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HBO's flexible gold

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Abstract

Recent HBO dramas like Game of Thrones, Luck, and The Newsroom do more than generate HBO brand equity - they quantify that equity and determine the conditions under which it might be converted into other kinds of Time Warner equity. These incipiently financial dramas are futures markets that establish rates of conversion between heterogeneous equities and should be understood as functionally equivalent to the class of financial instruments known as derivatives.

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... This financial function of brands is particularly clear in the culture industries. Indeed, Michael Szalay's work suggests that the content and programming strategy of HBO can to a large extent be understood as directed at creating brand equity for financial investors, and not simply for consumers (Szalay, 2014). This scenario is consistent with contemporary intepretations of financial markets that point at the conventional nature of value formation (Marazzi, 2008). ...
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