“Digital media” constitutes a promising and exciting new industry sector that exists at the forefront of new technology, offering high-value employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. Florida, particularly central Florida, has a strong base of digital media companies and stands to become a national leader in digital media employment, research and development, and industrial growth.

However, “digital media” is a nascent and still-forming industry sector, and Florida”s digital media economy is still poorly defined and is just beginning to distinguish itself. For many reasons, this presents special challenges to public sector leaders who wish to nurture and promote this sector. It is difficult to defi ne the industry for statistical and workforce purposes, and many companies who the description of “digital media” may not yet consider themselves as such.

This study was undertaken to investigate a few alternatives for identifying and reaching out to digital media companies in Florida, and to collect some preliminary data regarding how these companies thin of themselves and the industry, as well as some basic workforce, skill and employment statistics.

In 2002, PriceWaterHouse Coopers (one of the largest US accounting and consulting firms) was contracted to conduct an impact study of the digital media industry in Florida. In February, 2002, they released their report, “Central Florida Digital Media Initiative - Defining a Strategic Direction”. This was a significant and foundational study as it was the first to document the potential of digital media in Florida, and contained many strategic and economic development findings for nurturing this industry cluster.

At its heart, however, it contained a problem regarding definitions. The PWC study operationally defined digital media companies in terms of Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes for their statistics and impact analysis. However, their working definition framed “digital media” as an aggregation of existing industry categories; e.g. “advertisers” plus “publishers” plus “software developers” etc. While SIC aggregation is a common research practice (for example, using “airplane manufacturing” plus “space, missile, and guidance systems” to describe the aerospace industry), it is not appropriate for convergent industries such as digital media. While it is true that many digital media companies are oriented toward the advertising industry, for example, the reverse is not true; most advertising companies are not primarily oriented toward digital media, and thus, PWC”s definition produced an inflated picture of Florida”s digital media industry.

While central Florida”s public leaders were convinced that the digital media sector was a promising cluster that warranted support and attention, PWC”s definition provided little guidance for actually identifying which Florida companies were in fact “digital media” in orientation. In fact, separate efforts by the new Digital Media Alliance Florida (DMAF) indicated that the very definition of “digital media” was multi-layered and very complex.

This project was initiated in the context of these prior efforts, to explore preliminary workforce and economic development information about the digital media industry, and to identify alternatives for defining the industry and identifying digital media companies. The research was performed by Innovation Insight Inc., with support from the Digital Media Alliance Florida (DMAF) and the National Center for Simulation (NCS). The project was funded by the National Center for Simulation under grant by Enterprise Florida Inc.

This is report is available here for download as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.