Why Content Culturalization Matters During a Recession
The media is currently reporting and hypothesizing how a recession could impact the M&E industry. Will it reduce subscriber numbers, jobs, stock prices, and revenues? Who stands to win or lose? These are essential industry questions, but only one deals with the core product the industry creates: content.
The lack of new content motivates subscribers to drop one service and move to another with better options. Without new content, there is little justification for consumers to subscribe to a service or advertisers to buy time on one. Older content lowers interest and reduces perceived value, which increases churn. In recessionary markets, the challenge our industry faces become where to invest and where to cut costs. One area of production to avoid cost reduction is culturalization and localization.
Why? Because both are crucial to releasing content internationally. Although English is the recognized “language of business” and 1.1B people have some understanding of it, in terms of native speakers, it comes in a distant third behind Mandarin (918M) and Spanish (460M), with 397M speakers. Considering all languages, people who understand or natively speak English are only 16.5% of the world’s population. If you want to reach the other 83.5% of the market, culturalization and localization are essential to your content production strategy, providing a positive return on investment.
Who says? In a recent interview, Disney’s VP of Distribution Operations, Andrew Aherne, discussed how content developed for Latin American countries is playing “extremely well in Europe and other markets.” Netflix’s Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos said of “Squid Game” director Hwang Dong-hyuk and his production team, “They didn’t try to make the show different so that it would travel, but tried to find all the things about Korean cinema and Korean drama and build them up in a way and new levels of production values” that resulted in 1.65 billion hours viewed in the series first 28 days of release. None of these successes would be possible without culturalization and localization.
Economic downturns, whether short- or long-term, pressure studio and postproduction companies to look for areas where they can save money. Spherex is the only company that provides services and technologies that provide the market and cultural intelligence necessary to make more informed and targeted localization decisions, minimize production times and reduce costs. The combination of SpherexRatings and SpherexGreenlight ensures your titles are linguistically and culturally appropriate for every country and territory on Earth. Contact us today to see how we can help prepare your content for a successful global release.
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