Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age

该项目对当代电影行业中品牌的影响进行了持续的考察。作为一种实践，品牌已经成为好莱坞电影娱乐制作的工具。它是依赖商品销售、特许经营和产品植入收入的重磅经济的核心。在此背景下，先前的重要著作已经研究了好莱坞的营销策略，并分析了品牌媒体内容的具体形式和迪士尼等关键公司，而本研究则探讨了“品牌”如何在电影行业的所有活动中——在行业谈话、企业战略、标志设计、商标许可和电影图书馆、大片物业和多厅放映的管理中——影响着电影行业。整个项目传达的是关于在全球媒体时刻“销售娱乐”过程的争论，这一争论的特定目的是强调品牌对主流商业电影及其生产的工业文化的重要性。关键的是，该项目有两个主要目标。从广义上讲，它旨在扩大和深化对当代电影行业品牌的分析，超越关于商业化的一般理论，更精确地研究品牌关系，以适应当前媒体和营销环境的变化。更具体地说，它考察了“全面娱乐”的原则，这种原则在电影文化中产生了壮观的品牌相遇形式。从批判性的角度来看，该项目提出了关于工业和情感经济以及当代电影的一系列问题。在哪些方面，品牌对文化和消费行业的从业者来说变得“有意义”？品牌在多大程度上塑造了电影作为一种视听形式的遭遇？品牌在哪些方面构成了电影市场和商品流通？从工业和美学的角度来看，品牌在历史上是新的或特殊的，这种意愿在多大程度上是这样的？这个项目的好处是双重的。首先，它有助于丰富对品牌的特殊性和关键意义的理解，在一个被广泛认为预示着媒体行业组织的关键变革的时期。与对迪士尼的研究不同，该项目对华纳兄弟（warner Bros）和时代华纳（Time warner）（上世纪90年代最大、也可以说是最麻烦的媒体巨头）的延伸关注，提供了一个有利的视角，能够揭示当代品牌意志的不确定性和矛盾；它提供了一幅电影行业的图景，它在意识形态（或产业）上不像人们通常认为的那样连贯。其次，该项目将电影的本质视为一种体验形式，通过集中的案例和品牌在电影持久尝试中出售感官和壮观吸引力的功能进行分析。将主题、文本和背景结合在一起，采用从电影研究、文化研究和广告媒体研究中提取的跨学科方法，该项目准确地说明了为什么任何对塑造当代电影行业的潮流的评估都必须考虑到其标志的光泽。

The project provides a sustained examination of the impact of branding within the contemporary motion picture business. As a practice, branding has become instrumental to Hollywood's production of filmed entertainment. It is central to a blockbuster economy reliant upon revenues drawn from merchandising, franchising and product placement. While previous critical works has examined Hollywood's marketing strategies within this context, and has analysed specific forms of branded media content and key companies such as Disney, this study examines how 'branding' has come to inflect the motion picture industry across the full range of its activities - within industrial talk, corporate strategy, logo design, trademark licencing and the management of film libraries, blockbuster properties and multiplex exhibition. Conveyed throughout the project is an argument about the processes of 'selling entertainment' in the global media moment, an argument with the particular aim of underlining branding's significance for mainstream commercial film and the industrial culture from which it is produced.Critically, the project has two main objectives. In broad terms, it seeks to widen and deepen the analysis of branding in the contemporary film business, moving beyond generalised theories about commercialisation to a more precise examination of brandings relationship to change in the current media and marketing environment. More specifically, it examines the principle of 'total entertainment' that has given the rise to spectacular forms of brand encounter within cinematic culture. In critical terms, the project asked nested questions about the industrial and affective economy and contemporary cinema. In what respect has branding become to 'make sense' to practitioners within cultural and consumer industries? To what degree does branding pattern the encounter with film as an audio-visual form? In what respect does branding structure the cinematic market place and the circulation of commodities? To what extent is the will to brand historically new or particular in industrial and aesthetic terms?The benefits of this project are twofold. Firstly, it helps to enrich the understanding of the specificity and critical significance of branding in a period widely regarded as heralding key transformations in the organisation of media industries. Unlike studies of Disney, the project's extended focus on warner Bros and Time Warner (the largest and arguably most troubled media giant of the 1990s) provides a vantage point able to draw out the uncertainties and contradictions on the contemporary will to brand; it offers a picture of the film business that is less ideologically (or industrially) coherent then is often supposed. Secondly, the project considers the nature of film as a form of experience, analysing through focussed case examples and function of branding within cinema's enduring attempt to sell sensory and spectacular attraction. Combining themes, text and context never previously brought together, and employing an interdisciplinary approach drawn from film studies, cultural studies and advertising the media studies, this project demonstrates precisely why any assessment of the currents shaping the contemporary motion business must account for the lustre of its logos.