White Papers

June 15, 2011

C3 White Paper: Learning to Share - The Relational Logics of Media Franchising by Derek Johnson

This summer, select 2010/2011 C3 research memos and white papers willl be made publicly available.

Now available for download from the C3/FOE website:

Learning To Share: The Relational Logics of Media Franchising

Derek Johnson (University of North Texas)
Consulting Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium

franchising image

Download the executive summary or the entire research memo.

Executive Summary

In the contemporary media environment, it has become increasingly commonplace—and commonsense—to refer to successful, long-running intellectual properties as “franchises.” In May 2010, for example, Advertising Age made sense of the sale of Snoopy, Woodstock, and the rest of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts gang to the Iconix Brand Group in these terms, valuating the history of the property and its continuing potential in the global media marketplace by exclaiming “It’s a Great Franchise, Charlie Brown” (Bulik 2010). This metaphor for making sense of media properties extends beyond trade discourse, with popular blogs also participating in the franchise conversation. In a recent post later picked up by Yahoo! News, Life’s Little Mysteries blogger Mike Avila meditates on the media franchise by trying to determine “the most successful movie franchise of all time.” Having decided to make box office revenue the deciding factor, Avila awards the crown to the Harry Potter series and its $5.4 billion in ticket sales—but with the caveat that Star Wars would gain an advantage if merchandising were to be considered, while the James Bond films exceed both in terms of overall longevity.

Such posts contribute to an overall popular understanding of the media franchise as the result of ongoing management of a property across time and various markets, corroborating the perceptions of industry insiders like Disney’s Robert Iger, who similarly defines franchise as “something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time” (Siklos 2009). The economic meanings carried by this metaphor, however, have also been negotiated by those working creatively with these properties, whose individual interests and energies must be asserted in the face of all this successful brand maintenance. Reflecting on the conclusion of the TV series Lost in 2010, producer Carlton Cuse notes: “We certainly understand and absolutely respect that ABC and Disney has an incredibly valuable franchise and they want to do more things with Lost, but the story we're telling ends in May” (Chozick 2010). Because Lost is understood in this way as one of the most successful television franchises of the early twenty-first century, Cuse finds it necessary as a stakeholder to reassert the role of creative individuality within the perpetual corporate management of the shared property.

This notion of media franchising, therefore, shapes how analysts, executives, creators, and popular audiences each imagine the media industries of the contemporary moment. And as Cuse’s attempt to position his work outside perceptions of franchising demonstrates, this metaphor is a particularly loaded one, often negatively connoting corporate control and exploitation of a cash cow at the expense of independence and artistry. Without a doubt, many of these connotations come from the wider cultural history of franchising. Prior to the industrial revolution, a franchise was conceived primarily in the political terms of enfranchisement. Derived from the French franchir (to free), the word “franchise” conveyed one’s right to participate and pursue one’s interests free of constraint. Within a collective system such as electoral politics, the franchise was, by and large, a freely determined individual vote. However, as historians of marketing such as Harry Kursh argue, this free right to participate took on more economic—and more sinister—connotations by the nineteenth century, as emerging tycoons “slit each other’s corporate throats” in fierce competition to be awarded “franchise” rights over utilities, railroads, and other elements of public infrastructure (1968: 194). According to scholar T.S. Dicke, the term acquired an additional use around 1959, newly deployed to describe business systems in which corporate franchisors operating on a national level develop a trademarked system of doing business enter into contractual relations with franchisees who pay a fee to independently operate outlets on the local level (1992: 2).

It is from this usage that most consumers understand global business operations such as McDonald’s restaurants, Meineke auto shops, or Best Western hotels. Thus, as industry analysts in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and other sites of trade discourse began in the early 1990s to make sense of media content and its production as “franchising” (moving the term beyond existing usage to describe the assignment of broadcasting licenses and municipal cable monopolies as franchise rights to infrastructure), the term brought with it a great deal of historical and cultural baggage. To think about media culture as franchise is to think about it in the same terms that make sense of fast food. And in the same way that critics like George Ritzer (2000) have lamented the increasing standardization and rationalized control of culture as what he calls the “McDonaldization” of society, the articulation of media to fast food reflects allows the latter to act as cultural shorthand for the inadequacies of the former.

So while media franchising has been frequently invoked in industrial, popular, and scholarly discourse, perceptions of its economic determinism and its lack of cultural value have at least partially sidelined specific attempts to understand what the franchising of media culture actually means. In most accounts, the media franchise is a rather simple effect, figured most often as a product of increasing corporate power and conglomeration or as the endgame for intellectual property management strategies. Even as Henry Jenkins (2006), for one potentially divergent example, considers the franchised intellectual property more productively as a site where new forms of narrative practice and cultural collaboration have emerged, the media franchise is positioned and understood in relation to the larger patterns of convergence culture and transmedia storytelling. Nevertheless, media franchising is a phenomenon in its own right, not confined to specifically transmedia considerations, as properties like Law & Order and CSI have become understood as franchises for their multiplication within the single medium of television. Similarly, in The Frodo Franchise, scholar Kristin Thompson (2007) offers a detailed picture of the Lord of the Rings franchise, but in arguing about its exceptional character, her book offers only a limited perspective on the phenomenon of media franchising at large.

But what can we learn from the logic of franchising itself? What does it tell us about how cultural production and creative collaboration might work? How can we make use of this understanding? With much of this phenomenon remaining to be explored by media researchers, this project aims to directly confront and deconstruct the cultural logics of franchising in order to understand it not as the effected product of other issues and forces, but as a process and set of relationships that have historically produced culture. Though the notion of the franchise carries with it much cultural baggage, those entrenched meanings and values accompany a very specific logic for organizing and making sense of cultural production sustained over time and across multiple market sectors. By developing a detailed, historical portrait of what franchising is and how it has worked, we will deepen our understanding of how culture has been collaboratively produced and consumed across decentralized networks of “enfranchised” stakeholders. To that end, this inquiry combines current research trajectories in media and cultural studies with conceptual models drawn from the fields of marketing and organizational communication to make sense of media franchising as a social practice. This approach demands we consider franchising not solely in terms of texts, products, brands, or properties, but also through power-laden, networked relationships between franchisors and franchisees with distinct interests in the shared cultural resources of the franchise. By combining analysis of trade press with archival research and original interviews with media professionals, this project examines how these shared resources have been deployed, managed, and sustained in specific historical instances by media institutions, creative personnel, and even consumers invested in them.

Key Findings

Ultimately, this study recognizes that any attempt to define the media franchise once and for all is an exercise in futility, as its slippery cultural meanings are perhaps what make it such a versatile means of understanding a wide variety of media practices. Nonetheless, by arguing that franchising offers a cultural structure through which media content, media institutions, and media audiences have been put into productive relations, this study helps point to the relational, collaborative logic that defines a franchised culture. From this perspective, five key findings will be delivered to demonstrate the value of comprehending franchising as a structure for organizing collaborative cultural production:

The Cultural Logic of Franchising is Relational: franchising must be understood as relational given its dependence on sustained, strategic relationships between stakeholders with unequal interest in shared cultural resources; franchises are not reflective of intellectual property monopolies, but instead negotiation of imperfectly aligned interests.

Franchising Drives Institutional Relationships: the cultural networks constituted by franchising have not merely bolstered the power of “big media” institutions, but rather, in driving institutional relationships, have created tensions, cleavages and challenges to be negotiated by conglomerates and upstarts alike. The franchise strategies of companies like Marvel Comics, when most successful, have depended upon institutional partnerships.

Franchising Supports Creative Relationships: franchising must also be understood with respect to creative relationships, in that it has enabled co-creation and collaboration through decentralized, emergent uses of shared story worlds. Users of properties like Battlestar Galactica must negotiate not only the structure of a shared set of narrative resources, but also hierarchies of creative power that encourage and constrain creative uses of them.

Franchising Generates Consumer-Constituent Relationships: as shared cultural resources, franchised worlds have supported what can be described as consumer-constituent relationships. Invited to invest at a variety of productive, affective, and even civic levels, consumers act as defacto franchisees, pursuing their own economic and political interests in the institutional and creative management of programs like 24.

Franchising Extends Transnational and Transgenerational Relationships: franchises support transnational and transgenerational relations through ongoing exchange, transformation, and reinvestment. Franchises like Transformers can be most productively understood not as globally traded products, but as cultural processes in which local innovations feed cross-cultural networks of production over long periods of time.

From these findings, this project theorizes the culture of media franchising to uncover an established tradition of collaborative production in the entertainment industries. As a cultural logic structuring production in relational terms, the media franchise might therefore be considered, despite its more historical, less cutting-edge character, a crucial corollary to any attempt to understand emerging “social media.”

Recommendations

By reflecting on the heterogeneous interests in a shared set of resources implied by the term “franchise,” we gain a much clearer insight into the social, institutional, and creative relationships by which culture has been produced and reproduced in the media industries. To be sure, media franchises are not reducible to the franchise relationships that have structured the retail and service industries over the past sixty to seventy years. Relationships geared toward the expansion of distribution channels and marketing reach function much differently from those aimed at multiplying the production of media culture.

Moreover, the degree to which the cultural logic of franchises (as it has been described in this white paper) is consciously and strategically recognized in the media industries remains to be seen. Many of the executives and creative professionals interviewed for this project disavowed or distanced themselves from the very notion of franchising, claiming ignorance of the term or explaining that such considerations were outside their job description. This likely means that relatively few producers are actually thinking in any real depth about media franchises. While the practices and relationships described here may be in place, a firm structural and strategic logic may not actually underlie them in practice.

Thinking more strategically in terms of franchising—and the cultural logic it implies—has some distinct advantages, and it is here that some initial recommendations can be synthesized:

1. Practitioners should consider franchising in terms of its instructive potential as a historical precedent.

2. The relational logic of media franchising challenges industry insiders to reconsider any strategic logics structured around singular control over the use of intellectual properties.

3. In contrast to prohibitive top-down controls, open and heterogeneous creative experimentation can be relied upon to renew and regenerate existing intellectual property production resources.

4. In developing collaborative productive models, industry professionals should develop greater appreciation of contributions that emerge from outside the top echelons of power. By thinking of licensed creators and fans alike as “franchisees,” license holders can recognize vital stakeholders in the ongoing production of media properties.

Bio

Derek Johnson is an Assistant Professor, University of North Texas, Department of Radio, Television, and Film. His dissertation examined the historical development of the media "franchise" as a form based on shared intellectual property networks, as a specific set of production and consumption practices, and as a discourse used to make sense of media culture. Interested in the organization of culture across media platforms, his research spans a wide range of industries (including film, television, video games, comics, and licensed merchandising) and encompasses issues of narrative theory, audience reception, public sphere discourse, as well as media economics and policy. His recent publications include "Inviting Audiences In: The Spatial Reorganization of Production and Consumption in 'TVIII'" (New Review of Film and Television, 2007), "Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom" (Fandom: Identities and Communities in Mediated Culture, edited by Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss, 2007), and "Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?: Marvel's Mutation from Monthlies to Movies" (Film and Comic Books, edited by Gordon, Jancovich, and McAllister, 2007). Derek can be reached directly at Derek.Johnson@unt.edu.

May 31, 2011

C3 White Paper: Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out - Maximizing the Value of Television Audiences by Sheila Seles

This summer, select 2010/2011 C3 research memos and white papers willl be made publicly available for download via the C3/FOE blog.

Now publicly available:

Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out: Maximizing the Value of Television Audiences

by Sheila Seles
Graduate Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (2008-2010); MIT CMS Class of 2010;
Director, Digital and Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)

 

seles cover


Download the executive summary or the entire research memo.


Executive Summary

Audience behavior across television platforms is networked, instantaneous, and visible like never before. To maximize the value of the digital television audience, the industry needs to recognize and quantify the cultural value of content—they need to evaluate the reasons people watch TV in the first place. Unfortunately, current business models aren’t up to this challenge. While digital networked culture presents tremendous opportunities to engage with audiences, digital data allows us to see how poorly television ratings reflect actual audience behavior. In this white paper, we’ll see that the ratings system is ultimately responsible for the growing division between the financial value of the audience and the cultural value of content. As long as ratings exist in their current state, publishers and advertisers will miss out on innovative revenue opportunities, and they won’t be able to create programming that reflects real audience demand.

Television ratings are meant to make audiences valuable to publishers and advertisers, but ratings are too narrowly constructed to represent the diverse sites of value embodied in the contemporary television audience. This white paper suggests three key areas that should be re-imagined to maximize the value of the television audience for the digital age.

PART I: Structural Relationships Among Industry Players

• This section argues that the economic structure of the television industry has prevented industry players from maximizing the value of increasingly fragmented television audiences.

• We consider evidence of how industry players are caught in a codependent relationship that privileges the status quo to the detriment of true innovation.

• These relationships functioned best when audiences and programs were aggregated because there was only one way to watch TV—when it was on.

• Today, there are many ways to watch TV—live, recorded on a DVR, online, downloaded—but audiences are still measured like linear television audiences. This method of audience measurement fails to leverage the affordances of the medium and allows a lot of viewers to slip through the cracks. Sometimes viewers take it upon themselves to make sure this doesn’t happen, but most of the time networks and advertisers are guided by their dependence on outmoded conceptions of audience value.

PART II: The Changing Value of Television Audiences

• The second section argues for a system of audience measurement that maintains the value of audience exposure while accounting for the value of audience expression.

• Here, we resist the temptation to look at fans as a model for measuring expression both because fan behavior is anomalous, and because we can measure digital expressions as simple as clicking a mouse or changing the channel on a digital TV.

• Finally, this section deals with the value of viewing context. There are also different behaviors associated with different platforms and different content. Understanding the implications of viewing context makes the television audience even more valuable to advertisers and publishers. Context provides an opportunity to expand advertising strategies beyond showing the same ads on every platform.

PART III: Leveraging Digital Affordances to Maximize Audience Value

• The last section explains how the logic of successful digital companies can be applied to the television business. Both the methodologies and corporate ethos of successful online companies can serve as a model for the television industry, or they can be its undoing. This section uses mini-studies of several Internet companies to argue for the increasing importance of experimentation, networking, taste, organization, and interface in the television business for the purposes of better understanding audience engagement and audience value.

• First, we explore how Google is the leader in online advertising sales by making sense of data and making user behavior valuable.

• Next, Netflix provides an instructive example of how networked culture and progressive corporate culture can lead to success in digital business.

• Finally, Demand Media shows us how digital data can make visible manifestations of user taste valuable.

• Publishers, advertisers, and measurement companies have historically been able to get around the limitations of their codependency, but they are faced with increasing competition from digital companies that understand how to make fragmented audiences valuable.

Finally, this paper concludes that the industry can move beyond its problems by embracing emergent sites of audience value. Digital distribution affords significant opportunities for the television industry to make audiences valuable. By continuing to explore digital data, targeted advertising, behavioral use patterns, and audience engagement, the television industry can revolutionize its ailing business.

Bio

Sheila Murphy Seles graduated with a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from MIT in 2010. Her graduate thesis focused on the television ratings industry and the changing value of television audiences. Seles also holds a BA in American Studies and Theatre from Middlebury College. Her work at The Convergence Culture Consortium examined the television industry with a concentration on the changing business of television research. Seles is currently the Director of Digital and Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Sheila can be reached directly at smseles@gmail.com

March 14, 2011

Lewis Hyde: upcoming talk here at MIT and previous CMS MIT5 appearance

Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage. 1983) figured prominently in the C3 Spreadable Media White Paper (Spring 2009).

Lewis is here at MIT speaking this week on his new book Common As Air - which takes up current notions of intellectual property and pursues it back to the founding fathers and forward to Bob Dylan. His talk will be Thursday, March 17th @ 7 p.m. (MIT Room 3-270 [map link here]). This talk is part of the MIT Writers Series - sponsored by MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Lewis also took part in an MIT5 Panel, with CMS Prof. David Thornburn moderating, entitled Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures. A write-up on the panel is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary1.html

Video of the panel is embedded below.

September 17, 2010

Changing Relationships, Changing Industries (Nancy Baym, University of Kansas)

C3 Consulting Researcher Nancy Baym (University of Kansas) had a busy 2010.

Her new book, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, was released by Polity Press in the Spring.

Also this spring, Nancy contributed one of the first C3 Research Memos distributed to C3 Consortium Members. This C3 Research will be made publicly available via the C3 blog in late November of this year.

This summer, Nancy was here in Cambridge as a visiting researcher at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Danah Boyd's Social Media Research Collective.

While here in Cambridge, Nancy was asked to speak at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. Her talk (in the embedded video below) entitled "Changing Relationships, Changing Industries" addresses her thinking on notions of exchange (economic and social) between fans, audiences, the music industry and the independent music scene - specifically in the case of independent Swedish artists and music labels.

Nancy's insights into how the independent music scene by necessity has embraced new media distribution channels and the audience embrace of these new channels, as well as her insights and metrics on the major label music industry as an inadvertent 'loss leader' in the swift dismantling of the top down corporate music hierarchy (which we are now seeing manifest in film and television) were an early influence on what became 2008 - 2009 C3 research on new consumption patterns, new patterns of value exchange, along with innovative ideas surrounding value and worth - specifically the 2008 C3 White Paper on Spreadability, Xiaochang Li's 2009 C3 White Paper More Than Money Can Buy: Locating Value in Spreadable Media, Ana Domb's 2009 White Paper Tacky and Proud: Exploring Technobrega's Value Network and the CMS C3 FOE4 Panel, Moderated by Prof. Jenkins entitled "Consumption, Value and Worth" (panel video here, liveblogging archive here).


Location
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
License
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported
Copyright Holder
The President and Fellows of Harvard College

April 14, 2010

Final White Paper Releases: (2007 &) 2006, Part 2

Below are the final five research reports from the Convergence Culture Consortium's conception in 2006. I hope that you have been able to browse through all of our releases to see what kind of research we've been up to over the years, but also to see how relevant our ideas and analysis continue to be.

Fanning the Audience's Flames
Fanning the Audience's Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities
by Sam Ford
with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Dr. Grant McCracken, Parmesh Shahani, Ivan Askwith, Geoffrey Long and Ilya Vedrashko
How to Turn Pirates Into Loyalists
How to Turn Pirates into Loyalists: The Moral Economy and an Alternative Response to File Sharing
by Alec Austin
with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Dr. Joshua Green, Ivan Askwith and Sam Ford
No Room for Pack Rats
No Room for Pack Rats: Media Consumption and the College Dorm
by Sam Ford
with Rachel Shearer and Parmesh Shahani, Dr. Joshua Green and Dr. Henry Jenkins
This is Not (Just) An Advertisement
This Is Not (Just) An Advertisement: Understanding Alternate Reality Games
by Ivan Askwith
with Dr. Henry Jenkins, Dr. Joshua Green and Tim Crosby
Moving Stories
Moving Stories: Aesthetics and Production in Mobile Media
by Geoffrey Long
with Dr. Henry Jenkins, Dr. Joshua Green and Dr. William Uricchio

April 13, 2010

More White Paper Releases: 2007 & 2006, Part 1

In keeping with the push toward openness, this is yet another blog post linking to our research reports, this time from 2007 and 2006. I included two years in two parts because 2007 comprised two papers while 2006 included seven.

So, for today, I have linked four papers below, and tomorrow I will release the final five!

2007
Fandemonium
Fandemonium: A Tag Team Approach to Enabling and Mobilizing Fans
by Sam Ford
with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Dr. Joshua Green
Playing in Other Worlds
Playing in Other Worlds: Modeling Player Motivations
by Alec Austin
with Dr. Henry Jenkins, Dr. Joshua Green and Ivan Askwith
2006
Selling Creatively
Selling Creatively: Product Placement in the New Media Landscape
by Alec Austin
with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Timothy Crosby, David Edery, Geoffrey Long, Dr. Raymond Pettit, Parmesh Shahani and Dr. Stacy Wood
In-Game Advertising
Vision Report 2010: In-Game Advertising
by Ilya Vedrashko
with Dr. Henry Jenkins and Alec Austin, David Edery, Geoffrey Long and Parmesh Shahani

April 7, 2010

Convergence Culture Consortium 2008 White Papers Released

A number of weeks back, I announced that the older research papers produced by the Convergence Culture Consortium would be made available to the public. Today, I would like to present the two papers published in 2008, If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace, by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb
with Joshua Green
, and YouTube: Online Video and Co-Created Value, by Joshua Green with Jean Burgess (Queensland University of Technology). The links to the papers are below.







If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace

By: Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb
With: Joshua Green

Download the Executive Summary (PDF)

Download the Report (PDF)

March 8, 2010

C3 White Paper: Tacky and Proud, Exploring Tecnobrega's Value Network

The third installment of our 2009 C3 white paper releases. This white paper was penned by Ana Domb Krauskopf.

Tacky and Proud: Exploring Tecnobrega's Value Network

This paper explores the role of audiences as productive actors in the music industry and uses the value network as an analytical tool to facilitate the process of locating audience involvement and specifying the audience's role as creators of economic and symbolic value. Our main case study in this white paper is Tecnobrega ("Cheesy Techno"), a grassroots Brazilian music industry found in Belem (the capital city of Para, a northern state of Brazil). Tecnobrega evolved outside mainstream media, yet it became a successful music scene thanks to its innovative forms of production, distribution, promotion, and its strong relationship with audiences. Tecnobrega has also benefited from increasing widespread internet access throughout Brazil.

Download the executive summary or the entire paper.

February 22, 2010

C3 White Paper: More Than Money Can Buy: Locating Value in Spreadable Media

The next installment of our 2009 C3 white paper releases.

My white paper extends the work I began with If It Doesn't Spread, it's Dead in 2008. It digs deeper into how the social principles that shape the flow "free" goods and services online shape concepts of value.

Through theoretical analysis and practical case studies, the paper:

  1. Explains why "free" things aren't really free, and the social contracts that regulate these exchanges
  2. Outlines the key differences between socially-driven exchanges and market-driven ones, with an eye towards how to develop online monetization models that can bridge the two systems.
  3. Breaks down examples of best (and worst) practices
  4. Proposes general principles for understanding online communities and socially-motivated content creators, and how to build business models around their activities.

Download the executive summary or the entire paper. You can also view the executive summary online at my blog: part 1, 2, and 3

Let me know what you think in the comments or tweet @xiaochang.

February 17, 2010

C3 White Paper: It's (Not) the End of TV as We Know It

2009 C3 white papers are now available for download. Over the next few days, we'll be posting links to them here on the blog.

My white paper about online TV audiences is up first. The paper outlines strategies for understanding how viewership online complements broadcast viewing. Through research and case studies, this paper:

  1. Explains the strategies needed to manage viewer expectations of scarcity in the broadcast space and plenitude in the online space.

  2. Categorizes types of online content in terms of their appeal to viewers.

  3. Outlines strategies for appealing to different types of online viewers.

Download the executive summary or the entire paper and let me know what you think in the comments or tweet @shelila.

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