Media management is a business administration discipline that identifies and describes strategic and operational phenomena and problems in the leadership of media enterprises. Media management contains the functions strategic management, procurement management, production management, organizational management and marketing of media enterprises.
A uniform definition of the term media management does not yet exist, and "the field of media management in its present form is neither clearly defined nor cohesive." Notwithstanding this fact, among existing definitions there is a shared base concerning the business administrative character of media management and the functional understanding of management. In the following a number of definitions are provided.
"Media Management consists of (1) the ability to supervise and motivate employees and (2) the ability to operate facilities and resources in a cost-effective (profitable) manner."
"The core task of media management is to build a bridge between the general theoretical disciplines of management and the specifities of the media industry."
"Media and internet management covers all the goal-oriented activities of planning, organization and control within the framework of the creation and distribution processes for information or entertainment content in media enterprises."
Media enterprises and media markets
Media enterprises are strategically organized economic entities whose central work is generating and marketing of media. The generation of media is the bundling of internally and externally generated content and its transformation into a medium. The marketing is the direct or indirect distribution of media. The term media in this connection is restricted to one-to-many-communication with one sender and a large number of consumers. More precisely, the focus is on newspapers, magazines, books, music, television, films, internet and games. More details can be drawn from the graphic illustrating the definition of media enterprises.
In order to understand management in media enterprises it is crucial to build a larger picture of the media marketplace. The characteristics of media markets differ from markets of other economic sectors in several ways.
One characteristic of media markets is the multidimensional competition. Media enterprises operate in three different markets. They sell their services in form of content like information and entertainment, as well as in form of advertising space. These services are offered for different business markets. The content is offered to the consumer markets which differ depending on the type of media and the way it is used by consumers. The advertising spaces are traded on advertisement markets.
The third markets are procurement markets. They are needed as media enterprises generally do not produce all their offered content themselves but buy service packages of both, information and entertainment, from procurement markets. For example, authors and artists contracts or license and copyright deals can be acquired. But procurement markets can turn to business markets if, for example, complete rights to an event are purchased and then resold by a media enterprise in the form of secondary utilization rights. The described market structure is shown in the second image.
In fact, the three described media markets each media enterprise can be active in are strongly interdependent. But the intensity of their relationships differs. For example, there is a strong relationship between advertisement and consumer markets as the success among consumers drives advertising revenues. All possible inter-dependencies are pictured in the third graphic.
Furthermore, there are geographic media markets. Media enterprises operate in specific geographic markets. Some firms operate in a national market while other companies, for example, local radio stations operate in a regional area. So the marketplace of a media enterprise consists of the product media markets (consumer market, advertisement market and procurement market) and the geographic media market.
Value chain and core competencies
The value chain analysis by Michael Porter
can be adapted for the analysis of value creation in media enterprises. Although the media sector is very heterogeneous and has different branch-specific features, the presented value chain of the media industry form the basic principles.