Methodology, Skills and Professional Benefits Participants Participants' Comments MEDICI Head of Training «The 12 Labours of Hercules» Report of the Reports – Workshops 1 to 4

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Third Workshop Report — 17 to 19 September, 2013 — Château de Limelette (Belgium)

Module 2 – How do both the dramatic increase in audience data and a demand-driven economy affect our decision-making processes?

Please also see Michael Gubbins' presentation “MEDICI-Module 2” (PDF)

Or, in other words:

• How do we identify, create and nurture demand?
• The cultural engagement that films create can and should be measured. But collecting the relevant data does not immediately mean building up audiences. We have to process such data technologically in order to determine popular demand.
• Producer-audience interaction is still all too rare.

Meeting the audience demand:

• If the funds want to decrease the number of films supported, or to support films that are not only meant for movie screens, are they congnizant of the real size of demand, and of what people actually want?
• Do the different existing audience-based funding mechanisms determine the level of demand-recognition?
• Do funds have to consider the demand, given that there are a lot of producers and directors who receive support from the funds, make one film and then disappear? (Research from 2008 shows that up to 80% of directors in Scandinavia make a single film and then disappear.)
• Do the funds and producers have to start worrying about the relationship between the films they make in a cultural vein and what people are actually watching, are actually engaging with? Are there any opportunities for funds to find this out through data-collecting?

Data collecting:

Who needs data?

• Producers:
  Possibly, access to data can help them to make the necessary compromises in due time, and to learn from other people’s errors.
• Funds:
  Even if they do not systematically collect details about their failures, data collecting allows them to come up with a success at a later time, and to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Data can also serve to determine where to find audiences for your movies.

Why?

• Various data sources are available to prove whether a film did well in terms of screen averages, box office, and international visibility. Data can show the demand at a particular moment.
• New release windows are appearing ahead of television broadcasts. How does this impact arthouse film revenues for which TV presales or sales represented a massive part of their revenues. What is the value of these new windows? Do funds and producers lose money because of this lack of knowledge? Does television still need to be involved in certain projects?
• Such matters directly influence the mode of financing arthouse films, and they can only be clarified on the basis of data.
• Online marketing has become an essential tool, providing information about what part of the world is watching your products.
• Sharing data with others and looking at each other’s data knowledge are crucial.

Type of data that can be useful to the funds:

• Data that demonstrates the nature of the demand can be collected in collaboration with such academic institutions as are interested in carrying out this sort of research.
• Voluntary and personalized data is already being collected by companies like Amazon, in order investigate client needs. Film funds could do the same.
• Metadata is also important. Metadata is the information that allows the public to find other ways into a supported film. For instance, somebody might make a horrible film in Argentina. But that film might contain footage of Argentina that looks fantastic; as such, it could end up getting lots of money from the tourist board because of its great footage. Thus, funds should collect such data as well.
• Demographic data is important for locating potential audiences. If a fund supports a movie about minorities, it must first identify the demand and desire of the minority audiences entailed. Funds have an obligation to reach the broadest range of people in a community: if there are people who are socially excluded from our cultural dreams, then surely it is in the fund’s best interest to know how to reach them.

However

• The amount of existing data in the matter is enormous, and most of it reveals nothing.
• Becoming obsessed with numbers and/or misreading them remains a constant threat.
• The VoD channels do not disclose much information, and prefer to keep it confidential. Transmedia players are even worse: they have the data but do not want to share it with the industry and the funds. They do not want to make any information available to competing platforms.
• The search for data creates tension among groups within the film value chain. That is to say, if a fund supports a film and puts some money into its screening, it requires the distributor/movie theater to make the film's market reach and commercial success data available for discussion and sales evaluation. The exhibitor can, however, protest that doing so represents an extra effort and heavier workload.
• As cultural institutions, do film funds have any need or obligation at all to collect data? Is it any of theior business?

Outcome of group discussions

1. Political aspect

• From the political perspective, it is clear that film funds usually pursue cultural agendas that, theoretically, are not built on data collection.
• However, how do the funds know that they are fulfilling cultural objectives derived from the Constitution and the political agenda if they do not have data to evidence it?
• There are privacy rules. Data protection and access very often constitute a political issue linked to privacy.
• Data knowledge can decrease the lack of transparency of the funds. Insufficient transparency can always lead to political pressures and conflicts. Both the funds and the industry should have the exchange of data as a mutual responsibility, in order to avoid such tensions.
• For regional funds that act as co-producers data-collecting can have multiple purposes. However, the national cultural funds need data only to prove that supported films actually have audience and that cultural diversity is attained.

2. Economic aspect

• Data collection is expensive. Economic division between production companies that access and use this data and the production companies that cannot afford to buy it is huge. Thus, the funds have responsibility to provide some of this data or share it with independent and young producers.
• How can data collection be extended to other windows and platforms when there is the competition for time with other formats?
• Producers can be asked to make a certain effort to provide some evidence on the target group for his/her film. This can be done through a research project or making a facebook page, for example. Such data can improve economic (and/or cultural) performance.

3. Social (cultural) aspect

• The underlying value of data-collection is that it is not just about economic value but also about social (cultural) value based on understanding the demand.
• We need to know the nature of the demand on all platforms and alternative film-watching places, instead of collecting solely the data on admissions to movie theaters.
• More thorough research about the thinking and behavior of diverse social and age groups should be conducted in order to better the offer to them and engage them more.
• The problem of the disconnection between data-collection and filmmaking process. Say that today you have data on a certain film, and that you set out to support that film on the basis of said data. But it takes two years to make a film, and maybe in the end the data that you started out with will no longer be relevant or useful.
• Data about the audience that does not go to movie theaters is just as relevant as data on the audience that does.
• An important (social) cultural aspect is that the objectives of the funds should not be only about pleasing the audience, with the help of data, but also about understanding what can engage audiences.

4. Technological aspect

• What does technology enable us to do? How much does the audience use it? It is also about us and our skills in moving forward, and not only about the technology itself. Technology is just a trigger factor.
• Thanks to technology, the means for collecting data is much simpler and cheaper now than it was before, and sharing data with others is also easier today. There are a lot of apps, different business services based on technology, the use of dashboards, wave analytics, etc. And this will continue to grow, because the demand for data is on the rise.
• Skills for using the technological devices are also essential. Tons of technological means exist that we do not (yet) know how to use.

Impact of Digital in Film Business and Production

• Introduction — The Perfect Storm/The Workshop Method — PEST analysis
• Module 1 — Should we support less films for an overcrowded market, or focus on ensuring that the films we select find audiences on new platforms?
• Module 2 — How does the dramatic increase in audience data and a demand-driven economy affect our decision-making processes?
• Module 3 — How far do we need to adapt to new business models, and how far can we seek to protect traditional industrial structures?
• Module 4 — Conclusions

Decision Making Processes

• Module 5 — Goals and selection processes/methods
• Module 6 — Selection criteria
• Module 7 — Profiles of experts, consultants, selection committee members
• Module 8 — Relations with higher authorities and producers

• List of Participants (PDF)
• MEDICI Third Workshop Full Report (PDF)

Illustrations by Jean-Philippe Legrand – called "Aster"

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