NEW MEDIA & INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
(CM..)
Cunningham & Craig Introduction
- The social media universe is not only populated with inspiring uplift - fake news/content
- eg. 2016 US elections fake news spread to promote Trumps candidacy and spreading right-
wing news
- After the election, Clinton reflected on the pernicious influence of fake news on politics
- Described the phenomenon as an epidemic with real-world consequences
- Progressive creator activists affirm how this new medium of social media can be harnessed
to promote diverse political views
Defining social media entertainment
- The merging shape of screen industries in the 21st century shows established players, norms,
principles and practices ceding significant power and influence to powerful digital streaming
and social networking platforms
- These platforms have started to represent a greater value proposition to the advertising
industry that has served as the bulwark for main media
- Creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content
- This new ecology is driven by intrinsically interactive technologies and strategies of fan,
viewer, audience and community engagement
- The emerging shape of screen industries in 21st century encapsulates deep changes in
consumer habit and expectation, technology, and content production
- Larger trend across media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked
communication with traditional screen media practices
- This trend has given rise to major challenges to established media but also are shaped by a
set of newly prominent online entertainment platforms such as Apple, Amazon and Netflix
- Rise of social media entertainment- an merging porto-industry fuelled by professionalising,
previously amateur content creators using new entertainment and communicative formats to
develop potentially sustainable business based on followings across multiple platforms
- Some creators are securing sustainable careers with far fewer views and subscribers but more
engaged fan communities and richer brand deals
- Social media platforms: offer scale, technological affordances and remuneration and ups
killing to previously amateur creators
- Eco-logical approach by investigating the interdependencies among its elements: mapping
the platforms & affordances, content innovation, monetisation and management, new forms
of media globalisation and critical cultural concerns
- Proto-industry that has emerged at the intersection of the cultural, technological and
industrial dynamics
The specificity of social media entertainment
- SME has emerged spatially across several industrial dimensions as well as temporally in the
context of extraordinarily rapid change
- The challenge of online distribution
- The business history of the Hollywood majors is a history of remarkable stability
, - However, in early 2000s, the Majors tried but failed to establish themselves in online
distribution
- The rise of tv in 1950s threatened the incumbency of film studios, turning cinema
audiences into home-bound viewers but tv co-evolved and converged with Hollywood
- The challenge of cable distribution represented a similar pattern of co-evolution
- Most ad-based networks shifted their programming strategies to embrace Hollywood
storytelling to secure larger audiences and higher advertising returns
- Netflix and Amazon have engaged in investment in original programming, to function not
only as a distribution outlet for Hollywood movies but as destinations for their own brand
premium content
- Amazon’s programs function as promotion, to sell memberships for its formidable e-
commerce business
- In the professionally generated content (PGC) the new screen ecology, media content and
distribution operate as means to an end for other higher-margin industries interested in
selling products to consumers more than in storytelling for audiences
- Social networking platforms such as YouTube offer open access for unlimited content of
multiple modalities and innovative formats
- (The culture of connectivity) platforms have engineered sociality and facilitate a new mode
of enterprise by professionalising and commercialising users through sociality online
- The distinctive career pathways and low barriers to entry have meant that SME is more
racially plural, multicultural and gender diverse by far than mainstream screen media
- The means of digital production afford not only low budget production but virtually no
division of labor
- The hard-to-define personality vlogger operates at the business and cultural centre of this
new screen ecology
- These creators have build a media brand upon their personalities and through the
intensely normative discourses of authenticity around vlogging
- Interactivity
- New screen ecology occupies a convergent space between social media communication
and entertainment content, structured by a level of interactivity and viewer-audience
centricity
- Mainstream audience engagement has been preoccupied with creating the water cooler
effect or must watch TV
- PGC component has tended to attract greater attention than SME component due to its
appeal to mainstream viewer demographics
- SME is a radical hybrid of entertainment and community development and maintenance
- Global reach and IP Dynamics
- For major PGC streaming services (eg. Netflix), aggressive global expansion requires them
to negotiate with preexisting rights holders in each new territory and require them to close
down informal means of accessing their popular content
- SME content is largely born global as it is primarily based on IP control
- Key difference between traditional media operating multinationally and YouTube is that the
former produces, owns or licenses content for distribution, exhibition or sales in multiple
territories, while the latter talks of being primarily a facilitators of creator and content
- YouTube did not take IP ownership position due to its continued status as a platform or
online service provider rather than a content company
De la Hera: Chapter 1
,The Relevance of Understanding the Advertising Potential of Digital Games
- Origin of advergame can be dated to the early 1980s but the term wasn’t coined until 2000
- Anthony Giallourakis: understood that the market for interactive casual internet based gaming
would be too appealing to corporations for them to ignore the marketing and branding
opportunities associated with casual gaming on the internet: coined advergame
- The evolution of the game industry and advertising landscape changes have increased the
interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes
- Development of new technologies and spread of broadband have facilitated the growth of
game industry
- Casual revolution: a breakthrough moment in the history of video games
- Process in which digital games have become more normal and part of daily routines for 3
reasons
- 1) New digital games do not ask players to readjust their schedules as they can play
anytime and anywhere
- 2) Causal games do not require players to spend hours to make progress
- 3) Causal games fit the social contexts in which people are already spending their time
- The poor economic conditions and declining readership of printed media have motivated
marketers to shift their budgets from traditional to interactive media
- The trend of advertising to morph into another form of entertainment offers ways to
overcome consumer resistance to advertising messages
- Blurs conventional distinctions between advertising and entertainment - fusion of two into
one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content
- Nowadays, advergame can be found in branded micro-sites, game portals, social media and
application stores
- The development of an advergame is a process in which the client and the company
responsible for the game design need to communicate to create the most efficient product
according to the needs of the advertising campaign
- Many marketers still lack knowledge of game design and most game designers lack
knowledge of marketing and persuasive strategies
- Lack of knowledge has led advergame designers to borrow creative strategies from other
media which don’t always work due to the interactive nature of digital games
Cunningham & Craig Chapter 1: Platform Strategy
- There has been remarkable stability among the major businesses in the screen industry
- The biggest film studios adapted to waves of significant change in regulatory structure,
technology and taste, re-forming into corporate structures
- The fragmentation of once stable viewership means that tv’s splintering but still big audience
remains valuable to advertisers but digital advertising revenue beat out traditional television
advertising revenue
- A new confluence of information technology companies has been able to deliver content to
individuals on a broad scale, creating new national and global markets and laying the
framework to support new forms of content
- This new screen ecology challenges the dominance of legacy media companies, and
companies that succeeded most in digital distribution are outsiders
- The fundamental differences between these companies (Apple, amazon, google, fb) and
media incumbents are that they are internet pure play business that have large online
customer or user populations - share an overriding focus on technical innovation
, - They have commissioned new content, facilitating substantial change in the presentation,
distribution, and types of content and lead in controlling the platforms that deliver
content to burgeoning audiences across multiple screens
- Political economy of the emerging shape of social media entertainment is best understood as
an interdependency clash of industrial culture
- The IT behemoths are having to come to terms with both the old and new fundamentals of
mass media entertainment including the messy idiosyncrasies of taste of the consumer side
- Screen ecology is getting used to being in a state of what the software industry refers to as
permanent beta (state of rapid prototyping) or fail fast, learn, pivot
- However, fb and googles engineering culture has been confronted with influencer
marketing, branded content and other high touch commercial realities as revenue
generators
Power and Peril
- Outline histories of major platforms are constructed around this clash of cultures and in
relation to their variable convergence on video as a driver of platform content
- Arrange platform strategy on a continuum
- On one side are the digital platforms that play in the PGC space: Amazon, Netflix, Apple
- On the other end are pure social media platforms that thrive on scale and seek to leverage
user generated content creators and large audiences network effects afford to them to
monetise
- When it comes to social media entertainment content and strategy, it’s the social media
platforms variable convergence on video as a driver of monetisable platform content that is
the focus of the outline histories presented
- Wolff plumps for continuity, arguing against the power of platforms to disrupt the
fundamental business resilience of television and dismissing the content produced as
commoditised ‘Traffic’ rather than quality product
- Taplin mounts a full-fledged conspiracy account of the power of the platforms to move fast
and break things including the time-honoured means of producing US screen content
- Reasons to be concerned about platforms and their power: tax avoidance, privacy, anti-
competitive behaviour and national security
- While social media platforms and their associated affordances shape the structure and
operations fo social media entertainment, they don’t supervene over or control content,
creator and online community in the manner theorised for traditional media by critical
political economy
- The capitalist imperatives that drive platform strategy have more in common with
disorganised capitalism than the superordinate powers and majestic continuities, attributed to
platform capitalism and its antecedents
Theoretical frameworks
- The digital age and networked technologies have generated tremendous disruption, not only
within the industry but also within scholarly accounts of media power
- Consequences of this disruption include a clash of industrial, corporate, management and
production cultures between the tech and content industries reflected by theories
- Theories of affordances inform the underlying impulse for the proliferation, differentiation,
evolution, and convergence of tech and commercial potentialities
- The notion of power underpins the notion of political economy- idea that the economy is
inextricably tied to processes, intent and actors that are always already political
(CM..)
Cunningham & Craig Introduction
- The social media universe is not only populated with inspiring uplift - fake news/content
- eg. 2016 US elections fake news spread to promote Trumps candidacy and spreading right-
wing news
- After the election, Clinton reflected on the pernicious influence of fake news on politics
- Described the phenomenon as an epidemic with real-world consequences
- Progressive creator activists affirm how this new medium of social media can be harnessed
to promote diverse political views
Defining social media entertainment
- The merging shape of screen industries in the 21st century shows established players, norms,
principles and practices ceding significant power and influence to powerful digital streaming
and social networking platforms
- These platforms have started to represent a greater value proposition to the advertising
industry that has served as the bulwark for main media
- Creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content
- This new ecology is driven by intrinsically interactive technologies and strategies of fan,
viewer, audience and community engagement
- The emerging shape of screen industries in 21st century encapsulates deep changes in
consumer habit and expectation, technology, and content production
- Larger trend across media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked
communication with traditional screen media practices
- This trend has given rise to major challenges to established media but also are shaped by a
set of newly prominent online entertainment platforms such as Apple, Amazon and Netflix
- Rise of social media entertainment- an merging porto-industry fuelled by professionalising,
previously amateur content creators using new entertainment and communicative formats to
develop potentially sustainable business based on followings across multiple platforms
- Some creators are securing sustainable careers with far fewer views and subscribers but more
engaged fan communities and richer brand deals
- Social media platforms: offer scale, technological affordances and remuneration and ups
killing to previously amateur creators
- Eco-logical approach by investigating the interdependencies among its elements: mapping
the platforms & affordances, content innovation, monetisation and management, new forms
of media globalisation and critical cultural concerns
- Proto-industry that has emerged at the intersection of the cultural, technological and
industrial dynamics
The specificity of social media entertainment
- SME has emerged spatially across several industrial dimensions as well as temporally in the
context of extraordinarily rapid change
- The challenge of online distribution
- The business history of the Hollywood majors is a history of remarkable stability
, - However, in early 2000s, the Majors tried but failed to establish themselves in online
distribution
- The rise of tv in 1950s threatened the incumbency of film studios, turning cinema
audiences into home-bound viewers but tv co-evolved and converged with Hollywood
- The challenge of cable distribution represented a similar pattern of co-evolution
- Most ad-based networks shifted their programming strategies to embrace Hollywood
storytelling to secure larger audiences and higher advertising returns
- Netflix and Amazon have engaged in investment in original programming, to function not
only as a distribution outlet for Hollywood movies but as destinations for their own brand
premium content
- Amazon’s programs function as promotion, to sell memberships for its formidable e-
commerce business
- In the professionally generated content (PGC) the new screen ecology, media content and
distribution operate as means to an end for other higher-margin industries interested in
selling products to consumers more than in storytelling for audiences
- Social networking platforms such as YouTube offer open access for unlimited content of
multiple modalities and innovative formats
- (The culture of connectivity) platforms have engineered sociality and facilitate a new mode
of enterprise by professionalising and commercialising users through sociality online
- The distinctive career pathways and low barriers to entry have meant that SME is more
racially plural, multicultural and gender diverse by far than mainstream screen media
- The means of digital production afford not only low budget production but virtually no
division of labor
- The hard-to-define personality vlogger operates at the business and cultural centre of this
new screen ecology
- These creators have build a media brand upon their personalities and through the
intensely normative discourses of authenticity around vlogging
- Interactivity
- New screen ecology occupies a convergent space between social media communication
and entertainment content, structured by a level of interactivity and viewer-audience
centricity
- Mainstream audience engagement has been preoccupied with creating the water cooler
effect or must watch TV
- PGC component has tended to attract greater attention than SME component due to its
appeal to mainstream viewer demographics
- SME is a radical hybrid of entertainment and community development and maintenance
- Global reach and IP Dynamics
- For major PGC streaming services (eg. Netflix), aggressive global expansion requires them
to negotiate with preexisting rights holders in each new territory and require them to close
down informal means of accessing their popular content
- SME content is largely born global as it is primarily based on IP control
- Key difference between traditional media operating multinationally and YouTube is that the
former produces, owns or licenses content for distribution, exhibition or sales in multiple
territories, while the latter talks of being primarily a facilitators of creator and content
- YouTube did not take IP ownership position due to its continued status as a platform or
online service provider rather than a content company
De la Hera: Chapter 1
,The Relevance of Understanding the Advertising Potential of Digital Games
- Origin of advergame can be dated to the early 1980s but the term wasn’t coined until 2000
- Anthony Giallourakis: understood that the market for interactive casual internet based gaming
would be too appealing to corporations for them to ignore the marketing and branding
opportunities associated with casual gaming on the internet: coined advergame
- The evolution of the game industry and advertising landscape changes have increased the
interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes
- Development of new technologies and spread of broadband have facilitated the growth of
game industry
- Casual revolution: a breakthrough moment in the history of video games
- Process in which digital games have become more normal and part of daily routines for 3
reasons
- 1) New digital games do not ask players to readjust their schedules as they can play
anytime and anywhere
- 2) Causal games do not require players to spend hours to make progress
- 3) Causal games fit the social contexts in which people are already spending their time
- The poor economic conditions and declining readership of printed media have motivated
marketers to shift their budgets from traditional to interactive media
- The trend of advertising to morph into another form of entertainment offers ways to
overcome consumer resistance to advertising messages
- Blurs conventional distinctions between advertising and entertainment - fusion of two into
one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content
- Nowadays, advergame can be found in branded micro-sites, game portals, social media and
application stores
- The development of an advergame is a process in which the client and the company
responsible for the game design need to communicate to create the most efficient product
according to the needs of the advertising campaign
- Many marketers still lack knowledge of game design and most game designers lack
knowledge of marketing and persuasive strategies
- Lack of knowledge has led advergame designers to borrow creative strategies from other
media which don’t always work due to the interactive nature of digital games
Cunningham & Craig Chapter 1: Platform Strategy
- There has been remarkable stability among the major businesses in the screen industry
- The biggest film studios adapted to waves of significant change in regulatory structure,
technology and taste, re-forming into corporate structures
- The fragmentation of once stable viewership means that tv’s splintering but still big audience
remains valuable to advertisers but digital advertising revenue beat out traditional television
advertising revenue
- A new confluence of information technology companies has been able to deliver content to
individuals on a broad scale, creating new national and global markets and laying the
framework to support new forms of content
- This new screen ecology challenges the dominance of legacy media companies, and
companies that succeeded most in digital distribution are outsiders
- The fundamental differences between these companies (Apple, amazon, google, fb) and
media incumbents are that they are internet pure play business that have large online
customer or user populations - share an overriding focus on technical innovation
, - They have commissioned new content, facilitating substantial change in the presentation,
distribution, and types of content and lead in controlling the platforms that deliver
content to burgeoning audiences across multiple screens
- Political economy of the emerging shape of social media entertainment is best understood as
an interdependency clash of industrial culture
- The IT behemoths are having to come to terms with both the old and new fundamentals of
mass media entertainment including the messy idiosyncrasies of taste of the consumer side
- Screen ecology is getting used to being in a state of what the software industry refers to as
permanent beta (state of rapid prototyping) or fail fast, learn, pivot
- However, fb and googles engineering culture has been confronted with influencer
marketing, branded content and other high touch commercial realities as revenue
generators
Power and Peril
- Outline histories of major platforms are constructed around this clash of cultures and in
relation to their variable convergence on video as a driver of platform content
- Arrange platform strategy on a continuum
- On one side are the digital platforms that play in the PGC space: Amazon, Netflix, Apple
- On the other end are pure social media platforms that thrive on scale and seek to leverage
user generated content creators and large audiences network effects afford to them to
monetise
- When it comes to social media entertainment content and strategy, it’s the social media
platforms variable convergence on video as a driver of monetisable platform content that is
the focus of the outline histories presented
- Wolff plumps for continuity, arguing against the power of platforms to disrupt the
fundamental business resilience of television and dismissing the content produced as
commoditised ‘Traffic’ rather than quality product
- Taplin mounts a full-fledged conspiracy account of the power of the platforms to move fast
and break things including the time-honoured means of producing US screen content
- Reasons to be concerned about platforms and their power: tax avoidance, privacy, anti-
competitive behaviour and national security
- While social media platforms and their associated affordances shape the structure and
operations fo social media entertainment, they don’t supervene over or control content,
creator and online community in the manner theorised for traditional media by critical
political economy
- The capitalist imperatives that drive platform strategy have more in common with
disorganised capitalism than the superordinate powers and majestic continuities, attributed to
platform capitalism and its antecedents
Theoretical frameworks
- The digital age and networked technologies have generated tremendous disruption, not only
within the industry but also within scholarly accounts of media power
- Consequences of this disruption include a clash of industrial, corporate, management and
production cultures between the tech and content industries reflected by theories
- Theories of affordances inform the underlying impulse for the proliferation, differentiation,
evolution, and convergence of tech and commercial potentialities
- The notion of power underpins the notion of political economy- idea that the economy is
inextricably tied to processes, intent and actors that are always already political
