Well what’s been happening in and around our various fx offices ?

John’s been installing flames, Mike’s been in New Zealand training and photographing (thanks to PostGrad Brenton Cumberpatch), Jeff’s been at music festivals and doing some VERY cool music videos. While around the rest of fxphd, the Profs have been getting ahead, while Post-grads have been playing catch up. At fxguide we have been working on a range of stories from a variety of post houses and sources.

But in travelling around you get a chance to look at different post communities and you get time to ‘ponder’, especially on a long flight like the one I am on now. Without internet access to interrupt you, one gets a chance to put on some really good blues on your headphones and formulate trends you notice globally. Actually, with the limited access one has to the internet in hotels – you get a lot of time to think on business trips !

I was thinking about content and us making it – as an industry and I started to wonder: how do we fund quality journalism? How do we fund quality drama? Why does this matter? Because a lot of us make TVCs that get played in those shows, and still more of us make work on those big budget episodic shows. As I travel around and talk to post houses it sounds like money continues to move from TV spots to other indirect and online places, making TVC budgets tighter, all while the quality levels get raised and the schedules get shorter. In short it is harder to make a buck in Post.

here are some thoughts on what is contributing and some wild late night speculation as to where it is going:

1. If everything is a rush to the Net, then there just are not enough ad dollars to fund the current levels of production, for a few reasons:

– 99% of all USA ad reveune is going to the top 10 US web sites. But these sites are not program makers and journalism companies. they are not the ‘Net version’ of CBS, NBC, or even the BBC. They are not making programming or reporting the news as a way to attract eye balls that they can sell to advertisers. ie the $$ billions being directed to those companies is not funding serious content to attract those billions of reveune. Why do people go to their sites – well for content or searching of content, but the top 4 companies are not spending money on programming to earn these eye balls – they are doing other things like mapping the internet, providing a place for others to post stuff, or letting you post notes to other people. It is as if the the Ad industry decided to give billions of dollars to the Yellow Pages and the Post Office instead of TV ads. Neither organization is bad – they just dont fund content like ER, West Wing or Wired magazine, they fund directories and deliver things.

The situation isnt even that we just lost a few dollars in the move from old media to new media. Why buy an expensive classified ad when you can do it for free on Craig’s list? And classified advertising in newspapers has funded foreign offices of serious newspapers for decades, amongst many other aspects of a newspapers operations. The cover price rarely covers manufacturing and distribution, yet alone actual reporting. The journalist are paid for by the ads.

– Look at a specialist magazine, like a non tech glossy magazine, the number of ad pages is really high, vastly higher than you could get from putting that magazine online. But you could argue the audience still wants that level of journalism and reporting. They want reporting on overseas events, they want that independence, that on the spot reporting – and not just recycled press releases. But without much money too many web sites are just RSS feed aggregators. Too many podcasts don’t report, they just comment on RSS feeds. I know it is hard to generate but the audience deserves more.

2. For most organizations to survive they need to diversify out of just being a single focused media outlet. At the business journalism level, fxguide is an example of a site that is viable and can devote resources to covering a global specialist industry, but it also diversified to survive. There is a lot of advantages of having a leading media site/company in a particular field, and a lot of those advantages that are non-financial. Just looking at a site as a solely accountable media profit center web destination may not be viable way to do it when you are standing in front of a room of accountants for some public listed company. But a media presence gets you influence, it gives you a voice and provides access. In a diversified media company, it is worth a lot to have a flagship, it is the lighthouse account of your own portfoilo, and it is the spiritual heart often of such a company. The Washington Post now only has the actual Washington Post newspaper as 10 % of earnings, the wider company has a whole range of interests but the Washington Post is still extremely valuable to the group. Oh and do you like how I lumped fxguide in the same paragraph as the Washington Post? But it is true at all levels of media, being seen as an authority and a trusted site for news is a valuable (non-financial) asset. But while this may help the some journalists and blogger – it does not solve our problem with post production projects…

3. The future trends situation is actually much worse for advertisers than anyone else. If you want to run ads today, it is easy to both find inventory and have that message work to a mass audience – but for how much longer and on this current scale? Yes you put funds into those top half a dozen sites, but does that let you tell your message? If the brand exists you can reinforce it but can you change peoples perception of a product via a google adword the way you can a great TVC? The irony is that many TV ads now function as a way of pushing people to a web site. But the only way that people will return to those same web sites is content. One school of thought is that thinking will lead to the return to the “Colgate theatre”, to the “Ivory Soap Hour of Drama”, and “Tide’s all new Tick-A-Box “. But as you would have read here before, I think the net is all about information and not entertainment. You cant just make the internet an online TV Network – no matter what Rev 3 thinks. But still it is a big internet – room for all and I would watch a “NewsWeek Daily Show with John Stewart” (but then again to quote a recent This American Life podcast – “I’d drink John Stewart’s bath water “)

One answer could be making shows which are really ads themselves, entertaining enough shows that are just giant product placements. Of course, the hard reality of that is complex, while you can find a few sensible links , Honda and Top Gear seems like a good fit. Who funds product placement in BattleStar Gallatica or John Adams or the Tutors? The car companies collectively spend an enormous amount on high end TVCs , – they can’t all have their own “Top Gears” if they did we would trust each of their Top Gear shows to review their cars impartially?

Is our industry just in a sunset phase? Are our TVC post departments making the horse shoes of the 21st century ? I find that hard to believe, but there is a huge need to move from just TVC production to other content areas. The film effects companies have noticed the vast funding, profitablity and creative joy Pixar derives from making quality animation it owned vs being a company that could have just been a gun for hire – as most VFX companies current are set up to be. few have broken the mold – Pan’s Labyrinth was partially funded by CafeFX, and by all accounts this was a brilliant move both creatively and financially for them, ending as it did with an Oscar Red Carpet walk.

Could we repeat this relationship at the commercial TVC level? Why do post houses need to wait for scripts to be sent from the Agency? How long until the post houses build pitching creative departments that actively go and pitch to advertisers directly small budget strategic programs and skip the middle men? This would have been impossible ten years ago, as the only outlet for these ‘creative projects’ would have still been as TV ads and that required media buyers and a host of strategic integration. But today distribution is not a problem. Some companies like Radical Media are far advanced in this process.
Someone has to do it, either the ad agencies will wake up and get much more dynamic or a new breed of post houses will no longer be POST but pre-houses ! Companies that get in front of the problem and in front of the client and actually pitches creative concepts and then fully executes them, from script to web site and servers.

Finally there is no new or old media – just programming. The solutons and paths forward are not clear yet, but one thing I do know know for absolute certainty: the trend to the Net can be completely reversed if everyone was forced to pay for the internet at New Zealand hotel room rates – $58 for 120 Megabytes – for 24 hours !!!

Mike