Why And With What Success Are Traditional Media Institutions Adapting To The Challenge Posed By New/Digital Media?

The film industry has recently begun to utilise new and digital media in order to promote its movies with varying degrees of success.

Most films have Twitter feeds and Facebook pages up and running before the films are released in theatres and are now essential codes and conventions in the advertsing world, an example of this is the movie Paranormal Activity 4 which has a popular Twitter feed where positive messages from fans praising the movie are 'retweeted', this increases brand loyalty by making the audience feel like the producers of the film care for their fan base and value their participation, it also encourages people to see the film who haven't already seen it as they appreciate the good nature of the films producers 'retweeting' fan messages.

One aspect of new and digital media that has definitely impacted horror movies in a negative way is the advent and popularity of online film review websites such as Rotten Tomatoes, iMDB and the IGN film review series, these websites are notoriously highly critical of repetitive franchises such as the Paranormal Activity series and bland horror movies such as Silent Hill: Revelation 3D that do not bring anything new to the genre. Rotten Tomatoes recently called Silent Hill: Revelation 3D as "Featuring weak characters, an incomprehensible plot, and a decided shortage of scares, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is a mediocre effort even by the standards of video game adaptations". These review websites are incredibly popular and recognised as trustable and respectable institutions and as a result many fans will defintely be discouraged from seeing a movie if their favourite review website gives a film a poor review.

Fan websites such as TheFinalDestinationWiki provide a lot of fan service with all the codes and conventions of typical fan websites such as character bios and polls for users of the website to vote on, the film industry reognises these websites as essential marketing tools as these websites comply with the uses and gratifications theory, if people want to find out more about The Final Destination franchise and its characters, producers, settings etc, this website is the most obvious choice as it has by far the most information of The Final Destination out of all of the fan made websites.