Page 60 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014The initiative taken by the administrators of these spaces on behalf of brands, publishers and institutions is the key to giving an enriching service to these communities. When a user converses or publishes news about the economic crisis a publisher should participate and add a reference to one of its new titles on the economy; when someone comments about the light at dusk in a published photograph the organisers of an exhibition can recommend one of the works on display. An opportunity can always be found for communication that promotes and boosts a cultural content.It is a question of social participation, but by adding value, having knowledge about who this user is (CRM), their activities and behaviour, how influential they are within their community and how relevant they are within it. Having identified this group of relevant users, many brands offer them the possibility of becoming a kind of ambassador for this activity or cultural content.ON AND OFF. UNITED FOR EVERIf we have to define the great challenge, and of course it is also a great opportunity, facing cultural activities and content, it is the integration of their traditional activities, let us call them offline activities, with the new opportunities that exist in the digital sphere.Events, launches, marketing actions and mise‐en‐ scène, need to be reinvented and those behind all these processes need to exercise themselves about how to make their tasks meld with the new setting. The protagonists of the acts of creation, production and marketing must bear a new factor in mind, a new element which is of extreme importance since it defines everything: the digital is becoming the “glue” that is binding everything together.Although it might be thought that all these changes appeared from one day to the next, if we pause to look to the past we can see that in the 1950s the cultural sector also had to evolve.AC/EAfter the end of the Second World War the market for paperback books began to expand noticeably. During the war the historian and scholar Philip Van Doren Stern carried out a project for the US Army with the aim of making cheap paperback books available to soldiers. The important thing was not elegant binding or typesetting, but that the book should weigh as little as possible and be manageable enough to go in a soldier’s backpack.After the war mass publishing expanded greatly. The large publishers of the day (Ballantine, Bantam, Signet and so on) started their activities during these years. The key to the mass market was distribution through the network of wholesalers that placed magazines in newspaper stands and small shops, often chemists, throughout the entire US.In contrast withtraditionalbooksdistributed tobookshopswhich requireda specialagreementbetween thepublisher and the bookshop before a book could be displayed on the shelves, the “mass markets” were allocated by the publishers to the wholesaler who, in turn, distributed books to the points of sale controlled by them.This method had obvious advantages. It enabled thousands of copies to be distributed to a host of places with much lower distribution costs and this system meant that tens of thousands of points of sale were available throughout the country while there were bookshops in only a couple of thousand locations.The result was revolutionary. The greater availability of these titles, in combination with their much lower prices, created legions of new readers, and therefore consumers, who were completely enthused with these products.In this case the publishers’ association had to adaptThe great challenge is the integration of traditional activities with new opportunities provided by the digital worldWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 5: CULTURAL SECTOR MARKETING AND CONSUMPTION THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY CURRENT PAGE...60