Reel Word

My nephew is a voiceover artist. He does voices for Saturday morning cartoons, anime, commercials, and video games.  Companies whose primary business is creating and selling stories consider the writers, voiceover artists, and related creative talent to be among the highest-value assets of their organization, and the technical people are infrastructure.  Companies whose primary business is creating and selling games consider the programmers and related creative talent behind the gaming engine to be among the highest value assets of their organization, and the performers are just the tools for realizing the programmer’s game-play vision.

Which brings me to the writers strike.  The WGA and the Studios are expressing positions that reflect the view that they exist in a walled garden where the Studios control some marketplaces and the writers are the sole suppliers to those marketplaces.  That used to be true, which is why both groups were able, over many decades, to become strong and prosperous.

But now, while a strike is taking place to define the rules of play within that walled garden, writers are banding together and developing content for broadband and other distribution paths and markets, and Studios are acquiring content from broadband and other repurposable content development markets (including English language foreign markets).   These actions reflect the recognition from individual players on both sides of the strike that their playing field has become a component of a larger business ecosystem that now has emerging populations of players beyond their experience and control. 

Writers Guild members who undertake side projects that don’t violate the restrictions of the strike are competing with professional, prosumer, and amateur writers who have developed their skills writing non-linear books for games, posting blogs, constructing multimedia projects, etc.  The business people who run the operations that employ these non-Hollywood writers have only minimal incentive (ex. marketing hook – “by the writer of the hit show Yada Yada”) to offer the Hollywood writers the compensation and benefits that they are accustomed to.  In an ever-flattening world, visibly successful side projects by striking Hollywood writers will accelerate the readjustment of the compensation that they receive to reflect a new larger open market valuation.

Similarly, Studios that acquire content from outside of their system for repurposing within their system realize that they are in competition with other emerging and converging production/finance and distribution channels.  Establishing a brand that crosses over multiple distribution channels and monetization opportunities is a holy grail for the Studios and Networks.  By repurposing content from other sources, when search engines support tracking content to multiple sources, the Studios are to a certain degree undermining their own value.  They make themselves less important to the audience as ‘the’ place to find reliable quality content.  And they make their distribution infrastructure less valuable to advertisers as ‘the’ way to reach the target audience.

The strike is, among other things, a distraction for both parties; a diversion that is taking resources away from addressing the real challenges facing both parties.  In a world in which intellectual property is valued but not effectively protected, the Hollywood writers should be exploring creative ways to market themselves, increase their value in the emerging ecosystem, and monetize their creative output in competition with non-Hollywood writers.  In an anytime, anywhere, on any device world where anything can be found from multiple sources – including sources that have stripped away the tools that monetize the content and pay for its creation and distribution – the Studios should be exploring even more immediately-available ways than they currently are to create value-add experiences that draw consumers to their networks, sites, and products.