‘Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences’ Too what extent do you agree with this statement?’

‘Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences’ Too what extent do you agree with this statement?’

 To me looking at this statement I think that it is safe to say that I agree with what is said because of the money that global institutions have they can spend a lot of it on marketing and on advertising the product to people all over the world which means that they will be selling the product to at least a nationwide audience if not a worldwide audience.

Money is a massive part of the film industry, without it no films would be made to a very high standard. The companies that have access to a lot of money to make their films usually dominate in sales and box office figures. This is because of the large amounts of time and money that they spend on the advertising and marketing of the film through many different media windows, such as, TV advertisements, radio slots, interviews, internet sites and many others. They are also able to do this all around the world because of the money that they have access to. Sometimes large advertising campaigns aren’t always a good thing because spending lots of money on advertising can sometimes hype up the film to much meaning that when the actual film comes out viewers might be disappointed with the result because the campaign hyped it up to be amazing when maybe it actually wasn’t. A good example of this advertising is, in the marketing campaign for the film ‘Prometheus’ (made by 20^th Century Fox), there was a video of a future TED talk with Peter Weyland, the owner of the fictitious Weyland Corporation. There is also a website set up for Weyland Corporation. To make these two things, a large amount of money would have been needed. The result of the two created a lot of hype and meant that the film was advertised to a very large amount of people, this is known as viral marketing.

Smaller companies struggle to find money to afford to do all the advertising they would want to do for the film they are making and because of this usually don’t do as well with making the money they did spend on the film back and making a decent profit out of making the film which is really what it is all about. Without making good profits from their films, smaller companies such as Marv or working title would struggle to find the money to make films in the future. This is why smaller film companies try to spend less money on advertising the film they have made and more money on actually making the film to try and maximise the amount of profit that they will make from the film being good quality and not just from good advertising campaigns. An example of a smaller companies advertising campaign is the one for the film ‘Attack the block’ (made by studio canal and film4). They only had a very small amount of money to make film and because of this didn’t have a lot left to spend on making lots of different things for their marketing and advertising. They only had one or two very simple and quite short television trailers and also conducted interviews to promote the film. Because of the very small amount of advertising that went into the campaign not a lot of people knew about the film and so not a lot of people went to see it and so didn’t make that much money in the box office and was labelled as unsuccessful. The film didn’t do that well

Another point is that when a big name writer has written a script, he will probably only pitch it to a top company, one of the big six. This means that the smaller companies won’t even get a chance to work with many big name people and so won’t be able to sell their products to a nationwide audience because the films that are made by the big six will always steal the best scripts, writers, directors and actors, which are some of the main things that attract people to go and watch or buy a film.

Also the larger film companies can make their films in 2D, 3D or even in 4D because they have the money to do so, these ways of making the films will generate more ways for people to see the films and make the film companies a lot more money that the smaller companies who can only usually afford to make them in 2D and only have one way of them being seen by film fans.

To conclude, I do believe that media production is dominated by global institutions as they have the most money and can pay for the highest quality resources when it comes to making the actual film and also advertising and marketing the products that they are making and selling to the public. Because of the small amounts of money that smaller companies have they cannot compete with the larger global companies such as the big six, meaning that the big six will always dominate and sell their products to national audiences.