Understanding Randomness and Creativity - Creative Efficiencies
For example, on the service end:
"Decades of experience, creativity, and growth have made film production and distribution one of the most economically important industries in the United States," notes the 2001 U.S. Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "[u]nfortunately, our official statistics are woefully deficient." Current available data does not offer a precise picture of employment numbers for the full rage of professions involved in motion picture production or, for that matter, consistent measures of the industry's economic impact both regionally and nationally. Data available for production days and budgets is primarily collected by local film commissions and prone to irregularities and inaccuracies by default of naturally occurring idiosyncrasies in the measures and classifications used by those organizations.
In the absence of incentives or common effective measures, figures used are often volunteered by production companies and, therefore, in-auditable or even suspect. According to one film commissioner I spoke with, volunteered figures do not necessarily reflect actual monies spent in one's own region, especially when a production crosses state lines. In those cases, revenues accounted for in one state may be simultaneously accounted for in another state's revenue totals. Obtaining aggregate data at the national level is even more difficult.
In terms of overall economic model:
Outside the specificity of film production, we may have begun to
rectify our overall fiscal vagueness about the creative industries with
the recent adoption of the North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS) that replaces the U.S. Standard Industrial
Classification (SIC) system originally devised in the 1930s. The SIC
system, although periodically updated throughout the last century,
structured our economy on an obsolete industrially driven model. The
NAICS identifies hundreds of new, emerging, and advanced technology
industries, while reorganizing industry into more meaningful
sectors--especially in the service-producing segments of the economy.
Then in terms of advertising:
The growing price and waning influence of advertising expenditure
on mainstream television channels is a serious issue for many
advertisers today. Intolerance about wasted ad spending is mounting.
ROI is the today's advertising catch phrase. The linkage gap
between producers and consumers of non-subscription broadcast content
amounts to failure of means for assessing consumer preference with
suppliers and network television was chosen by thirty-two percent of
respondents as the worst medium for proving ROI, according to a study
by Advertising Age.
Advertising, long the main revenue source for much
of the media industry, is rapidly moving to the Internet, and shown by
the financial success of sites like Yahoo! and Google. This is part of
the trend in advertising from "mass" marketing to "measurable"
marketing. The interactivity of the Internet is driving the process of
fragmentation for broadcasters, but has the potential to provide
advertisers with information about the taste, preferences, and habits
of consuming audiences. So the Internet offers advertisers a valuable
advantage that mass media cannot provide.
Entertainment financials:
Many commentators have noted how inefficiently Hollywood does business. A studio will spend millions of dollars marketing a particular star in lieu of having its own brand only to toss that brand away at conclusion of a project. There is no question that media and entertainment are by nature risky. What I am suggesting is that there is a slow evolution towards efficiency measures in the media firm and entertainment firm business models. So for example, gaming firms reuse code from failed titles instead of starting from scratch with every title. Digital technology allows for greater fluidity and quantification in distribution, for example: In d-cinema the ticketing systems are integrated into the pre-show systems and concession stands, so business can see clearly what is working and what does not.
In the social consciousness:
Americans are generally oblivious to the economic benefit of media and entertainment. The industry is often viewed as glamorous when in fact it is also anything but that. So much of the discussion, in my view, is overly politicized by both the left and right: "Hollywood is destroying America!" or "Advertising is destroying art by commodifying it." What I aim to do is open up a space for discussion that looks at these matters in context.
As media and entertainment follow an R&D model, like oil exploration and pharmaceuticals; I thought the article below was interesting in light of my thoughts above about the increasing trend towards efficiencies in the creative industries.Fundamental to solving creative inefficiencies is understanding the nature of the creative process, in as much as it is developing models or solutions that make those processes profitable and capable of sustained duplication.
So the solution lies as much in developing models, as it does in understanding the limitations of those models...
FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“There is a lot more randomness in biotechnology and any form of medical discovery. The role of design is overestimated. Every time we plan on trying to find a drug we don’t because it closes our mind. How are we discovering drugs? From the side-effects of other drugs.” Researchers very often “change their story” when they discover something by accident to give the impression it was by design.
