Grand Theft Auto IV is out – and the hype is huge.

As with the launch of its predecessor, San Andreas ;

The fact that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas eclipsed the sales of every other videogame in the UK on its launch weekend is important, but only to the games industry. The fact that revenues from the opening weekend of the game narrowly beat the UK's biggest ever movie box office opening weekend (Harry Potter and the Prisoner Of Azkaban, if you're wondering) is a lot more relevant; and combined with the fact that the buzz and media coverage generated by the game has touched the hallowed levels reached by a new movie release, it provides more proof of the growing importance of videogames than could be provided by a mountain of figures.

It is again being compared to film. This time not as an equal, but as a predator !

GTA IV is expected to earn more during its first few days of release than the $400m made by the third instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean, the Hollywood record holder, in its opening weekend....The film magazine Variety has suggested the game's success could affect interest in this summer's blockbusters, which may struggle to compete for the same audience of young men....Iron Man, the high-octane movie based on the comic book character, which is expected to be one of the year's biggest action films, is just one of those which could be harmed by going on release the same week as Grand Theft Auto IV.

 

 

"A newly formed NBC Universal production unit is teaming up with an advertising agency to create programs around sponsors' products, the company said....NBC Universal Digital Studio will work with a division of Omnicom Group Inc. to create programs that help advertisers sell their products, the entertainment giant announced in a statement Thursday. The programming will be broadcast on NBC Universal's digital properties, such as Web sites."

"In this case, the more the show is copied, the more 'viewers' it gets and the more people see the sponsors' message: TV on your PC."

"No one wants to shop at one store for Sony BMG musicians, another one for Warner Bros musicians, another for EMI musicians, another one for Universal Music musicians and yet another for indie musicians. And, at the price point Sony BMG is talking about ($9 to $12/month) if you want subscriptions to all the fragmented stores, you end up pay $75 to $100/month for DRM-encrusted subscription plans. That's not going to work. Time to go back to the drawing board and not come up with ideas that were discarded five years ago."

"Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about an 'all you can eat' model for buying music that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices. Finally, it looks like the industry (or at least Apple) is 'getting it'. The real question is not whether the big music companies will go for it, but rather, who will be the first one to get smart and agree to offer it?"

"But first, lets take a look at the physics that are shaping today’s media space....We’re moving from a world of limited distribution channels and therefore abundant attention (CBS was not scared of losing any of us as customers 20 years ago, I came home from school every day and watched Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island because it was THE ONLY THING ON), to a world of unlimited distribution and therefore attention scarcity (when Zoe watches TV it’s TiVo and she doesn’t even watch TV after school, she gets on the computer, uses Facebook, does her homework with the help of Wikipedia, IMs with friends, etc)."

"In 2001 the UK Band 'Dodgy' raised enough money to finance an album through this very method. The group raised £15,000 ($25,000) through Internet based micro-payment systems (such as PayPal), combined with an appeal to their fan base. Fans were offered either a small share for £25 ($40), which also gave them a mention on the album sleeve, or a large share for £1000 ($1800) with a percentage of the profits from the sale of the album. Triumphantly, the band's website proclaimed "...we finally raised the entire recording budget to record their fourth and best album to date by encouraging fans, supporters and visitors to this marvellous site to 'invest' in the album." If this has worked for music, it seems logical that the same ideology could be applied to other artistic outlets including online film."

"A groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million people using the Internet and a global community of members.."

Following our look at the general issues facing the media and the difficulties of trying to transplant existing business models into the digital realm (part 1) - via Digital Rights Management (part 2), what are we left with (we note the failure of Weedshare, the p2p project that aimed to distribute DRM media files).  Well, there are a couple of well established methods, as well as a few new ones that have arrived on the scene.  Today we look at those staples of media; advertising and sponsorship.

Using the audience gathered by a media event and offering space to other companies to either tell the audience about their products (advertising) or associating the media event with the company (sponsorship) are ubiquitous methods of financing media.  Indeed, the very term 'soap opera' comes from the original sponsors of content aimed at selling housewives washing powder.  You might have noticed that recently this was taken up a level when dance outfit, Groove Armada 'signed' to drinks company Bacardi.  Bacardi already promote their products via music events, so this fits well and unlike the music-selling model of media, when the band put out an MP3, the more sharing the better, from the point-of-view of their sponsors.  Some might ask, so what about creative freedom?  It is now unlikely that Groove Armada willbe playing a gig for the Boycott Bacardi campaign any time soon, but then would they have anyway?  Tours have had commercial sponsors for some time, it is just that now the band are cutting out the middle-man.

How might this work for film?  Films already have product placement, the James Bond franchise being a good example - the same idea taken further would mean that for the sponsors of the film the more sharing of the film, the better - the studio can still charge for the cinema tickets (after all, going to see a film is about the event as much as what is on the screen - we pay for the experience and not so much for the film itself).  They might not make the money from the DVD sales, the increased sharing means they can charge the sponsors more.  (There is a core question about commercialism and artistic freedom here, but selling CDs and DVDs is not the answer!)

This method is not unlike a viral approach - short, catchy films that push a message.  One example of this is the exploding mints & cola film that reputedly netted its creators over $35,000.  Not only that, but this sort of 'guerilla' marketing is what lots of companies are keen to do to reach younger audiences who are using increasingly less and less old media.

On the subject, advertising is the business model of that media behemoth Google, and it is so successful because the internet allows it to sell targeted advertising space to people interested in the products.  The old-media advertising model is struggling with this as more and more advertising moves to new media for this very reason; on TV or a newspaper I can take out an ad and know that a certain percentage of people would be interested in my product, but it is a bit of a scatter-gun approach.  With Google, my ads only appear next to the search of people interested in my product - a far more efficient method!  This is the revenue method used by YouTube - but also sites such as blip.tv and Revver, who offer their creators a share of the money.

To underline this shift in ad-patterns;

"Everyone talks about advertising dollars shifting online, but when you're fighting all day in the trenches it's easy to miss the big picture.  Here's the big picture:  US advertising revenue at 4 big online media companies--Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX), and MSN (MSFT)--grew by $860 million in Q2, or 26%.  US advertising revenue at 15 big television, newspaper, magazine, radio, and outdoor companies (Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, etc.) shrank by $280 million in Q2, or 3%."

But not content with being the biggest online advertiser - Google has moved in on the TV and radio markets too!