To What Extent Is the Success of a Media Product Dependent Upon Effective Distribution and Marketing?

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To what extent is the success of a media product dependent upon effective distribution and marketing? Warner brothers is a vertically and horizontally integrated media conglomerate owning companies in production, distribution and exhibition. Warp films is a small, independent English film company, owning warp records, a small music company. The successes of media products are relative to their aims. Profit is the most common aim as investors want returns on their investment but there is a large difference in the budget of a film from a large media conglomerate and a small independent film company like warp and so they expect different levels of revenue from the films.. The films I will be using as examples for this essay is ‘this is England’ by warp films which cost £1.5 million and was directed by Shane Meadows, it had a revenue of £4.5 million. I will be comparing this to ‘the dark knight’ from warner brothers, which cost $185 million and had a gross revenue of 1.002 billion us dollars. Media products are dependent on the success of the marketing and distribution of the product. Films make money through a value chain, both large vertically integrated media conglomerates and independent non-vertically integrated film businesses make rely on the value chain for revenue. This value chain starts at the cinema, which is the most important stage of the value chain as it shows the quality of the product and has a direct effect on the rest of the value chain, which is dvd/blue ray, pay-per view and free to air TV. The dark knight had a blanket release strategy, this meant that they had distributed their film to over 4,000 cinemas and 98 I-max cinemas in North America. This meant that the dark knight grosses $67 million on the first day of release. The success of a media product also depends on when the film is released, the dark knight was released in the summer

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