Understanding Media Production

Paul Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138238138
• eBook ISBN: 9781315298030
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Using in-depth analysis of film, TV, news and online productions, Understanding Media Production shows how media theory helps aspiring producers understand good practice in media production.

With detailed contemporary examples, including Pirates of The Caribbean, Game of Thrones, Love Island and PewDiePie's "letsplay" videos, Dwyer highlights similarities and differences in the production strategies and styles used for a wide range of media products. The book tracks the evolution of these entertainment formats and the emergence of the media businesses which produce them. Chapters describe the key production practices associated with each format, including single and multi-camera filming, news reporting, three-point lighting and gameplay animation. They also explain the development of the production roles associated with these content forms; directors, producers, reporters, correspondents etc. The book goes on to explain how media businesses have used new technologies and production innovations to reduce costs and increase profits, resulting in dramatic changes to established production practices and roles.

By comparing media production across media industries, in the UK and US, and illustrating the links between economic, sociopolitical and cultural influences on production, Understanding Media Production opens up a constructive debate between media practitioners and theorists about key questions of creativity and innovation in production.

1

A THEORY OF MEDIA PRODUCTION

An outline of the theory

The basic framework for the theory of media production outlined below is derived from economics. The reason for starting with economics is not based on a belief that economics determines what happens in the media industries, but that economic factors – markets, prices, sales, economies of scale etc. – strongly influence which media activities continue and which fall by the wayside. Neoclassical economic theory is derived from the idea of scarcity. It attempts to explain how societies choose to use the scarce resources they have. Its conception of resources reflects its origins in an era when economies were largely agrarian. Production is explained in terms of three resources – land, labour and capital. This leads to a second key concept – substitution. If a resource, like labour, becomes scarce, and so costs more, producers will make a substitution, replacing their workers with machines or technology.

It is important to emphasise that neither technology nor economics determines how media industries develop and change. Technologies create possibilities and economics influences which activities succeed or fail, but it is culture which influences the ideas we have about how to use technologies, the knowledge we develop to do this, and the responses we receive from others. Evolutionary economics explicitly identifies the role of social, cultural and political institutions (governments, regulators, public opinion) in influencing which types of economic activities, particularly in their early stages, are accepted as legitimate, and which are regulated, constrained or prohibited. The other chapters of this book use this approach to explain why particular types of media production emerge, continue, change or decline.

Production as inputs of labour and technology

Neoclassical economists understand production in terms of a simple model, the production function, which describes the quantity of outputs (products or services for a market) which can be produced from a combination of inputs (labour and technology). If the price of a production input increases (for example, if it becomes scarce) businesses will change their production processes by substituting cheaper inputs for the expensive one. If camera operators were in short supply, they might be able to charge higher rates of pay. To try to maintain profits or efficiency, businesses might respond by substituting camera operators with cheaper fixed rig cameras. But economists recognise the limits to the substitution of inputs. For example, if production workers have specialist skills in writing stories or creating images or sounds, it may be difficult to substitute them with lower paid workers or automated production equipment. Economists would explain the generally labour-intensive nature of much media production as resulting from this “inelasticity of substitution” of specialist media labour.

As already noted, a number of amendments to the above conception will be needed to develop a theory of media production. Some of these are already common within conventional economics. So, the production function model assumes companies respond to changes in prices of inputs (or demand for products), and individual businesses cannot themselves influence these prices. However, some “industrial” economists suggest that if firms achieve sufficient size and/or share of the market, they may achieve economies of scale, enabling them to pay less for labour or technology. So, a large media company may be able to reduce its costs by negotiating volume discounts with suppliers (for example, paper, ink, film, video etc.) or distributors (news agents, cinemas, broadcasters, web hosting companies). A second method of achieving these economies of scale is through vertical integration: integrating the supply of production inputs, the actual production process and the distribution of final products or services, within a single company. This enables businesses to be independent of suppliers or distributors and so plan their production processes to operate at the optimum scale. This achieves efficiencies because it means people and machines are working at maximum capacity, without any “idle time”, waiting for deliveries of supplies or for the arrival of distributors (Moroni, 1992).

In addition to the limits of its conception of production, neoclassical economics has a limited conception of a product – assuming all the businesses in a sector produce homogeneous products. These products are “rival”. If I buy a smartphone it is not available to other interested consumers who must buy an identical copy from the producer. Products are also tangible and private – they are used up (eventually) in consumption. Consumers demand products because they are useful or satisfying, and so when a product is used up, consumers may repeat purchase them. Businesses will keep expanding production as long as they make a profit on each product they sell. These assumptions help economists develop an understanding of an industry based on businesses producing similar products, competing with each other largely on the basis of differing prices.

Again, industrial economists like Porter (1985) noted some important strategies individual companies may use to protect themselves from competition. Some businesses may be able to exercise market control by having lower costs. Vertical integration, because it can deliver economies of scale, may enable them to offer their products at lower prices and so achieve a dominant market position, creating barriers to entry for new competitors. Alternatively, if a company can produce a product with higher quality or better functions, and so differentiate their products from their competitors’ (“vertical differentiation”), consumers may be willing to pay higher prices for the product, in preference to a lower priced, lower quality product. Finally, if a company identifies a range of products, all relying on similar technology or knowledge, they may decide to integrate these similar businesses (“horizontal integration”) either by buying their competitors or by launching new products themselves. This can deliver economies of scope giving them cost or other advantages over competitors who are only producing one product in the range. Rather than engage in damaging competition, we should expect media organisations to use these strategies (economies of scale and scope, vertical and horizontal integration etc.) to try to exercise some degree of market control, by achieving a dominant market share or by making it uneconomic for new competitors to enter the market (“barriers to entry”).

However, the fundamental neoclassical model of competition, based largely on manufactured products, does not accurately describe the markets for cultural products like media content. Media products (especially live broadcasting) are less like tangible manufactured products, and more like services. The demand for a service is usually for something intangible (Rathmell, 1966). So, in services like hairdressing or healthcare, consumers do not value the actual performance of the service (the haircut or the operation) but its intangible content (the appearance or health benefits following the performance of the service). The demand for media products is similar; audiences do not value the physical form (the printed paper, DVD etc.) of the media product but its content – “the information or the message” (Doyle, 2002:12).

However, media organisations can achieve greater economies of scale in distribution than can services. A live musical or drama performance might reach hundreds or thousands of people in a theatre, auditorium or stadium. But to reach a larger number of consumers the performance must be repeated, often involving transporting a large number of people to deliver the performance locally to audiences. If the same performance were recorded onto a storage medium (film, tape, print or disc) it gains a greater degree of tangibility which means it can be stored, transported and traded. This process of converting services into tradeable forms is known as servitisation (Harjo et al., 2016) and has been especially important in the development of TV formats (see Chapter 6). Rather than moving the live performers, the use of storage media (including digital files) generates important economies of scale in media distribution. Rather than repeating the live performance, the use of storage media means that once a song or story has been performed (once the first copy has been produced) a media organisation can satisfy an infinite number of consumers without having to reproduce the performance. Although the first copy costs of media production are generally high, the costs of subsequent (recorded) copies are extremely low. This aspect of media products works spectacularly to the advantage of media businesses. The combination of high first copy cost and low-to-zero cost of subsequent copies enables media products to be distributed (via print, broadcast, internet, record/CD/video/DVD) to large numbers of people at very low cost (Doyle, 2002).

Where neoclassical economics assumes goods are rival and exclusive – consumption of a good prevents another person consuming the same good – this was not true of radio and TV for many years. Until the emergence of cable and satellite pay-TV, TV was a “public” good, distributed “free to air” without a means to charge audiences for content. The nature of broadcasting technology meant consumption of a programme by one person did not prevent consumption of the same product by another person. On the face of it, this would seem to make radio and TV programming a ubiquitous rather than a scarce resource, and would suggest that conventional economic concepts of demand, prices and markets would be useless in explaining its production.

However, while neoclassical economics leads us to think about resources for production in terms of land, and thus about production knowledge and technology in terms of farming or mining this resource, for the media industries, we can think of audience attention, the leisure time we have available for culture, as a scarce resource whose allocation can be explained in economic terms. “Attention economics” (Lanham, 2006) leads us to think about the knowledge required to attract and hold the attention of an audience; knowledge which originated in ancient Greece, in the art of rhetoric.

Thus, from the audience’s perspective, a broadcast programme is not scarce or rival, and so they do not pay for it. But from the point of view of the broadcast network, and even more so, the advertiser, the relevant scarce resource is the time and attention of the audience. Advertisers’ demand for audience attention is based on utility – it enables them to sell more products. Audiences supply this attention through the process of listening to or watching a programme. This creates a market in attention, with advertisers willing to pay higher prices to media organisations whose products attract the attention of a large or a particularly desirable audience (Falkinger, 2008). These “attention markets” are open to media organisations whose products are more private and rival (there is a scarcity of cinema seats or newspaper copies) as well as new media like the internet. This in turn means, as we shall see below, that creating value from media production depends on the core knowledge and skills required to attract the attention of the desired audience, in the right time and place, and ideally in the right frame of mind (Lanham, 2006).

Porter’s (1985) idea of product differentiation, although a useful amendment to neoclassical theory, cannot capture the sheer extent of the differentiation of media products. As noted above, demand for many products is based on replacement purchases. When a product is consumed (a bag of coffee runs out or a toothbrush needs replacing) people may buy another from the same company because they want precisely the same utility (taste, functionality etc.) they received from the previous product. Demand for media products does not work in the same way because, once the original has been consumed, audiences demand new products (new stories, new information etc.) rather than an identical replacement. The demand for media products can thus be described as predicated on the assumption that media goods are individually differentiated (Rosse and Dertouzos, 1978). This characteristic of media products fundamentally alters the economics of their production; “since media products are necessarily differentiated and distinct, as viewed by audiences, media markets do not fit easily into traditional economic . . . analyses” (op. cit.:41).

To the audience, every media product is like a completely new innovation – the only way of knowing if the product would deliver the required utility (humour, suspense, relevant information) is to actually experience it (they are experience goods). For the same reason, it is difficult to judge if one media product is a good substitute for another or to make price comparisons. Thus, an important feature of attention markets is that, even though a media product may be “free” to the audience (a broadcast programme or a free newspaper), audiences incur costs, first in giving their attention to the media product they consume, but additionally in the time they spend searching for a product they believe will deliver the desired experience. Because of the difficulties in judging this utility before actually incurring the costs of consumption, these search costs are likely to be higher than in markets for conventional products.

We can now return to the original concept of the production function. Imagine a media company, a feature film producer deciding how much to spend on production – and so how many people to employee, facilities or equipment to buy or hire, marketing budget etc. In the real world, “management makes the production function decision on a yearly basis”, having forecast projected demand for a company’s outputs (Van de Ven, 1976:66). For a farming or manufacturing company, this forecast may fairly closely resemble the previous year – a certain number of people buying replacement products, some new customers and the loss of some existing customers to competitors. Our feature film producer, however, will find it much more difficult to make this forecast accurately. There will be no replacement purchases, because each film is individually differentiated, and so a new film is not a replacement for a previous film. There are no “existing customers” because each new film is essentially a new product that customers have never experienced before – every customer is a new customer. But media products are not simply individually differentiated, they are also intangible, experience goods. Our film studio has very limited ability to communicate to potential audiences what the experience of its new film may be. This is not simply a conceptual problem. It fundamentally influences the effectiveness of markets in media products. The matching of sellers (our studio film) and buyers (audiences buying a ticket) in the film business is extremely wasteful and inefficient. For our feature film producer, the likelihood of failure (of not selling enough cinema tickets) is very high – studies suggest only one in ten feature films released will make a profit (de Vany, 2004). But this high failure rate is combined with a production process which makes the costs of feature production (the first copy costs) extremely high. Thus, our film studio making its production function decision is taking a much greater financial risk (of losing the money) than producers in most industries.

This is why market control strategies are extremely important for media producers, because they help to reduce the risks of failure. One important strategy is to try to increase the number of familiar elements so that individually differentiated media products acquire some of the characteristics of conventional products. While there is no “replacement” consumption, audiences do, at times, engage in habitual consumption. This is because, although media products are individually differentiated, the degree of differentiation varies. Comparing the production processes of media products, reveals the extent to which they vary in their proportions of new and familiar elements. As we will see, feature films tend to be the most individually differentiated (although movie franchises are increasingly common) with the greatest number of new and the smallest number of familiar elements, filmed series and studio shows are less individually differentiated, news reports and letsplay videos are least differentiated. Berlyne (1974) suggests that demand for experience goods (which don’t have a knowable and predictable “utility”) follows an inverted U-shape. Consumers gain lowest satisfaction from products which are either very novel or very familiar. They gain the highest satisfaction from new products with familiar elements. The “sweet spot” for media producers is, therefore, to achieve the optimum combination of new and familiar elements. As the subsequent chapters show, this prediction does appear to be supported by the development of dominant designs in different media industries. During the periods following the development of the dominant designs of the newspaper report, the feature, and the radio and TV series, these industries achieved their most significant habitual consumption; newspapers (1920s–1950s), cinema (1920s–1950s), radio (1920s–1950s) and free-to-air TV (1950s–1980s). But even at these times of habitual consumption, each differentiated media product (such as an individual TV show or a new series) remains, essentially, a new innovation leading to failure rates for TV series which are similarly high to feature films (Bielby and Bielby, 1994).

Media industries also adopt the strategies of other high-risk industries, for example following the portfolio strategy common in pharmaceuticals. Our film studio might therefore decide to produce a range of types of film to try to spread the financial risks of production, in case of a downturn in demand for a particular genre. Similarly, radio and TV channels may produce a range of programming genres, newspapers a range of subjects for news reports etc. This approach becomes a more significant market control strategy when media organisations try to spread the risk through horizontal integration. If our film producer was able to buy a TV network, this would spread the overall risk of production over two markets. Further, horizontal integration may help reduce competition by removing a competitor (the recent purchases of Instagram and Vine by Facebook and Twitter are examples of this strategy).

However, while the risks are great, so are the potential rewards. Media products do have an advantage over conventional products and services, because they are intangible, non-rival products which can be recorded onto inexpensive media (paper, film, tape, digital files) and distributed at low-to-zero marginal cost (via DVD, broadcast, cable or mobile network, or internet) – the costs of reaching a million consumers are not massively greater than the costs of reaching a thousand. This means that a “hit” feature or TV show can be hugely profitable. Media companies which develop a portfolio of products hope that the one-in-ten successful features or TV series they create may be profitable enough to more than cover the losses of the nine failures.

An alternative to the portfolio approach tries to exploit the hit characteristics of media markets. This suggests that success in the market is skewed towards a small number of “blockbuster” successes: 10% of the top 200 films typically account for 50% of industry revenue (Picard, 2005:67). Media businesses may try to implement Porter’s vertical differentiation strategy (1985) to increase the chances that their product will be one of these blockbuster successes. This represents a significant difference in the way these media businesses take the production function decision. The production function suggests that if labour or technology become scarce and expensive, businesses will substitute one for the other to reduce costs. Attempting to create a blockbuster media product may involve deliberately seeking out scarce resources in order to differentiate the final product from competitors. This is particularly true of the decision to employ “talent” – famous actors, presenters, writers etc. Because every media production is essentially a “new” innovation, consumers face the same potential risk as producers – i.e. that they will invest (either money or their scarce attention time) i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Theorists vs Practitioners
• 1 A Theory of Media Production
• 2 Producing Feature Films
• 3 Producing Studio Shows
• 4 Producing Filmed Tv Series
• 5 Producing News Reports
• 6 Producing Tv Formats
• 7 Producing Digital Content
• Conclusions: Creativity and Innovation in Media Production
• References
• Index