Consuming Marketing

I intend to use this paper to discuss how marketing has changed in the media platform and what makes them successful in the past decades. Is there any implicit message or a secret formula hidden in all of these marketing efforts? I am particularly interested in how product placement has affected the way we consume media in recent years, how the role of product placement has changed in the past few decades and how, as young audience, we have learnt to read product placement in a different way (in other words, how young people have been affected by these seamless marketing efforts) I am also interested in how marketing efforts are used differently in different countries, specifically comparing US to Asian countries. Seeing that Asian countries like China (which traditionally almost never spent money on marketing) are beginning to follow the Western model of promotion and advertising, I would like to see how marketing has also influenced Chinese movie industry, possibly in a different way. Knowing that so much money has been spent on marketing in recent years, I also intend to look at the box office statistics, and determine whether or not these marketing moves were indeed successful. My main argument would be that product placement and some traditional marketing efforts are getting saturated, and at the end of my paper, I would like to make suggestion, or even predict where movie marketing is going to go in the future.

In terms of structure, I think I am going to first talk about the history of marketing in media by introducing some important marketing campaigns. Then I would talk about how this has evolved into a seamless integration such as product placement, how product placement is effectively used in many media, how it has influenced the way we read media and how our tastes have changed because of them. Next, I am going to compare the marketing in US media to media in Asia, and see how they have possibly influenced one another. And lastly my argument would proceed to see if these new marketing efforts have been effective lately and if the market has actually responded to them.

I am mostly going to rely on Internet sources such as moviemarketingmadness.com, movieindustrymarketing.com and some other individual blogs such as vgbm.blogspot.com (Video Games Business and Marketing). Movie Marketing Asia (by Kinema Junpōsha) and A Proposal for the production, marketing and distribution of a theatrical motion picture “Pop Movie” (by Aaron Spiegeland) would be a great resource to me too.

I hope to find statistics that would support my idea that marketing in media has almost reached a dead end and a new way of advertising and promotion has to be found. Although I hope to conclude that marketing has severely affected the way we consume media, I do not want to give a stand on whether it is beneficial to the society or not. I wish to use my paper to discuss the future possibilities of marketing in media, especially seeing the saturated markets, what would future marketing lead to.