Media Ownership

• The Media controls the world, but who controls the media ?

What is Media Ownership?

• It is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media.

• Contemporary research demonstrates increasing levels of consolidation, with many media industries already highly concentrated and dominated by a very small number of firms.

Conglomerates that run the world

Synergy in the Media

• In media economics, synergy is the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate.

Types of Synergy

• Cross-promotion

• Cross-production

• Cross-advertising

Cross-Promotion

• Promotes own stations through media outlets.

• Example:

• Time Warner owns HBO & CNN

• CNN airs commercials of films shown on HBO or vice versa.

• It saves money and provides wider promotion.

Cross-Production

• Taking one original product and producing it in different forms.

• Batman which started as a comic book character has movies, TV Shows and soundtracks in its name.

• Warner Brothers produced the Batman series.

Cross-Advertising

• When an outside company wants to advertise using the conglomerate, they will use all the media outlets of the conglomerate.

• IIFA awards ceremony was aired on ‘Star Plus’, but the advertisements were shown across all Star Network channels.

Advantages

• The biggest beneficiaries of media conglomerates goes to the performers or actors.

• They are a part of one aspect of media conglomerate but also have access to all the media outlets of a conglomerate.

• Another big advantage of conglomerates is the quality. As the conglomerate earns profit it gets distributed to all its outlets even if one of them is not performing well.

Disadvantages

• The parent company might omit some information from all its outlets that could be against its policy.

• News coverage usually is in favour of the parent company.