What metrics really mean, a question of causality and construction in leveraging social media audiences into business results: Cases from the UK film industry

Digital distribution and sustained audience engagement potentially offer filmmakers new business models for responding to decreasing revenues from DVD and TV rights. Key to campaigns that aim at enrolling audiences, mitigating demand uncertainty and improving revenues, is the management of digital media metrics. This process crucially involves the interpretation of figures where a causal gap exists between some digital activity and a market transaction. This paper charts the conceptual framing methods and calculations of value necessary to manipulating and utilising the audience in a new way. The invisible aspects and mediating role of contemporary creative industries audiences is presented through empirical case study evidence from two UK feature films. Practitioners’ understanding of digital engagement metrics is shown to be a social construction involving the agency of material artefacts as powerful elements of networks that include both market entities and audiences.