M+E Connections

The enormous changes that are being seen in the media and entertainment industry are requiring M&E companies to reinvent their content supply chains to optimise global distribution and make several other changes to their strategies also, including how they use data and analytics, according to Bill Woods, EVP of sales at Whip Media Group.

Disruption in the digital media distribution space is at peak levels, while demand for original programming is skyrocketing as users are changing their viewing behaviours and using a wider variety of streaming platforms and devices. Meanwhile, media companies’ traditional windowing strategies are changing from theatrical to premium video on demand (PVOD) and the companies are focusing on getting the right content on their service to delight their audiences.

“Massive growth and industry shifts have really accelerated the need to modernise the digital supply chain,” Woods said Sept. 24 during the webinar “Welcome to the Age of Accelerated Digital Distribution.”

Why now? “As the way we consume content evolves, I think the workflows to manage the business processes also have to adapt to keep up with these changes in our industry,” according to Woods.

“You need to be able to accommodate what’s happening now. But equally importantly, maybe more importantly, you need to really be able to quickly support what’s coming next,” he said.

Meanwhile, “traditional content windowing strategies are maybe out the window [and] they’ve changed completely,” he noted. In the past, after a theatrical run, you might see a film on an airline before it hit a home entertainment window, he pointed out. “But now, with the near absence of going to movie theatres, we really have finally seen the realisation of premium VOD,” he said.

Clearly, “this is really unprecedented change in our industry,” although film and TV production is now starting to “meaningfully restart,” he noted.

The changes and disruptions are “giving everybody pause to really rethink how and where content is bought and sold,” he said, adding: “We’re really living in unprecedented times.”

What’s more, “it’s not only the pace or the rate of change” that is significant: “It’s the scale of the shift to the streaming world,” he said, adding: “Old metrics may not get it right in the new world.” For example, “does a Nielsen rating correlate to a binge?” he asked.

As a result, it is also “time to reevaluate the metrics,” he said. Everybody in the film industry used to watch first weekend box office metrics to gauge how much a movie would be worth “downstream,” he noted. But that has “completely changed, so new global insights are really required to be successful moving forward,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic complicates things. “But it’s really fuelled these trends that were already underway” before it even started, Woods pointed out.

Among those trends are the fact that: We are all viewing more content than ever; there are more content sources to manage; there are more business models to support; there are more territories to distribute to; and there are more “hidden gems” in libraries traveling to new audiences, according to Whip Media.

“The other big shift we’ve seen – and it’s been coming but it’s just full pace now – is this whole migration to direct to consumer,” Woods said.

“Netflix was a huge wakeup call to our industry,” he said, noting it “forced the hand of established business models, and that’s when the genie came out of the bottle.”

Since then, consolidation has happened in the sector that he predicted will continue. Meanwhile, virtually all the largest content providers are going direct to consumers with streaming services now, he said, pointing as examples to Disney Plus, Comcast’s Peacock, the new Discovery Plus, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and Viacom’s CBS Access (soon to become Paramount Plus).

“Direct to consumer changed everything. But at the same time, there’s still traditional licensing and distribution models too,” Woods said.

Whip Media’s “view is that moving forward, success requires new approaches,” he told viewers, adding: “The main thing you’ve got to deal with is change. Change is the only constant and maybe what got you to where you are today isn’t what’s going to be able to get you to where you want to go….. You need to really transform these workflows. You need to embed the right data into these workflows to optimise the process – and, obviously, test, measure, iterate. And you can only really do that if you know what to prioritise by having the right performance tracking available. You’ve really got to be able to understand the data. Data comes from disparate sources. How do I normalise it so I can do something with it? It needs to have a common context.”

Woods went on to highlight how his company’s analytics can help M&E companies use data to improve their businesses.

TV Time Engagement, for example, captures billions of data points that Whip Media says can “generate signals to drive content similarity.”

The company’s CVM DemandIQ predicts the probability of success for a TV programme by leveraging unique first-party engagement inputs and performance data to predict success outcomes on titles, rights and avails, it says. While Demand Score better predicts title success and optimises content acquisition dollars, Content Similarity pinpoints content that is most similar to what a company’s audience is already viewing and desires.

The results speak for themselves because CVM DemandIQ provides predictions for a programme’s success that are 8x better than predictions provided by traditional methods, according to the company.

What the book and movie “Moneyball” taught us are that “the right data changes the game if you align your performance indices to your goals” and the right data can “monitor performance metrics as you progress towards those goals – that’s what it’s all about,” Woods said.

He went on to urge M&E companies to integrate intelligence into their workflows. Companies can accelerate digital distribution and gain efficiencies, improve performance and make smarter content decisions with unique data insight, according to Whip Media.