Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age

该项目对品牌在当代电影行业中的影响进行了持续的检验。作为一种实践，品牌化已经成为好莱坞电影娱乐制作的重要工具。它是依赖于商品销售、特许经营和植入式广告收入的轰动一时的经济的核心。虽然之前的评论作品研究了好莱坞在这一背景下的营销策略，并分析了品牌媒体内容的具体形式和关键公司，如迪士尼，但这项研究考察了品牌如何在电影行业的所有活动--工业谈话、企业战略、标志设计、商标许可和电影资料库的管理、大片物业和多厅放映--中产生影响。整个项目传达了一种关于在全球媒体时刻出售娱乐的过程的争论，这种争论的特别目的是强调品牌对主流商业电影的重要性，以及它所基于的工业文化。关键是，该项目有两个主要目标。总而言之，它试图拓宽和深化对当代电影业品牌的分析，超越关于商业化的泛化理论，更精确地审视品牌关系，以应对当前媒体和营销环境的变化。更具体地说，它考察了“完全娱乐”的原则，这一原则导致了电影文化中品牌接触的壮观形式的兴起。在批评方面，该项目提出了关于工业和情感经济以及当代电影的嵌套问题。对于文化和消费行业的从业者来说，品牌在哪些方面变得“有意义”？品牌在多大程度上塑造了电影作为视听形式的遭遇？品牌在哪些方面构建了电影市场和商品流通？在工业和美学方面，品牌的意愿在多大程度上是历史上的新的或独特的？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，在这个被广泛认为预示着媒体行业组织结构关键变革的时期。与对迪士尼的研究不同，该项目对华纳兄弟和时代华纳(20世纪90年代规模最大、也是可以说是最麻烦的媒体巨头)的广泛关注提供了一个有利的视角，能够揭示当代品牌意愿的不确定性和矛盾；它提供了一幅电影行业的图景，但在意识形态(或行业)上并不像人们通常认为的那样连贯。其次，该项目将电影的性质视为一种体验形式，通过有重点的案例分析品牌在电影经久不衰的尝试中的作用，以销售感官和壮观的吸引力。这个项目结合了以前从未结合在一起的主题、文本和背景，并采用了从电影研究、文化研究和广告媒体研究中提取的跨学科方法，准确地展示了为什么对塑造当代动画业的潮流的任何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.