Industry Note: Advantage is in the DNA
Oh look, a publisher finally decided to...be a
publisher:
"...But for this latest online push, Warner Brothers has discarded its initial strategy of insisting that advertisers shoulder production costs from the start. Instead, it has decided to finance most projects itself and worry about lining up advertisers to recoup costs later."
...ie, bear the idiosyncratic risk of production in exchange for a share of the returns.
The lesson is a really, really simple one. Advantage is in the DNA - who you are, why you exist.
If Warner had made this simple, tiny decision 2, 3 or even 4 years ago - imagine how much strategic freedom it would have given them to revolutionize media value chains and business models.