Entrepreneurial Experience and Internationalization in Creative Industries: The Culture Business Case Study

Fanatic About Films has at the base of its business, the account with international distributors that looks for surrounding marketing campaigns that can reinforce their advertising efforts, intensifying the awareness about a film release. What has been happening since few years, is that distributors are caring more and more on the strategies linked to dvd releases and have developed marketing strategies applied, especially, in the Anglo-Saxon countries. These strategies foresee the combination of a traditional advertising campaign with a significant surrounding of commercial campaigns that could spread the awareness even through different means of communication, especially on products and services provided by traditional companies.
This operations, called co-marketing, combine the traditional advertising campaign promoted by the distributors with the one activated by the joining company that uses it to generate increasing in selling, reward customers and/ or retailers, or to generate stronger affiliation.
FAFI works as a mediator between the distributor and the company needs and goals but receives from the studios, precise lines of behavior; we can define this international dimension as one-sided because FAFI acknowledges the prescriptive from distributors that act on multinational markets.
The majors provide TCB with specific documents that have the aim of addressing the research of joining company and ruling the use of creative contents for commercial promotions. For example, no co-marketings with alcoholic beverages companies or other “immoral” industries, are allowed.
Moreover, must be avoided those multinational firms that have bought licenses of the film contents, even in other countries. Being these documents specifically conceived for the anglo-saxon market, FAFI has the key task of adapting these guidelines to the national context where the consumers behaviors, the market and the culture are quite different. Since 2007, when these kind of promotions have become the core business in FAFI division substituting the screening previews organization, TCB has developed a deep knowledge of the co-marketing applied to cinematographic contents, turning itself into one of the most important specialized agencies in Italy. It gained the exclusive on treating global success like the dvd release of Shrek IV - Forever After and How to Train your Dragon, two Dreamworks® success both distributed in Italy by Paramount Pictures®. This exclusive granting, involves (and it is limited to) the possibility to built promotions that advertise, specifically, the dvd release of the film. That is because a joining company can take advantage of the character without buying a character license, but by showing the creativity of the dvd on the pack, or on other parts of the product packaging, and on its visibility tools, ATL or BTL.
Albeit FAFI uses to treat with international studios, and work on internationally based promotions, it only works on the national territory. Expanding the promotions on foreign countries would mean to work on unknown territories, both in culture and in market systems. For example, Artsana, has joint a comarketing promotion with Shrek IV - Forever After and wanted to spread it in other European countries, FAFi could behave in three ways: accept to manage the promotion in foreign countries (but ignoring how the markets work there); search and outsource the development and the management of the promotion to other specialized agencies and renounce to the task because of the great spending of energies and time for a too high risk seeking operation for its possibilities. FAFI decided not to take charge of this job. According to Monsurrò, it would have been a great investment of time and energies stolen to the development of national projects where the market is growing more and more, rising possibilities for advancement and increment of the volume of business.
FAFI's approach to international market, answers to the need to adapt a particular kind of necessity expressed by cinematographic majors to the Italian local market. Their work of promotion development, has been established step by step with many difficulties, first of all the fact that Italian firms didn't feel comfortable with cinematographic and creative contents whereas actually, customers were ready for it and replied positively. This success is confirmed by the fact that the number companies that decide to join this kind of promotions are increasing and some of them, have become stable clients of FAFI, like Euronics and Mercatone Uno.