Anita Elberse is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, specializing in the entertainment, media and sports sectors. (wikipedia)
If anything, the impact of digital technology is creating bigger brands and bigger superstars.
Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs.
Most of my colleagues have research awards on the shelf. I have party invites.
For the first case I did with Octone, 360 deals were not at all being talked about. And then for the follow-up case, it was the focus. I wanted to see how things were changing and what the new challenges were.
When a publisher spends an inordinate amount on an acquisition, it will do everything in its power to make that project a market success.
Because making movies is such an expensive endeavor, other media such as books and comics have long been a more feasible way to experiment with truly new ideas.
Think about trailers you see in theaters. If you're seeing a Warner Bros film, the studio might have three of the five trailers. So having a hit helps you create the next hit.
The average movie-goer in this country sees six films in a year. That's one every two months. What the studios are trying to do is make sure it's their movie.
I spend way too much time watching television, going to sports games, going to movies. It struck me that there's an awful lot of data in the public domain for these sectors. The movie industry publishes weekly sales numbers - not many industries do.
As demand shifts from offline retailers with limited shelf space to online channels with much larger assortments, the sales distribution is not getting fatter in the tail.
