Cultural industry embraces digital transformation (decoding new trends online)

The outbreak of the new crown pneumonia has brought a lot of impact to the cultural field, but also brought new opportunities for transformation and upgrading. Many new formats have emerged in the field of online culture. Online cultural industries, online public cultural services, etc. have opened up new spaces, ushering in new opportunities, and entering new levels. Since this issue, the newspaper has launched a column entitled "Decoding New Trends in the Online Market" to interpret new developments in online culture and help practitioners grasp new opportunities in the cultural field.

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Eye-catching online cultural activities

During the new crown pneumonia epidemic, residents across the country have become "otakus / dot girls", and various online consumption behaviors with the attributes of "home economy" have experienced explosive growth, becoming the most significant change in the consumption field during the outbreak. The data that best reflects this trend is that from January to February, the cumulative traffic of the mobile Internet reached 23.5 billion GB, a year-on-year increase of 44.2%. Emerging online consumer fever has soared. Although it is a special phenomenon in a special period, all sectors of society are aware of the problem that the potential of digital transformation and digital consumption is far from being fully tapped, and there is still plenty of room for consumption upgrade.

In terms of cultural activities, many agglomerated cultural activities that originally took place offline were moved online. "Cloud Museum", "Cloud Tourism" and "Cloud Concert" continued to emerge during the epidemic. People's Daily, ByteDance, Tencent, and local governments conducted large-scale experiments on the "Cloud Exhibition" and "Cloud Forum" for the first time. VR and panoramic vision technology develop online tour platforms and put them on the society, and the cultural needs of consumers during their homes are filled to some extent in the Internet space. For example, the National Palace Museum has launched a series of online products such as “VR Forbidden City”, “Panoramic Palace” and “Cloud” tour of the Forbidden City. . In addition, mobile games, short video platforms, social networks and other media broke out across the entire home period, making the development of online cultural industries eye-catching.

In terms of cultural production, new forms of online office are rapidly gaining popularity. The use of digital technology has brought new social awareness, cultivated new consumption habits, and created new spaces for efficiency growth. This means that online teaching, office, education, training, consulting services, and even industrial production will usher in deeper development opportunities, which will further affect the production and office methods of cultural enterprises. During the epidemic, many service providers opened remote office products to the society for free, thereby helping to reduce staff turnover, including Alibaba's Nail, Huawei Cloud's WeLink, Tencent's Tencent Conference, Byte Beat Fei Shu, foreign remote office and Conference software zoom, etc. This opens up possibilities for telecommuting and cloud collaboration in the cultural industry. Many industries, such as art design, online literature, and game design, which rely heavily on computer technology, have resumed work through cloud office.

Consumption habits are important considerations

As the epidemic prevention and control has achieved important results in stages, the economic and social order has been accelerated to recover, and some of the emerging industries generated during the high tide will ebb and some will be further upgraded and integrated into the future social production system.

Because the current technology can't fully restore the "liveness" in the agglomeration cultural experience activities, online viewing exhibitions, online concerts, and online travel cannot temporarily replace similar activities offline. Most of them are Transition "solutions" in the epidemic. Take Modern Sky's "Cloud Music Festival" as an example. Although the live broadcast on the first day has achieved 1.31 million viewers, and the audience has given high praise to online performances, just like some musicians have tried to live broadcast, In the end, it did not achieve the desired effect. Online concerts cannot provide the ritual sense of watching and paying tribute to musicians in online venues; online concerts cannot provide the satisfaction of singing with people around them in performance venues such as stadiums. By the same token, online travel cannot provide the sense of harvest brought by the local elements such as sunlight, humidity, wind, and sound at the destination. These "field feelings" are difficult to replace in emerging industries. People's cultural consumption habits have not yet been subverted, and they will gradually return to their original state after the epidemic.

For the film and television industry, some of the original operating models have been rewritten and surpassed in the digital space. The most typical case is that on the eve of the Spring Festival, Xu Xun's new work "Aunt" gave up plans for a theater release and switched to today's headline for a free online premiere (play). Since then, films such as "Fat Dragon Crossing the River" and "Big Winner" have also been selected for screening on online video platforms, and theater lines are no longer the premiere choice. This model has been practiced in the field of music. Ten years ago, China's music industry has undergone a transformation from traditional records to digital distribution, and this process will now happen again in the film industry. Although the cinema screening (including the art cinema theater) has a strong sense of ceremonies, high comfort, and sufficient consumer stickiness, online distribution has a strong appeal from a commercial perspective. Therefore, it is estimated that the distribution method of the film industry will further change after the epidemic. How to distribute the game is one of the problems left to the industry by this epidemic.

After the epidemic, the cultural industry will resume as usual. Although the economic benefits of the digitization of museum collections are not high, this does not affect the major museums to continue to actively promote the process of digitizing collections, digitizing exhibitions, and digitizing visits. On the one hand, the digitization process is a new requirement for inheriting Chinese excellent traditional culture in the new era. On the other hand, the content of the cultural relics in the collection is a condensed of excellent traditional culture. Using digital technology to "re-create" the cultural relics in the collection can not only effectively promote the sinicization of artistic creation and cultural expression, but also help the full flow of social innovation elements in society. . After the epidemic, such measures should continue to be vigorously promoted through the design of fiscal budgets, government purchases or self-financing.

Stand at the crossroads of change

After basic judgments have been made on the changes of some new business formats after the epidemic, we must also consider from the perspective of demand the causes of the new phenomena and the frequent emergence of new business formats, that is, to review the changes in consumer acceptance habits before and after the epidemic. Although the rapid development of the above-mentioned new business formats and new consumption forms did make a huge contribution to the growth of the consumer market during the epidemic, "e-commerce" is still the most important source of supplementary consumption.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the online retail sales of physical goods in 2019 will be 8.5 trillion yuan, contributing more than 45% to the growth of total retail sales of consumer goods. It can be seen that e-commerce has been an important booster for the development of the consumer market in recent years, and it is the consumption portal, channels and platforms that consumers are most dependent on now. During the epidemic, the e-commerce platform made even greater breakthroughs. In February, the total number of orders received by Taobao live-streaming merchants increased at an average rate of 20% every week, and the transaction amount doubled compared to last year.

In the digital age, the external impact of marketing thinking is huge, the dazzling performance growth is external performance, and the internal reflection is the almost fierce marketing planning competition. Social e-commerce, represented by "carrying goods", has become a place of miracles in the digital age. Live streaming is the most important entry and platform in the marketing process, which is determined by the social habits of social platforms and e-commerce platforms that occupy nearly 80% of our mobile phone usage time.

It can also be seen from this that digitalization is the key to resisting industrial vulnerability. For the cultural industry, the more new formats emerged from the epidemic, the lower the degree of digitization we originally had, and the greater the impact we suffered. With the advent of the 5G era, consumers will definitely ask for more products and services from the digital space. If producers of cultural products and services cannot improve their ability to conduct online business and formulate marketing strategies adapted to the new business environment, no matter how drastic the reshuffle period will become the one who swims naked after ebb.

In other words, in the era of rapid development of information technology, the cultural industry stands at the crossroads of development and change. Whether the public sector and the market can truly embrace digital transformation and pay for and pay for a wider range of digital cultural products, cultural services and cultural experiences will largely determine the development trend of the cultural industry after the epidemic has eased.

(The author is the Dean of the School of Cultural Industry Management, Communication University of China)

Fan Zhou