Why did the internet giants storm the movie?

2014 Internet companies in general pretty close to the film industry, which makes a lot of self-feel good practitioners, have been startled a cold sweat. Unlike previous entrants, internet companies not only bring money, but also bring about successful experience in the field of film industry and a lot of new ideas and vocabulary, "Big Data", "Iteration", "Electric quotient", "Pain point", "Internet thinking", "disruptive innovation" and so on. Throughout the 2014, internet companies, with their skilful ability to manipulate the media, have instilled their thinking in the film industry almost by a new word every month. What lurks behind these new words is not only methodological innovation, but also new rules for internet companies and a comprehensive overhaul of the industry's old processes.

Why the offensive is concentrated in the last two years, the film industry less than 30 billion of the market capacity of the box-office, why can so attract hundreds of billions of dollars in the value of the Internet giants, to understand such a wave, we have to go back to another area of the story.

From macro policy, to see why the internet giants storm the film

In early 1996, the United States amended the American Communications Act, which has been in use for more than half a century, the biggest change is to break a lot of barriers in the field of communications, allowing long-distance, local, radio, cable television, film and television services and other business infiltration, allowing all types of communications operators to participate in the cross-regional brawl, that is to say, We are now trying to complete the "triple-Net Convergence" (telecommunications network, radio Network, Internet), the United States has begun to adjust to the rule of law 20 years ago.

In 1997, the United States of America, Canada, Mexico and other countries published a unified North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), the information industry is clearly classified as an industry category, and defined as the conversion of information into commodities, including three categories:

Production and distribution of information and cultural products industry: such as publishing, film and software industry

Providing for the delivery or distribution of these products as well as data or communications media industries: Telecommunications, radio and television

The industry that processes data: the Internet industry at a time of rapid growth in the United States

In the 90 's, the United States to the information industry, and the introduction of a series of deregulation policies for mergers and acquisitions, directly contributed to the 1996-2001-year, information services-oriented media industry collectively joined the United States in the history of the fifth wave of mergers and acquisitions. According to statistics, only in 1996, the U.S. media industry more than 5 million U.S. dollars in mergers and acquisitions have occurred 258 cases, the number of increase than the previous year 48%, when the Disney acquisition of ABC, Time Warner acquisition of Turner Broadcasting Company, the total amount of two transactions amounted to 25.6 billion dollars, This figure is already much larger than the current one-year merger of China's information industry.

After the crazy integration of the late 90, in addition to Disney, in addition to Time Warner, several other media giants, such as Viacom (Paramount's parent), Comcast (global parent) and News Corp (21st Century Fox parent), were born in the United States, which still hold control of the global media industry. The 2001 merger of Time Warner and AOL completed the largest mergers and acquisitions in the history of the world, with a record of $186.2 billion trillion, which has not yet been broken.

The reason why we need to go back to the development of the U.S. information industry is because in China right now, we are also facing a critical period of overall adjustment of the information industry.

The great integration of information industry is the main cause of the cross-boundary of Internet enterprises

Similar to the original intention of the United States in the 90 to promote the reform of the information industry, China's economic development has entered a stage determined by information efficiency. It is the trend of the information industry to increase the capacity of resource allocation by enlarging the scale effect and eliminating excess capacity.

Over the past two years, four policies have been the direct cause of accelerating the pace of integration in the information industry.

January 2013, the Ministry of Industry and a total of 12 ministries issued the "on speeding up the promotion of key industries Enterprises merger and reorganization guidance." It is clear that the electronic information industry to 2015, should form 5-8 annual sales income over 100 billion yuan large backbone enterprises (bat three are not yet achieved, but the gap is small), and strive to cultivate sales income over 500 billion yuan large enterprises.

August 2013, the State Council issued a "on the promotion of information consumption to expand domestic demand," a number of views this is the first time that the State Council has publicly understood the market characteristics of information industry with the concept of "information consumption", and at the same time refined the steps of "comprehensively promoting triple-net integration", emphasizing the national strategic significance of the integration of information industry.

February 28, 2014, the central government's overall deepening reform leadership group second meeting to consider the adoption of the "deepening of the cultural restructuring of the implementation of the Programme", which explicitly put forward to promote large-scale media Group special management Unit pilot, is the focus of the 2014. Such a move represents the possibility that China, which clearly stipulates the same rights as shares in the company law, may take private capital in the form of different rights in the media sector.

March 2014, the State Council issued "on further optimization of the merger and reorganization of the market environment," in response to some of the details of mergers and acquisitions of enterprises to reaffirm the direction of national policy adjustment, and proposed that private capital should be further relaxed in various areas of access requirements, promote the state-owned enterprises mixed ownership.

In the continuous promotion of policy, all kinds of private capital in the information industry as far as possible, to the Internet business as the protagonist of the merger of the trend of rapid rise. According to the Chingko Research Center, mergers and acquisitions in China's broader internet sector (which is equivalent to the information industry) increased by nearly three times times in 2013 compared with the previous year. In 2014, the figure jumped to more than $20 billion trillion, rising from a minuscule share of the entire Chinese mergers and acquisitions market to 19%. It is to be recalled that the figures mentioned here are based only on the classification carried out by the acquirer, and do not include the expansion of these enterprises in other areas.

Although internet companies with a keen sense of smell quickly embraced a new round of policy dividend, but they are now free to expand the space is actually not big, these private capital-oriented internet companies, hands and feet are still in the details of the policy is not clear to bind.

It is the only option for Internet capital to occupy the film industry before the policy is released.

In the field of telecommunications and radio and television basic communications, access to private capital is still in the Thunder than the rain stage, last April, a wave of public opinion of Alibaba shares China's media, although has been approved by the SFC, but has not yet completed, the guidance of other Internet enterprises is not clear.

As for television and radio channel Resources, 2003 years later, a small gap has been released. This gap spawned Zhejiang film and television group, its assets include Zhejiang Film and television channel management rights, the establishment of the private enterprises in Zhejiang Guangsha has accounted for 49% (after the state-funded recovery). At the same time also the birth of private capital accounted for 60% of the shares of Guizhou Golden heaven and earth Advertising, which contracted Guiyang several major channels in addition to the content of the right to operate outside the news. There are Inner Mongolia satellite TV, Qinghai TV, tourism satellite TV and Nanjing TV station, at that stage have tried different forms of reform. But such a gap, because of the government's ideological adjustment, was replaced by a new conservative policy in 2005, and there is still no sign of opening again.

So what is left in the entire information industry, and what is the relative freedom of internet companies to participate in? Clearly, these companies have come to think of "content" together.

In some countries, the content industry is referred to as the "copyright industry", which refers to all the fields of intellectual copyright, which is basically summarized by "cultural industry" in China. In contrast to the instrumental services provided by Internet enterprises, all the content-oriented services in the cultural industry are more perfect in the legal level, and the consciousness of the protection of property rights in the policy is also relatively clear. In these content-oriented products, the film industry, although the market cycle is not long, but the most open to private capital.

As we mentioned in the previous article, the Government had allowed private capital to have a holding position in the film industry as early as 2003, and the affirmation of private capital was carried out in most parts of the industry, not just in some part. Other content areas other than the film industry, in addition to the network platform more dependent on the game and digital publishing, such as books and periodicals, TV dramas, variety shows and so on, are subject to the distribution channels and broadcast control platform constraints, the policy of access to relax in fact seriously lags behind the film industry.

So, to sum up, it is not difficult to understand why private capital from internet companies will collectively be assembled in the film industry in 2014, which is only tens of billions of of the market. Ali and Baidu in the three major internet companies in the film market moves more frequently, because of another entertainment-oriented content industry, the scale of 2014 to 110.8 billion of the online games market, 40% is Tencent's control, monopoly position difficult to shake. The relationship between the game and the film is obviously more closely than the other two main business, forcing Ali and Baidu can only step on the road.

How we sell movies in the accelerating process of marketization in the 2015

In the 2014, the Internet enterprises, which not only brought new words and new ideas to the film market, but also brought some methods to improve the efficiency of operation, the logic followed by these methods, the market thinking of "audience as the core" was re-established in the film industry. When all aspects of the film industry are affected by these cross-border capital, we can see that the market-oriented process of the whole industry is being accelerated.

More capital entry, the first to make the financing of the film relatively simple, originally up to six months, a year of financing process was quickly compressed to three months. But the convenience of financing does not make project managers more calm, because the market environment instability and exploratory funds too much, most of the capital is in the success of a single project to calculate the profit, capital turnover efficiency is the main evaluation index, the project cycle and ROI also become very sensitive.

In this atmosphere, prompting many practitioners forced into a state of extreme excitement, in the pursuit of higher, faster, but it is difficult to become stronger in the short term, the quick success has become a helpless choice. In order to publicize the effect, always enlarge the investment of the film industry, suddenly turned the direction. Seems to be overnight, we learned the concept of percentage, the media on the issue of box office myth has rarely talked about the scale of investment, to the rapid pace of large, to small beats become often praised deeds. So, in this accelerating market, we need to focus on a number of clues that are not too much changed to make reference to our current market decisions.

The 28 rule of the film market has remained unchanged, and the difficulty of project management has increased

Although the overall size of the film market is rising every year, the concentration of the market has not changed too much. In the North American market, the top 60 films in the box office have to stabilize more than 70% of the share, at home, because the variety of film types is not enough, this number to reach 80%. We have detailed statistics of the 2009-2014-year market concentration fluctuations, we can see that the 2014 figure is 83%, that is to say, 2014 a total of 388 films, of which 328 accounted for only 17% of the market share, on average, each film can only get 15 million of the box office.

But every month the big media focus on the most rewarding films, and none of the films that have been released will think they should fall into the 17% range. We collectively create an atmosphere of optimism that allows some practitioners and new entrants to believe that the film industry is an open pit gold mine, as long as the forklift is big enough to get enough. As a result, the investment scale of a single film is rapidly rising, the current growth rate has gradually exceeded the increase in the total market.

In any non-administrative monopoly industry, the overall profitability is relatively stable, and if it is pushed higher by market demand, the influx of new competitors will immediately return it to the prototype. So we see the rapid growth of media costs in the 2014, a few years ago almost equal to the free new media platform, the cost increases are already faster than the announced budget, and we can see that the cost of the cast is expanding, some of the young actor's income quickly entered tens of millions of levels, and the schedule has been arranged for a year; , all the factors that could have touched the audience are facing a continuous improvement in the threshold, special effects? Star？ Director？ Topic？ In the past, the publicity of the elixir, because the output to the audience too often, is gradually losing the effect of the past.

And the demand for capital is different, for the staff in the front-line, when the scale of investment increased, management difficulty is also increasing. They need more time to prepare and plan, more stable power structures to think about rhythm control, and more resources to support increasingly complex operations. Unfortunately, this kind of demand is difficult to get attention from the beginning of a film project, all people need to be stung by the market before they reflect.

The structure of the audience's demand for the film remains unchanged, and the real gold needs to be polished more brightly.

As a kind of cultural entertainment consumption, although the movie body looks very complex, but in the audience level, the structure is relatively clear, we can put their consumption consciousness of the film into three levels.

Functional: Film as a passive experience consumption, in determining whether a movie is worth watching, whether to obtain entertainment effect, for the audience is always the first element. Different types of movie viewers of the core consumption purposes slightly different, comedy consumption is joy, drama film Consumption is suspense, love movie consumption is romantic, horror film consumption is tense, fantasy film consumption is the reality of escape ... These are the most basic functional requirements of the audience for the film, which can provide satisfaction only with the video clips.

Surrogate sense: In psychology, it is often called telepresence, in the gaming industry, it is called immersion. Whatever the description of it is, its essential meaning is the same, that is, the audience from space, think they are in the movie World. The most effective way for the audience to gain a sense of generation is to provide multi-dimensional perspectives and a wealth of image details, and the transformation of these perspectives and the cohesion of the details need to match the audience's understanding of the narrative. This puts a higher demand on technical control, and any loss that requires the viewer to think in mind to make up for it will affect the sense of generation, which we often call "drama" in the film industry.

Social value: The audience is willing to accept the experience of the film, essentially from the human learning ability. The discussion from the beginning of contact with movie information to the end of the movie is a process that triggers curiosity and answers. The mass characteristics of the film market make it possible for large crowds to complete similar experiences at the same time, so the social value of the exchange of experience becomes the main demand of the audience for the film.

Because cinema viewing is a first-paid service, the above three requirements are clearly sorted at the audience level. The audience's understanding of any movie's message is that it starts with a functional judgment, and when viewers think they can get a functional satisfaction, they will measure whether it is worth going to the cinema. As for the social value of the audience can be achieved through any platform, so in the mature market, window scheduling and large-scale publicity budget is to promote the audience in the first time into the theater.

Based on the 2014 Chinese film market and the understanding of the future development, if you want to do in the 2015 to promote the film itself, then may need to be in the project operation, the following adjustments.

From the pursuit of transmission to the pursuit of accuracy: Now the supply of film is more abundant, the audience is more critical of the function of the film, if you want to make the audience more aware of the effectiveness of function, need to reduce the noise first. Film Promotion before the "topic" of excessive reliance on today has seriously interfered with the audience's ability to analyze film information, the new media channels and the uncontrolled spread of such a platform film information, will blur the audience's perception of a single film. Therefore, reducing the frequency of publication in new media channels and expanding the coverage of the same release on multiple platforms is an adjustment that must be made.

The construction of the sense of generation needs to be strengthened: the trailer is the trial of the film, and it is the main tool for the audience to predict the sense of generation. In previous film campaigns, we usually hope that by triggering the topic to attract the attention of the audience, so that the audience actively search for trailers, but if the topic does not have a long period of continuous bedding and the process of absolute control of the spread of the ability to directly increase the release of trailers, reduce the audience contact with the trailer barriers, will be a more effective choice.

The Guide to social values needs to be more focused: a film's appeal to the audience consists of a variety of elements, before we will be stars, directors, scenes, plot conflict resolution to the fragmentation of information to spread, hoping to trigger different discussions to expand the impact. But these elements because of the increase in market supply, the frequency of repeated use of various films is too high, the audience has begun to feel tired. In order to make better use of these elements, it is necessary to strengthen the unified construction of the film brand, that is to say, the significance of the movie story itself should be emphasized in order to accelerate the fermentation of the movie's Word of mouth and improve the social value of the movie.

Conclusion: Consumption and art are always parallel

This round of China's economic development is under the "neo-liberalism" trend of thought, deregulation is the main direction of national policy reform. The policy changes that have taken place in the United States after 1980 years, as a result of the "neo-liberalism", are unfolding in China today, and the social problems that the United States faced at the time are the confusions we need to face today. Unlike the American market, the film has failed to achieve the ultimate in unifying social ideology and shaping the role of new social ethics. "Top Gun", "for Miss Daisy Drive", "Rain Man", "Forrest Gump" these repair family and interpersonal relationships, to ease class contradictions, to shape the spirit of the film, is the most lack of Chinese audiences, but it is very easy to despise the project.

2014, "Dear" is what we think the most market reference value of the film, its production results appear to be a perfect entertainment, it in the market-oriented operation of the rigorous, but also better help the film completed its own mission. A good film, we think it can not only from the production of Evaluation, film is the media, the film should use its popular language to let people regain the sense of security of the collective, so it must let more viewers complete experience can really draw a full stop. And how to do a good movie, sell, need us to brush off those floating on the surface of the haze, really go to the audience around to understand their feelings and needs.

Even now the market is showing an excessive pursuit of "entertainment", where the shadow thinks that it is only tertiary market audience in the back into the theater, the temporary blind consumption results, but also a part of the young creators are limited to their own and the overall ability of the industry, innovation can not perfect the defect. But the speed of the film market's iterations will quickly awaken viewers to their needs, a number of valuable creators are being affirmed by more capital, and we believe they will eventually gain real respect in the marketplace.

Audiences and creators are never opposites, consumption and art in the development of human society, is always in parallel to help each other, any capital in the film market, it does not want to bear infamy. Making movies and doing more good movies is the demand of the film market and the needs of the whole society, but also the ultimate bargaining chip for the creator in the face of any capital.

(Micro-trust public number fweekly Weekly:

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)