Cross media convergence and synergy is where two or more types of media come together, e.g. a comic and a youtube clip, to make something else, e.g. a film. They synergy is when different elements of a company work together to promote related products for e.g. a film.
For the synergy side, the partnership of two or more institutions ensures a larger effect and is beneficial for each company in expertise and costs. See Saw Films formed a business with Paramount pictures USA, this allows for control by Paramount over their product/film. They did this because they have experience and size in the marketplace [cinemas, stores, online, etc.] which all help in the distribution of a film. Film 4 were another institution that also joined up with another institution, Celador Films, who are the makers of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’. The technological convergence is also key for their film Slumdog Millionaire, with Boyle using new software to add special effects in editing; the use of blue screen and also using new types of digital cameras to shoot with. Slumdog Millionaire’s early US distributor Warner Independent went bankrupt and wanted to take the film straight to a DVD release. However, A business relationship with the French Company, Pathe helped to distribute the film and create the poster, trailer and also the UK website. In the U.S.A. Fox Searchlight took over. This shows without without the synergy of the other companies, Slumdog Millionaire possibly wouldn’t of even gone out into the cinemas, due to a lack of funding however they were helped out at the last minute. However, a film such as Tron Legacy wouldn’t really have to worry about this too much. Due to them being such a massive company, and owning so much worldwide and being in the ‘big 6’ companies, they have plenty of contacts that helps to keep everything within their own name. They did however use Sean Bailey as he is known for being particularly strong within Disney for his works in Sci-Fi film productions.
For marketing, convergence of media occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all of them; marketing on phones, and internet, downloadable films straight to computer and phones, Blu-Ray DVDs can carry more features, therefore are used as they are preferred by many of today’s customers. Other people come in which helps to enable the feature of being able to save films on the SKY digital player, and also on Freebox Satellite television. Furthermore, people make games for the film, on all different kinds of platforms making it available to millions of people with worldwide online gaming also a feature. Finally people do a lot of work of uploading videos/trailers of the film onto YouTube to try and get hype around the film even before it’s out. See Saw Productions use websites, blogs which give access to ongoing filming of their films, chat rooms to discuss the film and even downloadable screen savers. As we can tell, despite there being a fair piece of marketing, there still isn’t loads, and this could be to do with the fact that they are only a British Company with budgets far from those in the American Industry. Once again this is apparent when considering Film 4, they can only use the cross synergy to a certain degree in their marketing campaigns due to a lack of budget. Therefore they try cheaper alternatives in an attempt to still get a good marketing campaign for their film. These include, Trailers, which they used clips of the public recommending the film, they had their website which was used for discussions from fans. Film 4 also released clips, ringtones and screensavers which could be downloaded onto a variety of different platforms so that they could still attract people over the internet. The fact that they produced so many posters helped the film in terms of ‘word of mouth’ marketing, as for a period they were everywhere and you couldn’t get away from them. Totally on the other hand we have Walt Disney with their film Tron Legacy. Walt Disney have no issues at all with their marketing budget, which is virtually limitless depending on what film it is for. For Tron the overall budget was $170,000,000 obviously not all of this was for their marketing campaign, however it shows you when a film has a budget of that size, they can afford to get the film marketed extremely well. Walt Disney had a lot of Technological Synergy for their marketing, including toys being made by Be@rbrick, Oakley even designed 3D sunglasses for the film. They teamed up with Daft Punk for the soundtrack, which was released prior to the film’s release which was to of believed to of attracted a lot of viewers who wouldn’t have necessarily been overly interested in watching the film, however as they had seen that Daft Punk were involved, decided to go and watch it, one YouTube member even commented on the trailer saying about how this saddening fact had actually become the majority of people at the cinema watching the film. They even took the Daft Punk scenario as far as making dedicated film posters totally to Daft Punk themselves. Disney even went to the extent of creating a crackable CSS code for their fans to attempt to crack and then get even more behind the scenes footage, trailers, news etc.
These days there is a big difference in the way that films are produced, distributed and marketed. This is mainly because of the ever growing new technology we have in today’s film industry. I believe that with the big six companies dominating 90% of the films worldwide we have to look at them directly for film production and distribution as nowadays 90% of films at some stage will go through one of those company’s whereas years ago, despite their being ‘bigger’ companies it wasn’t so dominated by the big companies.
I believe that the internet and new technology has changed the marketing side of the films dramatically. With people now being able to make DVDs, Blu-Ray DVDs, online interviews with cast, producers, directors, film trailers games, downloadable pictures, screensavers, ringtones, soundtracks etc things have come a long long way from when they just made a short trailer and a film poster, and even before that when there was just posters.
To compete with the American dominance British companies have adopted a few new strategies, which are all really based around the same kind of thing; word of mouth.
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