Essay 4 - Extract

“Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences”. To what extent do you agree with this statement?

In general, global institutions do appear to dominate media production. For example, in film, Disney is a major player owning over 4 of their own studios like ‘The Prospect Studios’. However, small national companies are not entirely out of the picture. In 2011, for example, Bedlam Productions and See Saw Films, both small UK companies, achieved massive success with ‘The Kings Speech’, proving that small, national companies can reach global audiences.

Disney is considered a global institution it owns its film companies such as Pixar and Touchstone Picture, it has theme parks, crises, radio stations and TV channels. You could say Disney uses all it ‘arms’ to help sell to its target audiences also with horizontal marketing. Disney’s target audience is aimed at children but also adults because their films have a double meaning and has adult jokes.

For example, there new ‘Alice in Wonderland’ film is a fairy tale aimed at children. However, it sets a dark side to the traditional values aimed at the adults. It’s a British story and they use British actors.


Whereas ‘The Kings speech’ has similar strengths where it is a British traditional story, quite patriotic and uses famous British actors. For example, ‘Helen Bonham Carter’. ‘The Kinds Speech’ reached global audiences with a mere production budget of £15m compared to Disney’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ budget of £200m. Bedlam Productions and See Saw film would have had to use vertical marketing to compete with companies like Disney and the success of films like this show that they can achieve success.    

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