June, 1985: At a conference on film financing, a banker from First Boston asks a crowd of film industry executives to name the most valuable thing in the movie business. None of them have the answer she’s looking for, an answer that was prescient at the time, and never more relevant than it is today. “The most valuable thing in the movie business,” the banker informs them, “is 52 weekends a year.” In the banker’s opinion, it is the film studios’ ability to capitalize on the 52 yearly opening weekends that determines their status in the marketplace. Not long after the banker makes this observation, the Weekend Boxoffice Report begins appearing for the first time in newspapers around the country. For better or worse, who ‘wins the weekends’ becomes a new metric for a film’s success, a new context for audiences to consider, and a driver of a film’s revenue in ancillary markets.

In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. (more…)