Connections

The entertainment industry has been evolving rapidly in recent years, with seemingly every major company engaging in a streaming arms race. And while 2020 brought a seismic shift that changed consumer viewing habits for good, most of these companies are still programming their platforms the old-fashioned way: through a combination of gut instinct and manual processes.

Most deals are still done over the phone, by email and at in-person film markets using spreadsheets and walled-off, proprietary analysis.

Distribution and programming executives are faced with a plethora of new business models, global expansion and an insatiable public appetite for content.

To meet this exponentially bigger demand, they need new tools built for this new landscape. Simply put, buyers and sellers of content need more comprehensive information fast to make better licensing decisions in this dynamic marketplace.

The industry needs a new transformational online content marketplace with workflows that keep up with today’s ever-changing and fast-paced licensing world.

A rights marketplace that serves as a central hub for discovering, buying and selling content rights, enriched with proprietary predictive insights, and combined with sophisticated tools to streamline licensing workflows, will enable buyers and sellers to work more efficiently and get smarter deals done faster.

For example, a buyer might need a certain number of hours to fill with children’s content, or content produced in a specific European country to meet local production requirements. Or a seller might have lots of children’s content, but not know which buyers are in the market for their titles.

Organizations need to quickly see all available options for these types of situations, and to be able to select the content that not only meets their criteria but also has the highest likelihood of performing well.

Another mismatch in the current paradigm stems from the fact that in-person marketplaces and relationship-based deal-making are inherently structured to make it hard for new players to break through.

A platform that helps to foster communication between newer and more established buyers and sellers of con- tent would provide value for both sides of the equation.

While big players don’t need much help in finding one another at conferences or from long-standing relationships, smaller companies on both the buyer and seller sides have a harder time making contact and vetting one another.

Ideally, buyers would know how offered content will stack up versus what they’ve already got, and sellers would know how their catalogs could succeed on each platform in each territory. Even large companies may lack resources to efficiently find the best smaller players, and smaller companies need help to gain the attention of larger entities.

A platform that helps level the playing field and efficiently identify the best potential partners regardless of size would be a great boon to the licensing space.

WHIP MEDIA EXCHANGE: AFFORDABLE SCALE THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

The Whip Media Exchange provides all this and more with groundbreaking insights and streamlined workflow tools. While the Exchange provides significant added value to content companies of any size, the marginal utility for smaller, independent or foreign entertainment firms is arguably even higher.

Companies that might lack the means to buy or create their own analysis can take advantage of Whip Media’s ability to consolidate insights from across the digital entertainment ecosystem.

Smaller players can benefit from being able to gain access to sophisticated analytics without the heavy investment of creating these tools themselves. Larger companies will also benefit by quickly analyzing new content from a wider swath of potential licensing partners.

Just as blogging software makes it possible to turn a single writer into a media outlet, the Exchange allows smaller teams to analyze and procure more content, and larger teams to find more partners.

The data which powers the Whip Media Exchange is made up of a combination of worldwide respondent-level consumption, engagement and reaction data obtained from Whip Media’s consumer-facing app, TV Time. Using cutting-edge machine learning techniques, the Exchange’s data scientists use this information to create “affinity mapping” between every piece of content, across every territory.

These “affinity maps” are then used to generate predictive insights, including a Demand Score, demographic affinity, regional appeal and other metrics in a fully integrated user-friendly product.

The Demand Score predicts relative performance by title, territory, platform and availability window, while the other predictive metrics enhance the Demand Score with further perspective on what titles have the strongest appeal, and why.

Quite simply, there’s no other tool on the market quite like it and no broader dataset from which to harvest user behavior worldwide.

The trends that have transformed the media and entertainment industry over the last few years are only accelerating. The marketplace becomes more complex with each passing day, and the public’s appetite for new content remains unquenched.

Players large and small will benefit from an easier way to connect, a consistent way to evaluate content and a streamlined way to make deals. Finding the content that’s right for every platform just got much easier.

* By Sherry Brennan, EVP, GM, Content Licensing, Whip Media *

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