On September 20, Universal Studios Beijing, a theme park built with film and television IP (intellectual property rights) as the core, was officially opened and quickly became a popular scenic spot. According to reports, on the first day of universal studios beijing ticket sales to the public, the tickets were sold out within 1 minute of the ticket, and the number of ticket reservations exceeded 10,000 within 3 minutes, which shows its popularity. Theme parks from classic films such as "Kung Fu Panda", "Despicable Me", and "Transformers" have created a shocking immersive experience, which once again confirms the huge market value brought by IP to the cultural tourism industry.
With the rapid development of China's cultural tourism industry, the importance of IP in the upgrading of cultural tourism industry has become increasingly prominent, and it is regarded as a magic weapon by the industry. However, specifically, many practitioners have a relatively more concrete understanding of the abstract concept of IP - IP can be a literary work, a work of art, a character, or a story.
"Those who get IP win the world" is becoming the consensus of the cultural tourism industry. Especially in the development environment that attaches great importance to the creation, application and protection of intellectual property rights in China, IP has brought more innovation possibilities to the acceleration of industrial upgrading. On the road of deep integration of cultural tourism, the power of IP cannot be underestimated, but has the domestic cultural tourism industry mastered the key to IP success? How will practitioners create more high-quality new IP in the growth of the market?
In April 2020, most of the shops in the Hakulubara Folk Culture Village, which is undergoing demolition, have been closed. (Photo by Xinhua news agency reporter Li Yanan)
Henan Satellite TV's 2021 "Mid-Autumn Festival Fantastic Tour • Crane Return" was widely acclaimed
In the industry's view, IP is the core of cultural tourism, which represents personality and scarcity, which can improve the recognition of tourist destinations, revisit rates, brand premiums, drive secondary consumption, and fundamentally solve various industry diseases brought about by homogeneous competition.
IP is the need of the times Homogenization needs to be broken
Entering the era of mobile Internet, IP, as a new fashion language, connects potential business value and consumer attention, thus becoming an important traffic entrance. The industry sees 2015 as the first year of IP development, and in the following year, IP grew barbarically. When the commercial value of IP is continuously magnified, IP conversion is also facing the problem of homogenization.
In the field of online literature, IP itself has the characteristics of high commercialization, and it is inevitable that there will be problems such as similar plots, homogenization of themes and types. Most film and television production companies mostly focus on romance, immortals, palace fights, youth and other themes when purchasing IP, resulting in too much concentration of film and television adaptations of the same type of IP, resulting in aesthetic fatigue of the audience.
In the field of cultural creation, with the popularity of traditional cultural "symbolic" expressions, the cultural and creative IP based on traditional Chinese culture has increased sharply. The reporter noted that in the past Mid-Autumn Festival and summer, the endless stream of cultural and creative ice cream has not yet "receded", and the cultural and creative mooncake has begun a new round of competition for beauty. In daily operation, homogeneous cultural and creative products such as cookie-cutter bookmarks, mobile phone cases, tapes, refrigerator stickers and so on occupy online and offline related sales channels, while some museums and local tourist attractions with their own IP to create cultural and creative products, after a short period of scenery, most of them have fallen into the strange circle of homogenization.
"In the tourism industry, IP has become an important part of the modern tourism system." Li Zhongguang, vice president of the China Tourism Research Institute, stressed, "Looking back at the development of the tourism industry over the past 10 years, we can see that IP is reshaping the competitive landscape of tourist destinations. Looking forward to the modernization of tourism in the future, IP will play a key role in meeting tourism consumption, implementing the integration of culture and tourism, and shaping the new development pattern. ”
"Although the market's awareness of the value of cultural tourism IP is constantly improving, and the transformation of IP is also constantly cross-border and optimized, the homogenization of cultural tourism IP products in various places is still criticized, and the quality is uneven." Chen Shaofeng, deputy dean of the Institute of Cultural Industry of Peking University, said bluntly that the homogenization problem of theme parks and characteristic towns launched in the "cultural tourism + real estate" model is particularly prominent.
In recent years, domestic theme parks have risen rapidly and shown a spurt of development. The "2019 Theme Park Research Report" released by the MobData Research Institute pointed out that the scale of China's theme park market is expected to surpass the United States and become the world's largest theme park market. However, according to incomplete statistics, only 10% of the more than 2,000 theme parks currently owned in the country are profitable. The reason behind this is that the ability of domestic theme parks to excavate and integrate Chinese excellent culture is still weak, theme parks with high-quality planning and long-term development capabilities are still rare, and homogenization, low cultural heritage, and poor planning have become common problems in most theme parks.
"The high degree of homogenization of many theme parks in China is very important because of the lack of highly recognizable IP as a support." Chen Shaofeng said that some domestic theme parks are eager to build scenes, IP
Lack of fan base, just so that the device in the appearance of the combination of IP image, the overall integration of the park and IP is not high enough. "In addition, domestic theme parks still lack the ability to transform IP into themed experiences. For example, in previous years, the 'Three Kingdoms City' and 'Water Margin City' have blossomed all over the country, but homogeneous and mechanized replication has wasted the vitality of IP. ”
Like theme parks, some characteristic towns that blindly get on the horse and are eager to achieve success have also been restricted due to serious homogenization. Data show that by the end of 2020, China has basically achieved the goal of building 1,000 characteristic towns nationwide. However, behind the development of projects that bloom everywhere, many characteristic towns are difficult to find "characteristics", but they lead to a series of problems such as single positioning, insufficient industrial co-power, lack of creativity in the cultural industry, etc., and the advantages of the "culture + tourism" model are difficult to highlight.
The long-tail effect of IP comprehensive performance is remarkable, "orderly planning + iterative upgrading + cross-border integration" has become an important factor for high-quality IP, and now IP conversion has begun to shift to lasting user precipitation and collaborative layout.
Extend the life cycle Secondary creation makes the IP appreciate
Any product has a lifecycle, and IP is no exception. In the eyes of industry insiders, it usually takes 5 years for an IP to be cultivated. With more and more CATEGORIES OF IP in the current market, the life cycle of IP is also shortening, and some explosive products have a life cycle of only half a year. Luo Mu, chief screenwriter and director of Hunan Comic Cartoon Culture Media Co., Ltd., who has led series of animation works such as "Rainbow Cat Blue Rabbit", "Blue Cat Naughty", and "Strange Adventures", believes that a high-quality IP needs 10 years of polishing. "The durability of an IP's vitality mainly depends on whether it has a story core that touches people's hearts." In his view, "a good story, a good image, and a good art style are conducive to making animated characters enter people's hearts, so that IP can become a friend who accompanies children's growth, and its vitality can last." ”
IP with a long enough lifetime is more valuable. When it comes to IP transformation, many practitioners describe its incubation and operation process as "sowing seeds and waiting for it to grow into a tree", and excessive commercialization will lead to impetuous content, and the IP life cycle will inevitably be short.
In 2020, a "death list of towns with Chinese characteristics" was widely circulated online, and the Former "Net Red Town" of Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village has declined rapidly in a few years, with shops closing and tourists hard to find. The Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village, built because of the literary masterpiece "White Deer Plain", opened in 2016 to be closed and demolished four years later, and the operator's helplessness also exposed the blindness of IP transformation in name only. There are many tourism projects with the theme of "White Deer Plain" like Folk Village, such as White Deer Cang Scenic Area, White Deer Plains Ecological culture tourist park, White Deer Plains Film and Television City, White Deer Ancient Town, etc. Although many such man-made attractions with cultural IP are built in an antique way, they lack core competitiveness and no soul, and tourists often do not pay for these artificial attractions.
In this regard, Zhang Ali, a professor at Northwest University, said: "Bailuyuan Folk Village, Bailuyuan Film and Television City and Bailucang are all characterized by ancient residential buildings, mainly snacks, lack of cultural consumption types, lack of decision-makers and developers of scientific planning and professional marketing ideas, so from the beginning, Bailuyuan Folk Culture Village is difficult to escape 'short life'. ”
In fact, from the time the word IP first stirred up the industrial market, the industry has realized that quality content is a necessary condition for successfully creating IP. From the empirical observation of successful IP, it can be found that 80% of the contribution in the life cycle of IP is secondary creation. For example, the popular IP in recent years - "Nezha", "White Snake" and "Dasheng", although they all come from traditional stories, the creative team did not repeat the well-known stories in the film, but lengthened the timeline of IP and told their past and present lives.
Cheng Wu, vice president of Tencent, believes that the original IP itself has certain limitations in form, such as novels that cannot be visualized, comics that cannot be immersive, and film and television works that cannot interact with the plots of the characters... These limitations make the original IP unable to break through itself to some extent, and cannot achieve greater value in content and business, at this time, it is necessary to reshape the IP in another form.
This point of view is not unrelated to the "pan-entertainment" boom that has risen in the entertainment industry in recent years, and the IP adaptation that has swept the market under this boom has also made the industry flock. Adapting the novel into a movie and making the movie into a game, the industry believes in the principle of "on the basis of maintaining the essence of the original IP, through the appropriate channels to combine ip in various forms, in order to make the IP endless". Although ip adaptations have achieved explosive works in the past few years, to a certain extent, they have been verified by the market, but in recent years, the IP conversion rate has been significantly reduced, and IP is no longer just a simple intellectual property, it also needs the projection of audience emotions.
"Not all IP can be adapted into film and television works. A good IP should first have a mass emotional basis. Film and television planner and screenwriter Ren Jiying believes that in the process of IP transformation, it also needs the wisdom of creators, "Adaptation should respect the most attractive part of the original IP, and focus on the part that can best convey the 'spirit'." At the same time, IP adaptation should not be limited to the framework set by the original IP, but should be reasonably extended and recreated, refined and innovated. ”
If in the traditional media era, the limitations of IP are still focused on how to find high-quality resources, then in the current Internet era of information explosion, rich original content is continuous, how to enhance the fan stickiness of IP itself with the help of new media platforms, and cultivate and incubate super IP is particularly important. The "Xinhua Cultural Industry IP Index Report (2021)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report")," compiled by the China Economic Information Service, shows that the long-tail effect of ip comprehensive performance is remarkable, and "orderly planning + iterative upgrading + cross-border integration" has become an important factor for high-quality IP, and now IP transformation has begun to shift to lasting user precipitation and collaborative layout. The "Report" believes that IP industrialization is inseparable from the operation platform and a good coordination mechanism.
This is also why traditional culture as an IP resource is widely oriented to the media platform to carry out cross-border cooperation - under the premise of continuous enrichment of content creation, the link of IP operation also needs to be paid attention to, in order to extend the life cycle of IP, it is also necessary to continuously enlarge the audience and influence of cultural inheritance and dissemination, and collaboration and cross-border will mean having a sustained and expanding fan base. To this end, a number of Internet platforms have launched related activities in combination with traditional cultural IP content, with the intention of laying out a complete content system. For example, Douyin launched the Guofeng Partner Support Program, bringing together Guofeng IP and characters and works; Kuaishou launched the Intangible Cultural Heritage Project to build an intangible cultural heritage IP system with online support and offline recruitment; Ali Entertainment combined with "Daming Fenghua" and "Chang'an Twelve Hours" to link Nanjing and Xi'an to launch a one-stop in-depth punch card experience of "see-tour"; Baidu has created a series of IP "Treasure China" based on urban culture.
When IP creation and transformation ignore "empathy", it is impossible to create more emotionally connected content and more delicate and sincere stories, so it is difficult to break through the circle and become a hit.
Enhance the timeliness of IP Empathy with people and resonate with the times
For a long time, Disney animation, the Marvel Universe series and many well-known animation IPs from Japan have taken turns in the domestic market, gaining fame and fortune. However, in recent years, from phenomenal animation film and television works such as "Big Fish and Begonias", "The Return of the Great Sage of Journey to the West", "The Demon Child of Nezha" and other phenomenal animation film and television works have come out of nowhere, to the series of Chinese traditional festivals such as "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", "If National Treasures Can Talk", "National Treasures" and other museum cultural creations have successively become "Internet celebrities", and then to Henan Satellite TV's "Tang Palace Night Banquet", "Lantern Wonderful Night", "Dragon Boat Wonderful Tour" and "Mid-Autumn Festival Fantastic Tour" and other series of Chinese traditional festivals in the past six months. The overall performance of Chinese traditional cultural IP in the cultural industry market has shown unprecedented heat, which verifies the domestic industry's manufacturing ability for super IP, and also shows that the IP transformation carried out after being close to the emotions and aesthetics of young people has been rejuvenated with the traditional historical and cultural core and modern scientific and technological interpretation.
The essence of IP is more or the interpretation of the story and the creation of character personalization, which must be inseparable from the development of the emotional line, there will be rich emotional pre-embedding such as family, friendship, love, etc., and the character and the emotional line are connected together, which will also drive the development of the entire story. Original Warehouse Data, a professional big data platform institution for IP intellectual property rights, believes that if you want to successfully build IP, you can't do without the support of high-quality content, and if you want to create high-quality content, empathy is the key. Only by understanding emotional resonance and starting from emotions and complexes can we create content that is easier to touch users, so that the audience can empathize with IP and identify with values. Therefore, emotional resonance is especially important for creating high-quality IP content.
Some analyst reports pointed out that the key to "empathy" with the current young audience mainly includes some emotions, emotions such as love, cuteness, and burning, or a strong sense of cultural collective. Generally, IP with strong empathy, whether it is film and television works, animation works, games, or IP derivatives, will attract the attention of the public. For example, the series of movies "Transformers" familiar to the public and the domestic animation image "Nezha" have attracted many fans because of their excellent content and distinctive characters, and these contents and roles will make the public get emotional empathy, thereby helping IP to prolong its vitality, while also enhancing the public's interest in related IP derivatives. Some commentators have bluntly said that many OF the CURRENT IP content is too homogeneous, and the reason is still that the creators do not have true empathy and do not understand the needs of the audience from the emotional point of view. When IP creation and transformation ignore "empathy", it is impossible to create more emotionally connected content and more delicate and sincere stories, so it is difficult to break through the circle and become a hit.
For the field of culture and tourism, Huang Xiaoli, deputy general manager of Shandong Taierzhuang Ancient City Tourism Group, said that there are many well-known IPs abroad, such as Kumamoto Kuma, Disney, etc., but the domestic cultural tourism IP is still relatively small, mainly representing the cultural creation of the Forbidden City. "Although there are many cultural tourism scenic spots actively creating their own cultural tourism IP, from the perspective of cultural mining, there are still many articles to do, which need to be given more cultural and emotional factors, in order to truly resonate with tourists and industrialize the product IP."
In fact, as the designer and creator of cultural products, the empathy for IP is the most profound. "IP is half culture and half business." How to grasp the cultural connotation while considering the needs of the audience is a problem that creators have been thinking about.
Four Seasons, one of the founders of TheLmona Studio, which focuses on the development and production of original high-end handicrafts and art derivatives, has a persistent love for traditional Chinese culture, and he applies elements such as traditional Chinese culture, stories and legends to the design of derivatives. In the view of The Four Seasons: "Traditional Chinese culture is a rich mine for the development of art derivatives. The nutrients that designers can draw can bring inexhaustible inspiration for derivative development. However, in the process of creating and incubating its own IP products, Four Seasons found that the works of the early studios were imitating the designs of Japan, Europe and the United States, "what people do, we do, and finally put on the shell of traditional culture." After the imitation stage, he began to think about how to truly combine the elements of traditional culture with modern aesthetics.
In recent years, while pursuing artistry, in order to take into account the aesthetics and needs of the public, the studio has successively participated in the production of classic animations such as "Black Cat Sheriff", "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", "Big Fish and Begonias", "Nezha's Demon Child Descending" and so on. Considering the contemporary young people's preference for Western constellations, the Four Seasons will use the Twenty-Eight Stars statue in the Jade Emperor Temple in Jincheng, Shanxi Province, and the Twenty-Eight Clay Statues sculpted by the Yuan Dynasty art master Liu Luan as references, trying to explore and incubate traditional Chinese cultural IP, and develop them according to different star figures. In the view of the four seasons, the use of traditional Chinese cultural elements is not "pasted" on the product like labels and symbols, but on the basis of stylized creation on the basis of retaining traditional cultural genes, such works will be attractive. "The complex and interesting traditional Chinese cultural content behind the products needs to be further developed. Knowledge such as astronomy and astrological observation involved in the Twenty-Eight Houses, including the interpretation of the personalities of different stars, can become the driving force for future IP building and brand building. ”
In the film and television industry, where IP conversion is more representative, in recent years, it can also be seen from market and audience feedback that IP adaptations with "era temperament" and "in line with mainstream values" have high market potential. In January this year, the "Evaluation Report on the Potential of Online Literature IP Film and Television Drama Adaptation" led by the China Filmmakers Association released the ranking of the potential of online literature IP film and television drama adaptation from 2019 to 2020. Among them, the "Heavy Industry of a Big Country" focusing on China's industrial development and the "Ladder of Heaven" that reflects the officers and men of the Air Force ranked first in the potential table. The "Evaluation Report on the Potential of Online Literature IP Film and Television Drama Adaptation" believes that the two works that focus on realist themes and convey the values of the times show a very high positive incentive effect on individuals. This "individual incentive" dimension is an important indicator to evaluate whether an online literary work has a high market value as an IP film and television drama adaptation.
In the early years of the "barbaric growth" stage of online literature, Shao Yanjun, a professor at the Department of Chinese of Peking University, hoped that more online literature could open up a direction to reveal the latest urban life and confusion in today's Chinese. She feels that online literature should constantly face reality. In recent years, with the good response of works such as "Great Rivers and Great Rivers" and "My Name is Yu Huanshui", the market has paid more attention to realistic themes, and the trend of film and television adaptation of online literature is also changing. Some institutions predict that realism and serious literary IP will become an important demand port in the film and television market in the next few years. In this regard, Shao Yanjun suggested that the film and television adaptation of online literature should keep pace with the times, highlight the mainstream value, and "have full information of the times and reflect the changes in people's concepts in this era."
Practitioners in the cultural tourism industry generally believe that after the "Internet +", IP is one of the most valuable outlets for development in the current era. In the face of the wind outlet, "riding the wind" must "create wind". "Successful IP creation is inseparable from the precise target positioning and innovation direction, the depth and breadth of content mining, and the ecological cycle with long-term planning." Chen Shaofeng believes that good IP comes with fans, "For the cultural tourism industry, the development of cultural tourism IP is not achieved overnight, it requires a professional team to carry out systematic operation and maintenance, from cultural mining to IP marketing, from authorization chain to supply chain construction, all need complete system support." ”