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About the Website
This website was conceived by Suma Media Consulting for Wintec's Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre. Luke Jacobs sourced the qualitative data on industries in the region and wrote the sector summaries. Studio Ahoy designed and produced the website.
A note on the statistical data
The data used for the statistical analysis is based on publicly accessible and custom data sets sourced from Statistics NZ.
The effective statistical mapping of the creative industries is a difficult exercise, and the figures we have used . The definition of creativity itself is not strong. Who is to say that a biologist is not in a creative industry? Yet, the kind of creativity involved is very different than the work of a scriptwriter, and would be recognised by most people as such. A rough consensus on the areas covered under the Creative Industries has been largely inherited from the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Even when settling on these definitional issues, gaining reliable data is difficult. Some of the problems include:
- Early mapping exercises focussed on business data grouped by Australian New Zealand Standard Industry Classification (ANZSIC). These classifications are too broad to effectively represent business groupings in a way that businesses themselves recognise, and are in need of updating to better reflect the kinds of businesses that exist within each sector. For example, the compilation of business directories is a markedly different kind of "creative" enterprise than publishing a lifestyle magazine, yet both will be grouped in the same sector.
- The businesses located in a particular sector also contain a mixture of what economist Richard Caves calls "creative" and "humdrum" inputs. A large business classified as landscape architecture may have most of its labour force involved in physical labour with very little creative decision-making. On the other hand, a classical architectural practice rarely involves construction workers. In many respects, creative development is better mapped through occupation data. This also captures the large number of people working in creative occupations within companies not in the "creative sector" (e.g. graphic designers in consulting firms).
- Some definitions of creative sector occupations are not widely shared. For example, the "industrial designers" we have found in the Waikato range from people involved in mostly product development and aesthetics through to those basically working as engineers, with very different educational backgrounds and skill sets.
- While we have used Statistics NZ data to allow for baseline comparisons in the future, this anonymous data collection seems to throw up anomalies at small sample sizes. For example - the information on employment by industry area shows employment figures in Advertising Services of 510 employees in 2000, with the subsequent years 2001-4 being 65, 75, 80, and 80 in the Waikato. This is while the number of businesses operating in this sector was 32 in 2000, the same as in 2004. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that while there was a downturn in the creative sector in 2000/2001, it is nothing like what the employment figures would suggest. In another example, no sound recording studios are registered for the Waikato 2002-2004, though at least three are operating commercially during this period.
For this exercise we have focussed on qualitative data collection and seen where the statistical data supports our impressions, rather than working the other way around. In our view, the numbers are, despite appearances, not as "factual" as qualitative data. An effective quantitative mapping exercise remains to be undertaken and should ideally be done at a national level, building upon the work undertaken by NZIER and Auckland City in their mapping exercises.
For best practice in creative industries mapping, see Peter Higgs' detailed methodological work at Queensland University of Technology's Creative Industries National Mapping Project at http://nmp.ci.qut.edu.au/confluence/
For information on the data used, please contact creativeindustries@sumamedia.com
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