A
AdamTM
Guest
The Industry
Or, how the entertainment industry will fall flat on its face and not get up afterwards.
This is it people, I'm writing one of my giant rants again. tl;dr version will be at the bottom summarized in a few paragraphs.
Lets not lie to ourselves anymore shall we? The entertainment industry is going down the drain.
It has been now for many years, since roughly 2003 revenues for "classical visual media" (TV, Movies) have been on the decline. Many experts blame this on the evil evil Pirate Bay and on file sharing in general. Of course this is a fallacy, you can not estimate your revenue by including people that "might have bought" your product.
The fact is simply that file sharing has almost a non-existent influence on media sales. I have researched quite a bit on this and my interpretation is that with file sharing the sales actually should have gone UP. The ability to test/demo something you want to buy is exactly what is prevalent throughout all the other product lines not tied to the media.
You do not buy a car without test-driving it, you do not buy a cellphone without playing around with it in the store.
Now this leads me to the only conclusion: Through the readily available possibility of testing a product before you buy it, consumers decided AGAINST the product due to its inferior quality.
If you ever bought a computer game you will know what i mean. As an example lets take a game like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a FABULOUS game (in many reviewers opinion) but completely unplayable due to coding errors, bugs and generally really bad craftsmanship.
Now as a consumer has the possibility to test-drive this game, he will decide against buying the product, its faulty.
As anecdotal evidence i know of a many people that work just like this, friends of mine have extensive legal collections of games they buy AFTER testing them from file sharing sites (or not buying them for the mentioned reasons).
There is a reason that publishers often do not release demo-versions of games before the launch, they want to minimize consumer interaction with the product and therefore all that a customer can rely on are reviews and trailers.
This is not only true of the gaming industry (that is going through its boom right now, but thats a different topic) but also to the movie and television industry.
Customers are kept in the dark, consciously lied to and deceived. It is called marketing.
But with the emergence of file sharing this marketing becomes less and less effective as a consumer can test the product before purchase.
How many times did you see a movie trailer, think it was positively amazing and then the movie was spectacularly mediocre? The industry now tries to blame its problems on US, the consumers.
We are the thieves, the criminals. We are now at fault for their fall.
We have "elusive" tastes that their number-crunching department can't figure out!
This is only part of the story, however there is a kernel of truth in that statement. But Mr. Solomon looks for the reasons in the wrong place. The consumer can by definition not be at fault. YOU are providing a service to US. If your product does not appeal to us then YOU are at fault.
The Industry has for too long now relied on their marketing, survey and ratings departments. This has lead to the situation where The Industry, the big movie studios, are completely disconnected from society.
Simply put, we are not elusive, you just missed the shift of demographics, and your statistics are at fault!
The Industry simply is probing the wrong people, because those people suddenly became the fringe group. This leads to faulty marketing data and therefore products that do not reach their audience.
On the forefront of this is of course The Nielsen Company. I can not even describe how faulty their method of probing a few thousand households is and then extrapolating the data into the general public.
This system is prone to fail as soon as such a demographic shift occurs. The whole, faulty, method relies on the fact that Nielsen picks the average person.
But you see, for example, the 30 something demographic does not work like the 30 something demographic from 10 years ago. The 30s demographic right now was a fringe group 10 years ago and would not have been picked for the Nielsen rating.
This is mostly apparent when we look closely at the "fringe groups". Science Fiction fans always were considered the fringe group, and so were the Fantasy fans. But Harry Potter and Avatar proved they are now the main demographic.
Yes WE the nerds are now the main bulk of the population. We with our silly cellphones, the iPhones and laptops, with our handheld gaming and wireless internet.
The people that in your school times were laughed at, discriminated against are now the majority.
"You play nintendo? What are you, 8 years old?"
Now my father (57) has a PS3 and we play Need For Speed: Shift on it.
Marketing is at fault to suppose that they need to create for the "jock next door", that group is getting smaller and smaller, its becoming a fringe group. The fact is that a lot of the "jock" demographic started to become nerds, or as VGcats coined the term, Gramers (http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=287).
Shows like American Idol, Big Brother and other don't represent the level of programing an average human enjoys.
My rationale for this:
The Sun is an awful tabloid daily paper in the UK, it has a readership of 7.7 Million a Day.
Its an awful piece of garbage, but it costs under a pound. A person can buy more than one paper a day.
To follow that, since the Sun has the biggest newspaper sales in the UK, The Sun is exactly what the people want to read would be a logical fallacy.
The average person buys The Sun to laugh at it, or for the gratuitous boobs on page 4. To say that The Times needs to change its layout and style to match The Sun would be asinine.
American Idol and Big Brother are exactly the same, you watch them, I watch them, everyone does, but then the program ends, our brains start working again and we want something meaty like "V" or "Lost".
The danger is only that ALL programs start becoming American Idol or modeled after sub-par programing. Then the audience suddenly becomes "elusive".
But its not, it just doesn't want to be fed the same crap all the time. American Idol is fine, Big Brother is fine, but don't think just because we watch them its what we want to see ALL THE TIME!
Marketing usually has knee-jerk reactions, and this is one of them. The same happens now after Camerons Avatar.
"Oh people liked Avatar you say? It must be because of 3D! We need to immediately make a movie in 3D!!!"
Stop doing that! You are chasing the tail of one single demographic marker all over the place like its the holy grail of marketing. Its not! You are missing the bigger picture!
Tl
r version:
The Industry is disconnected from the viewing audience due to false marketing, loss of confidence and broken statistical tools.
To be continued
Or, how the entertainment industry will fall flat on its face and not get up afterwards.
This is it people, I'm writing one of my giant rants again. tl;dr version will be at the bottom summarized in a few paragraphs.
Lets not lie to ourselves anymore shall we? The entertainment industry is going down the drain.
It has been now for many years, since roughly 2003 revenues for "classical visual media" (TV, Movies) have been on the decline. Many experts blame this on the evil evil Pirate Bay and on file sharing in general. Of course this is a fallacy, you can not estimate your revenue by including people that "might have bought" your product.
The fact is simply that file sharing has almost a non-existent influence on media sales. I have researched quite a bit on this and my interpretation is that with file sharing the sales actually should have gone UP. The ability to test/demo something you want to buy is exactly what is prevalent throughout all the other product lines not tied to the media.
You do not buy a car without test-driving it, you do not buy a cellphone without playing around with it in the store.
Now this leads me to the only conclusion: Through the readily available possibility of testing a product before you buy it, consumers decided AGAINST the product due to its inferior quality.
If you ever bought a computer game you will know what i mean. As an example lets take a game like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a FABULOUS game (in many reviewers opinion) but completely unplayable due to coding errors, bugs and generally really bad craftsmanship.
Now as a consumer has the possibility to test-drive this game, he will decide against buying the product, its faulty.
As anecdotal evidence i know of a many people that work just like this, friends of mine have extensive legal collections of games they buy AFTER testing them from file sharing sites (or not buying them for the mentioned reasons).
There is a reason that publishers often do not release demo-versions of games before the launch, they want to minimize consumer interaction with the product and therefore all that a customer can rely on are reviews and trailers.
This is not only true of the gaming industry (that is going through its boom right now, but thats a different topic) but also to the movie and television industry.
Customers are kept in the dark, consciously lied to and deceived. It is called marketing.
But with the emergence of file sharing this marketing becomes less and less effective as a consumer can test the product before purchase.
How many times did you see a movie trailer, think it was positively amazing and then the movie was spectacularly mediocre? The industry now tries to blame its problems on US, the consumers.
We are the thieves, the criminals. We are now at fault for their fall.
We have "elusive" tastes that their number-crunching department can't figure out!
http://www.livetradingnews.com/hollywoo ... -15581.htm
This is only part of the story, however there is a kernel of truth in that statement. But Mr. Solomon looks for the reasons in the wrong place. The consumer can by definition not be at fault. YOU are providing a service to US. If your product does not appeal to us then YOU are at fault.
The Industry has for too long now relied on their marketing, survey and ratings departments. This has lead to the situation where The Industry, the big movie studios, are completely disconnected from society.
Simply put, we are not elusive, you just missed the shift of demographics, and your statistics are at fault!
The Industry simply is probing the wrong people, because those people suddenly became the fringe group. This leads to faulty marketing data and therefore products that do not reach their audience.
On the forefront of this is of course The Nielsen Company. I can not even describe how faulty their method of probing a few thousand households is and then extrapolating the data into the general public.
This system is prone to fail as soon as such a demographic shift occurs. The whole, faulty, method relies on the fact that Nielsen picks the average person.
But you see, for example, the 30 something demographic does not work like the 30 something demographic from 10 years ago. The 30s demographic right now was a fringe group 10 years ago and would not have been picked for the Nielsen rating.
This is mostly apparent when we look closely at the "fringe groups". Science Fiction fans always were considered the fringe group, and so were the Fantasy fans. But Harry Potter and Avatar proved they are now the main demographic.
Yes WE the nerds are now the main bulk of the population. We with our silly cellphones, the iPhones and laptops, with our handheld gaming and wireless internet.
The people that in your school times were laughed at, discriminated against are now the majority.
"You play nintendo? What are you, 8 years old?"
Now my father (57) has a PS3 and we play Need For Speed: Shift on it.
Marketing is at fault to suppose that they need to create for the "jock next door", that group is getting smaller and smaller, its becoming a fringe group. The fact is that a lot of the "jock" demographic started to become nerds, or as VGcats coined the term, Gramers (http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=287).
Shows like American Idol, Big Brother and other don't represent the level of programing an average human enjoys.
My rationale for this:
The Sun is an awful tabloid daily paper in the UK, it has a readership of 7.7 Million a Day.
Its an awful piece of garbage, but it costs under a pound. A person can buy more than one paper a day.
To follow that, since the Sun has the biggest newspaper sales in the UK, The Sun is exactly what the people want to read would be a logical fallacy.
The average person buys The Sun to laugh at it, or for the gratuitous boobs on page 4. To say that The Times needs to change its layout and style to match The Sun would be asinine.
American Idol and Big Brother are exactly the same, you watch them, I watch them, everyone does, but then the program ends, our brains start working again and we want something meaty like "V" or "Lost".
The danger is only that ALL programs start becoming American Idol or modeled after sub-par programing. Then the audience suddenly becomes "elusive".
But its not, it just doesn't want to be fed the same crap all the time. American Idol is fine, Big Brother is fine, but don't think just because we watch them its what we want to see ALL THE TIME!
Marketing usually has knee-jerk reactions, and this is one of them. The same happens now after Camerons Avatar.
"Oh people liked Avatar you say? It must be because of 3D! We need to immediately make a movie in 3D!!!"
Stop doing that! You are chasing the tail of one single demographic marker all over the place like its the holy grail of marketing. Its not! You are missing the bigger picture!
Tl
r version:The Industry is disconnected from the viewing audience due to false marketing, loss of confidence and broken statistical tools.
To be continued
