Jurassic Park (2015), with a budget of $150m USD compared to indie films such as Hunt for the Wilder People (2016) with a budget of $2.5m USD. The high film budget enabled the casting of actors with big media presence- for instance, the main actor Chris Pratt with 28.6m followers on Instagram- and use quality digital technology to produce computer-generated imagery (CGI)  important in making a fantasy action movie realistic and entertainment. Because of its good marketing, the film grossed $1.6b. The Blockbuster movie is able to have more synergy as evident by the launch of two Jurassic World video games in 2015. There was a fan page about the fictional Masarani Global Cooperation which Universal later hired to later design the official Masrani website- this is a form of viral marketing which helped to create hype around the movie. The website contained information absent from the movie to satisfy the curiosity of avid fans.