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Fourth Workshop Report — 16 – 18 September 2014 — Štiřín (Czech Republic)
Module 1 – The Role of Public Funds in Promotion
Introduction
Public funds have adopted a variety of positions and tactics to promote the films they support. Some funds avail themselves of their website, newsletter and/or other means to promote and inform politicians, professionals and other parties. Others have created a specific entity to actively promote their industry and projects at festivals, on the market and/or for special events.
Or, in other words:
- Is it the role of public funds to be pro-active as “promoters” of the projects they support, and/or of the professionals active in their country?
- To what extent can they become involved? Who are the persons concerned?
- Do their actions bring concrete results (political level, sales, selection for festivals, etc.)?
- What are their relations with sales agents and distributors?
1. Overview and challenges of the market
- A very tiny market share for domestic films in most of the EU countries
- Competent law(s) determining how and where the films supported by the funds must be released
- Audiences moving towards a demand-driven market. How should public funds position themselves: by following audience demand? by confronting that market trend?
- The impacts of the economic crisis i.e. less financing support from broadcasters (public and private), distributors, but also from public film funds, rendering the decision-making process more difficult (support to fewer projects?)
- No more physical boundaries.
- A fragmented market competing for audience, which makes the idea of a single European film market almost impossible, due to:
- tiny national markets with 28 different languages, mentalities and laws across 47 Council of Europe member countries;
- the increased number of TV channels;
- the power of the US industry, which represents 60% of the market share in Europe, even though the number of the US releases is five times less.
- The balance within the value chain is changing (production-distribution-audience cycle) due to the arrival of new players like telecom companies and Netflix. Consequences are:
- packaging or communication with consumers is starting to take priority over content;
- an audience design strategy during the production and financing phase has become unavoidable.
- Content's decreasing commercial value could impact its quality and give rise to cultural issues.
- The difficulty of finding space on screens for national and European productions, inciting distributors to financially favor corporate over cultural support.
- The “brand” issue, which makes Netflix and HBO very successful thanks to TV series with numerous episodes and seasons. Arthouse films are one-time formats and, as such, they have more difficulties on the market. If the distribution business moves from buying the title in the shop to buying a brand, that becomes a problem for the film funds and their cultural mission.
Outcome of group discussions
- Re-think the notion of the evaluation criteria in the context of the new media by incorporating three types of criteria – economic, industry and cultural (see Module 3).
- Have producers and directors team up with distributors and sales agents to provide upfront an adequate marketing plan for reaching audiences. Niche films require more effort and planning.
- Investing more adequately in the distribution of supported films may increase EU films' market share. In fact, the majority of public fund money goes to the production stage.
- Funds need to be more selective and open for releases on VOD platforms when seeking to support distributors.
- Find a way to develop the taste for platforms devoted to national and European content and to have them – like Netflix – invest in production. They represent a future for European films.
- Both brand and content are important. It is crucial to create hype around a project, so that everybody wants to take part in it through word of mouth and social networks. That creates a distributable product lending itself to distribution.
2. What about the challenges of piracy?
- Piracy and illegal platforms offer much more than legal offers.
- Education and free Internet access facilities influence piracy habits.
Outcome of group discussions
- To use the music experience and success like Spotify, etc. by:
- Lowering the price of products. The problem is that doing so will even more greatly decrease the market income for all the film industry players.
- Providing people with a legal offer that matches the piracy offer. With Spotify, there is no longer any need to download music illegally. It provides a better legal offer than private/pirate offers because you can connect to it everywhere for US$10 a month. The value added services topping the content can expand the business models.
- To add editorial content for free (like Universciné) (see Module 3) to every film. Editorializing makes a big difference between piracy and legal offers. Piracy provides only the movie and nothing more, and this very often in a poor quality. Legal offers should be based on creating the content around a film – talking about directors, actors, the way a film has been done, what it reflects, reviews, previous shorts of the director, etc.
- To try to benefit from something that is made available for free. Piracy can help incite popularity.
- Obtaining data on illegal downloading. It can speak volumes about people’s habits, general taste and demand.
- To put into place specific organizations to fight piracy, like:
- In Norway, the levies from the cinema and media distribution are partly used as financing sources to fight piracy. The money is spent on financing anti-piracy campaigns and lawyers. It is administered by the association of cinemas.
- In Germany, a special institution developed by the film industry and the FFA fights piracy with a budget of 500’000 € to 1M € a year. FFA also invests in anti-piracy education and has developed a system for tracking downloads. The latter enables research on when a film is released on the piracy scene, so that we can evaluate the damage. This is done in collaboration with distributors of the same films.
- In Sweden, film agreements stipulate that some of the financing must be spent on fighting piracy: the amount comes to about 1 million €.
Challenges
- If content is free access, how to finance it?
- Who checks if the money allocated to specific programmes is being used actively?
3. Further questions
- How to find and know the audiences in order to influence them through promotional activities? How do funds do this in other countries?
- What happens with the ways things are consumed? How does that affect the distribution of films, job positions and the organizational structure within the public film funds?
- How to predict what will happen if the market develops on its own, without any interventions? How will the public film funds protect and support films with niche markets if they rely primarily on content with wide appeal?
- We are on the cusp of a major change. The path that public funds are pursuing is not going the way they expected. However, every time of big changes leaves room for new opportunities. How could the funds take advantage of such opportunities? How could they carry out or try out something different and integrate it into the system?
Promotion, Distribution and Success Evaluation
- Module 1 – The Role of Public Funds in Promotion
- Module 2 – Distribution – Who and What to Support
- Module 3 – Vod Platforms as Potential Friends of the EU Cinema
- Module 4 – Release Windows
- Module 5 – Finding and Addressing Audiences
- Module 6 – How to Evaluate Success
Illustrations by Mišo Duha
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