Connections

The powerful macro environment that includes the audience and income should inform all commercial creative undertakings, whether in film, TV, gaming or other types of content, according to John Penney, co-founder of Elemental Content, a data-centric content and technology startup focused on digital innovation to deliver engaging content to mobile and connected devices.

“We all talk about having lots of different opportunities to basically engage wherever we are in the media value chain with an audience, he said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).

Whether we’re creators or business/salespeople or a little of both, “we’re all trying to sell a lot of products and services to American consumers,” he told attendees during the session “Balancing Business & Creativity Through Data: Who Exactly Is The Audience?”

During the fireside chat, he looked at some of the high-level drivers behind and the real size of the U.S. market for premium creative products.

“We use a U.S.-centric viewpoint” and, including streaming, gaming devices and “everything that allows you to access media and entertainment, [we’re going to] start with this notion of there” being 332 million people in the U.S., he noted. “That’s a pretty big number [but] there’s 7.8 billion in the world,” he added.

Overall the target market is a relatively “wealthy on average group of people,” he said, adding that, at the very least, people who “have some levels of income that can afford the types of things that media wants to sell them, that technology companies want to sell, that everybody wants to sell, depending on your particular, you know, status as an income earner” in the U.S., he said.

“In order to break the 332 million number up … if you’re going to build a new business” you have to consider the fact that there are 69 million Generation Z Americans in the U.S,, 72 million millennials, 66 million Gen X and 70 million baby boomers, he said.

“And now I’m going to take a left turn [at] Albuquerque as Bugs Bunny used to say,” he told attendees, pointing to the need to reach Americans via the internet. After all, he noted, “you can’t participate in media or in democracy without that.”

Also important to factor in is class, he said, noting there are 121 million people in the U.S. middle class and “then there’s 51 million people above the middle class,” with the low end of that range those earning $40,000 a month in gross income.

Not everybody can afford all those “really fancy things like subscription services” that are typically about $16 a month and $1,200 iPhones, expensive cars, “expensive gas, expensive education [and] a healthcare non-system system that doesn’t provide value to people.”

A whopping 60% of “personal bankruptcies are related to healthcare issues,” he added.

And now along comes the “metaverse and all of this exciting stuff” that not every consumer will be able to afford, he went on to say

The moderator asked if business people should be thinking about what can creativity offer that differentiates and rises to that level of something that people want and will spend in order to have.

“That is a fantastic question,” Penney responded. On the path that we’re on now “wealthy households get streaming services, [getting] an average of three of them or two and a half of them,” he said. The inflation and rising interest rates that we’re seeing in the U.S., meanwhile, are making things even harder for many Americans, especially those “at the lower income spectrum, the 70 million below $40,000” a year in income.

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.