Spring 2025

Perspectives

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The Currency of Audience: How the Connection Between IP and Audiences Leads to a Stronger Media Industry

Earlier issues of Perspectives examined the seismic shifts in the audiovisual (AV) and the interactive digital media (IDM) industries. New technologies, algorithms, and digital platforms mean that the industry is evolving faster than ever before, leaving creators with a seemingly endless task of staying up to date.

However, this third issue of Perspectives, The Currency of Audience, brings us back to basics. How might intellectual property (IP) – or rather, an industry centered around harnessing its real value – answer these foundational shifts?

IP is undoubtedly a broad topic within our industry. It’s used to describe copyright, underlying rights, intangible assets, and all other legal elements related to a creative project. The Currency of Audience, on the other hand, investigates IP in terms of the story that it tells. It explores the underlying creation and ideation that is developed and then turned into individual content.

The maxim “content is king” has long defined the sector, but our industry is built on IP. It’s what’s behind every film set, gaming engine, and social media channel. As digital platforms themselves are being viewed as audience sources, IP is the real reason why we flock to certain creators and their points of view. In a moment where policymakers and industry alike are redefining Canadian stories and seeking to understand what sets them apart in a highly competitive global media market, this issue revisits the ways in which we mobilize and support IP to offer strategies for unlocking success.

Richard Koo
Vice President, Analytics and Strategic Insights

Sections

Intro: The Critical Relationship between IP and Audience

What do we really mean when we talk about IP? The film? The videogame? Or the underlying concept, world, or core story? How does thinking differently about IP reshape our understanding of development, audience engagement, and authentic storytelling, in addition to positioning Canadian content creators for success?

Section 1: IP, Content, and Finding Audiences in the Global Ecosystem

We live in an age of abundance—multiple screens provide seemingly infinite hours of screen-based content. Discoverability is a challenge. The visibility and accessibility or “prominence” of content is one part of the equation. Understanding IP as an audience strategy, not just a content one, gives creators a greater role in the discoverability of their content.

Section 2: IP, Audience, and Authenticity: Strategies for Sector Strength

Early audience engagement and authentic storytelling are the cornerstones of recent national and international Canadian successes. Rights ownership, and the opportunity to exploit content in the marketplace, leads to stronger companies and contributes to overall sector resilience. How can IP development be refocused to strengthen companies, promote diverse voices and storytelling, and contribute to overall sector resilience?

Section 3: Back to the Future: Transmedia Strategies for Young Audiences

“Back to the Future” revisits transmedia, a subject covered previously in the CMF’s Key Trends Report. The buzzword once referred to incorporating digital media components into traditional broadcast storytelling. Since then, the term has fallen out of fashion, and the emerging digital media platforms of the 2010s are solidly established, especially in children and youth media. But is the concept truly gone, or has it been incorporated into the larger industry?

Credits

The Canada Media Fund (CMF) fosters, develops, finances and promotes the production of Canadian content and applications for all audiovisual media platforms. The CMF guides Canadian content towards a competitive global environment by fostering industry innovation, rewarding success, enabling a diversity of voice, and promoting access to content through public and private sector partnerships. The CMF receives financial contributions from the Government of Canada and Canada’s cable, satellite and IPTV distributors.

CMF Foresight and Innovation

Vice President, Analytics and Strategic Insights
Richard Koo

Research Lead, Foresight and Innovation
Jon Montes

Analyst, Foresight and Innovation
Corinne Darche

Nordicity

CEO & Managing Partner
Kristian Roberts

AV Sector Lead
Nicole Matiation

Senior Consultant
Christiana Puntillo

Senior Analyst
Charlotte Panneton

Content

Writing
Corinne Darche
Nicole Matiation
Charlotte Panneton
Christiana Puntillo
Kristian Roberts

Translation
Rime El Jadidi

Perspectives: Embracing Change (Spring 2024)

The second issue of Perspectives explores change. We’ve all heard the expression “embracing change” but what kind of change matters most for the screen industry? What dynamics should we be paying attention to?

Our industry is built upon a diversified ecosystem with multiple creative realms—audiovisual productions, digital creation on social media platforms, and video games, not to mention extended reality—and they are all intertwined and impacted to varying degrees by current economic, societal, behavioural, and technological dynamics.

These dynamics are tied together by a structural transformation of the industry that is driving us not only to adapt, but also to collectively reinvent ourselves. Today, artificial intelligence, environmental sustainability, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility are reshuffling the deck. Is the screen industry aligned with the times and the world? Do we have what it takes to meet today’s societal, ecological, and technological challenges head-on? Can we look at the data and trends to move forward in integrating these important societal changes now? The answer is certainly yes. Our creativity is what powers our industry, especially when it comes to meeting such challenges.

Perspectives: Flipping The Screen (Fall 2023)

The creator economy is producing staggering figures: from the number of digital creators, to the economic forecasts for this flourishing market (expected to reach US$480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs), to the steady shift of audiences towards user-generated content platforms.

A breeding ground for talent, creativity, and diversity, the digital creator ecosystem is shaking up the established order as younger (and older) generations embrace this content. Traditional media is paying close attention, and we are seeing the line between traditional and digital starting to blur.

Backed by the latest data and analysis, this first issue of Perspectives provides an overview of the forces at play and helps us better understand the dynamics at work in this race for audiences and attention that is rapidly reshaping our industry. While creativity and talent are central to both ecosystems—traditional media and digital creators—the modus operandi differs. Two distinct universes, different rules of the game, but collaborations are happening as we speak — as you’ll see in this issue.