Digital creativity entails the use of digital tools and technologies to explore creative ideas while applying various approaches and finding new ways of presenting works and research. This could be in form of photography, video recording, graphics designing, or making a presentation in a fancy way. It may involve the use of digital tools in the development or exploration of non-digital material or outputs. It may also imply the development of creative skills in coding, data visualisation, gaming, or virtual reality. In this article, we will be examining how digital creativity impacts revenue generation.
Read on.
It is a highly digital world that we live in and you need highly creative and appealing digital content to stand a chance to get the attention of your prospective audience, clients, or customers.
In 2020, the digital creative industries were responsible for nearly $3 trillion of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The ratification of rising digital technologies is opening brand new channels to produce, distribute, and monetize content. These technologies are capable of creating formal income-earning opportunities for millions of creatives globally and generating substantial economic growth for countries. But there is still a long way to go as the industry still needs more investment by both public and private stakeholders to help the growth of the industry to spur, and create greater economic variation while creating more employment opportunities.
Even though the creative industries were responsible for close to $3 trillion of the global GDP in 2020, their capability to aid all-inclusive and sustainable economic expansion in rising markets is greatly unseen, especially when compared to traditional sectors like mining, manufacturing, and financial services.
This is largely due to the difficulties in defining, measuring, and quantifying the creative industries and their impact, given that most of their growth outcomes are nonphysical.
Although, there are strong motivations for governments and the private sector to quantify and invest in the creative industry because new technologies which have thrived since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic are deemed to have the capability to establish income-earning opportunities for millions of individual creatives and groups, generating a significant economic increase in countries around the world.
The creative industries use culture in conjunction with creativity as their major input in the production of many diverse products such as music, film, visual arts, and fashion among many others. The sector has the potential to contribute not only as a source of cultural value but also economic value across rising markets.
A solid example is Nollywood. The Nigerian film industry contributes about 3% to Nigeria’s GDP. The Nigerian film industry provides well over 300,00 direct and about a million direct jobs in form of graphic designers, cast and crew, and film marketers. It also generates about 10% of foreign exchange revenue from non-oil exportations.
There is still a lot of Nollywood’s commercial potential to be tapped, as film piracy is considered to make up about 50% of potential profits.
Digital creativity also enhances economic growth by aiding productivity, promoting industrial originality through the provision of chain linkages with other various sectors, and improving the country’s branding, therefore, enhancing the tourism industry. Furthermore, differing from other economic sectors, the digital creative industries provide a potpourri of socio-rational gains for individuals, as the ingestion of digital creative goods supports educational outputs, health, and well-being through the relaxation and entertainment it provides, and inclusion. These surface at the national level in form of diversity, social cohesion, and nation-building/grafting.
However, in the past, rising markets faced significant difficulties during their formative stages while trying to commercialize their creative wealth.
A broken creative value chain coupled with a poor empowering society has caused a disintegrated environment with high costs of production of creative products and restricted local and global distribution and monetization channels or markets for artists from emerging industries. The disintegrated nature of the sector also implies that there is insufficient enforcement and backing of institutional frameworks or laws to protect creative intellectual properties, limited public investment in the field, and an absence of infrastructure, funding, and skills to further develop the industries.
Disruptive Technologies
Partially provoked by the difficulties faced by creatives in developing, promoting, and marketing their products during the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of new upcoming digital technologies is opening new ways to produce, promote, market, distribute, and monetize digital content. A radical reduction in the costs of digital media recording equipment, such as cameras, lights, microphones, and sound recorders has also assisted artists to purchase and rent equipment to carry out their productions.
Digital technologies such as music streaming platforms like (Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube music), movie production and streaming platforms like (Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and Hiss box), tech applications for creators like (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok), and e-commerce in conjunction with seamless electronic money solutions, has significantly lowered barriers to enter for talent discovery, promotion, distribution, and making money from creative content.
For instance, musicians in most African countries previously depended on live shows for a large part of their earnings, but digital platforms like Spotify have enabled thousands of artists from Africa to sell their music and music videos to global audiences.
Essentially, disruptive technologies have allowed the digital creative industries to be considered an investable sector among many other emerging markets.
The creative innovation to create digital platforms to promote digital creativity is enabling artists to track their earnings and provide avenues for new ways of income generation such as advertising and brand promotion or marketing. These new technologies also uphold technological and legal barriers to production that ensure that the intellectual properties of artists are protected.
Proofs about the potential effects of digitalization on the security of the intellectual properties of creatives from developed markets note that appealing licensed streaming platforms can reduce piracy rates. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), a budding blockchain technology that tokenizes and keeps records of digital products on a digital ledger, help in enforcing copyright protections and allow artists to be adequately rewarded for their works. These new technologies also allow for data generation in the creative industries, assisting governments in understanding the importance of the creative industries and building evidence-based policies and laws to promote them.
Now you see how digital creativity impacts revenue generation. The importance of digital creativity in a country cannot be overemphasized, which is why governments of various countries should look further into the promotion of this sector.
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