WHEN IT COMES to marketing, Disney has it almost too easy.
Just consider the past few weeks. The entertainment giant launched a Pixar clip where the characters personifying emotions in Inside Out react to the Star Wars trailer. ("I love this trailer!" Joy says.) On Disney-owned ABC, Good Morning America’s anchors revealed new Star Wars toys and dressed up as Star Wars characters with their very own recreated trailer. ("This is awesomeeee!" Jesse Palmer shouts.) The company has also released Star Wars clips during evening programming on ABC and ESPN.
For Disney, such cross-promotion—known in corporate-speak as synergy, where two or more divisions of a company increase value by working together—is business as usual. After all, the company owns not only one of the biggest film franchises ever but a major sports network and a major broadcast network, not to mention Pixar, which has made some of the most popular movies. With so many outlets available for promoting Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the question isn't "Where can I see more Star Wars?" but "Where can I not?"
Such synergy-driven advantage isn't new, and Disney is far from alone in exploiting it. Universal, for example, aggressively promoted Jurassic World—Chris Pratt appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, whose voice is heard in the film providing instructions to park-goers. (NBC and Universal are owned by Comcast.)
And, yes, Disney also gets an enormous boost from media coverage of the upcoming Star Wars film, including WIRED's latest cover. Fans on social media also play a role in fueling the growing hype.
But the unending promotion of Star Wars on Disney's platforms is a deliberate strategy by the company itself. In fact, Disney may well be the master of cross-promotion, a skill it honed with its iconic, family-friendly characters. Now its many corporate arms reach a uniquely vast array of audiences across the US and around the world. Even as upstarts like Netflix and BuzzFeed try to change how we consume entertainment, such traditional media power is hard to ignore—literally.
The basic concept of Synergy can be explained through this mathematical formula:
1+1=3
Whilst this may not make sense to mathematicians, in business it does, when we think of profit value. If you sell two separate products, for example a video game and a film, they could both do very well, giving you a profit of £200 million each.
However if the video game and film were linked, i.e. both Harry Potter projects, this is synergy because the profit value of each will be more, perhaps £300 million each. Therefore the product value of intertied products is
morethan the value of two separate products.
As film students, of course you do not have to worry about mathematics, but you do need to understand the importance of synergy for the industry and to be able to identify and discuss examples.
Jill Nelmes, in ‘An Introduction to Film Studies’ defines synergy strategy as:
Combined or related action by a group of individuals or corporations towards a common goal, the combined effect of which exceeds the sum of the individual efforts. (Nelmes, 1996: 42)
Synergy can come in a number of different forms:
Product Placement
Companies pay to feature their product in a film, which often leads to a deal in which the film’s protagonist or other characters are featured in their advertising campaigns.
Tie-ins
Promotional Partnerships, where the film or its characters will feature on existing products. This may be in the form of competitions.
Spin-Offs
Products based on the original, i.e. the Film. A film may be a spin-off of a television series, or a television series may be created as a spin-off of a film. We can also think of this as media convergence.
Pre-Existing Property
If a film is based on pre-existing material (for example a video game, novel or comic book) the pre-existing material is often re-released featuring imagery from the film on its cover, or a special edition is released in synch with the film’s scheduled cinematic release.
Merchandise
Companies created products specifically for the film, for example toys, calendars, video games. These products not only help market the film, but the audience’s knowledge of the film brings their awareness to the merchandise.
Vertical Integration
When distribution and some forms of exhibition are kept in-house, meaning other subsidiaries of the conglomerate (who owns the production company) distribute the film and create DVD releases of it.
We do not consider publicity (i.e. press appearances and interviews) as a form of synergy though.
Synergy is a common action of the multi-media conglomerates who own the Hollywood studios. Often they will incorporate products from their different subsidiaries. For example, one of their Studios will produce a film, one of their TV studios will create a spin-off series, and one of their games manufacturers will produce a game. This will benefit the conglomerate as their products will be cross-promoted by each other, multiplying the profits for the conglomerate. Remember conglomerates are horizontally and vertically integrated meaning they have several companies in a number of different multi-media fields, which allows them easy access to synergy opportunities.
Looking at the synergy of particular case studies allows us to analyse the structure of Hollywood, how major high concept releases get the funding and profit they do and how they are able to dominate, through their distribution campaigns, over independent films. It is an important facet of Hollywood because it enables the conglomerates to continually accumulate large sum of profit, thus enabling them to continue to make major releases and dominate over the global market.
Another key issue with synergy is that it is in part responsible for the repetitive nature of Hollywood films. To encourage corporate partnerships, merchandise deals and other pre-sales, enabling large budgets to be sought means the films Hollywood produce have to be viewed as low-risk by the partners.
Safe films are those which seem to be almost guaranteed to succeed (remember there are never any guarantees in the film industry!). Partners and investors will want to see evidence that similar films have done well in the recent market, that the directors and stars’ recent films have been profitable and any pre-existing property or clear genre conventions help this.
Therefore, if you look at your local cinema listings, or a film magazine like Empire and Total Film for upcoming releases, you will see there are many similarities between the major Hollywood films. Filmmaking at this level is a business and films have been potential for synergy, therefore more potential for profit if they are safe investments.
Whilst we often say a film’s profit is dictated by the opening weekend box office figures; in today’s global society film’s often make as much, if not more profit, from the longevity of the film’s brand as a presence in the public sphere - this happens through synergy.
So to sum up:
- Synergy is an important part of a film’s marketing campaign- making the public aware of the film’s existence.
- Synergy is an integral reason for the success of the major conglomerates, who own Hollywood, and for their dominance over independents worldwide.
- Synergy is also a key reason for the studio’s preference towards safe films, because the safer the investment the more likely it is that they will be able to attract corporate partnerships.
- The synergy opportunities developed for a film can often be more profitable than the film itself and keep the film brand in the public sphere constantly- ideal if the studios are planning a sequel, which is more than common in contemporary Hollywood!
