Hollywood Media Synergy as IMC

Abstract: contemporary marketers and brand managers can learn from the media synergy strategies developed by Hollywood studio executives in the past several decades – where media products are deployed to promote one another.

Hollywood’s penchant for sequelisation of blockbusters one form of media synergy. Theme park rides, sound tracks, novel tie-ins and videos games are important and profitable forms of convergence.

ARTICLE: After the never before seen success of Star Wars, 1977 and its sequels and prequels, Hollywood focused more attention of marketing and developing big-budget sequels and synergistic media tie ins.

Mark Crispin Miller (1990) is one of the first critics to analyse Hollywood’s move from vertical integration to horizontal integrations, and films which are easy to deploy amongst various media platforms, as well as looking at how easily they can be made into a sequel (sequelisability) and how easily they can be cross-promoted.

In Hollywood terms, a franchise films is any film that is itself a sequel, or a title that has one or more sequels that follow from it. Sequelitis (in the mid 1990s Hollywood trades began to utilise this term to describe the increasing ratio of sequels – often dubious ones).

Sequels began to account for over 25 per cent of domestic box office in 2003. David Bordwell.

Sequels tend to be thought of as “brand extensions” as they can drive revenues beyond raw box office – DVD sales, toy merchandising, soundtrack tie ins, videogame tie ins. The six conglomerates depend on “sequelised fare”.

This is a 4-S Hollywood Megafranchise model. These are ones such as Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Shrek, LOTR, Pirates of the Caribbean. There generally deploy four key elements to ensure their continuing success, through the four titles. They have theme park rides, videogames, books and soundtracks. The importance of videogames to contemporary media should not be underestimated. They are one of the most important forms of media cross promotion with movies.