M+E Connections

The days of static products and generic consumer experiences are ending. Media and entertainment (M&E) audiences are expecting increasing personalization, customization, and relevance at every touchpoint, according to Sabrina Chamberlain, senior director of data engineering at Slalom.

“In today’s technology-led world, M&E companies face a host of challenges like never before,” she said March 10 at the Smart Content Summit in Los Angeles, during the breakout session “Intelligent Products – the Future of M&E.”

Inside companies, those challenges include “working with increasingly complex and costly architecture, processing and mining massively scaled datasets, and building and nurturing the teams required to do so, all while trying to push the envelope on innovation,” she told attendees and those viewing online.

Meanwhile, outside their organizations, “they’re seeing dynamic and shifting user segments and expanding customer appetite for personalization and competitors jockeying for the best position in both of those areas,” she added.

During the session, Chamberlain explained the difference between a typical digital product and an intelligent product, as well as the four components you need to create an intelligent product, and dove into some examples of Intelligent Product use cases in M&E.

“The most successful organizations we see are pivoting to focus on intelligent products,” she said, describing them as products with “a web of capabilities that do more than they were originally programmed to do.”

She went on to cite the features that make a product intelligent, noting that “leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics is an important part of development today.”

But she said: “These are just tools and not intelligence in and of themselves. Just like human intelligence, digital intelligence exists on a spectrum. Traditional products do only what they’re manually programmed to do. They aren’t capable of dynamic actions or decisions.”

However, she went on to say: “We found a few signals that we like in the marketplace that identify a product intelligent. Is the product able to perform self-taught logic using new information that it receives? Or, instead, is it able to allow for personalization being driven for more than demographics and user profiles but perhaps from user behavior or scalable action? Can the product itself learn and evolve based on collected behavior and market shifts?”

But, she explained, “the defining factor is moving away from products that do what they were originally coded to do and that have the ability to adapt and grow their own code.”

So why would anybody want to use intelligent products? “In short, the benefits are massive,” she argued, explaining they: can delight users with just-right experiences, empower people to do what they do best, adapt and scale with data instead of release cycles, blur physical and digital worlds with real-time insight, improve the quality and value of enterprise data, and create the foundation for high-quality, high-velocity, and highly scalable solutions.”

Not every company is ready to leap into intelligent products yet, she conceded.

The journey to intelligence includes features/early maturity, when an organization can test what intelligence can do by adding it to a small part of the experience, she noted. Mid-maturity adds on processes, with intelligence and automation added to areas including transforming workflows to reduce steps. And, advanced maturity includes ecosystems, she noted. That is when we have the “culmination of technology, intelligence, experience, and operations working as one,” according to Slalom.

The ”four connected elements of intelligent products” are technology, intelligence, experiences and operations, she went on to say.

Common applications for intelligent products within the M&E sector include recommendation engines, audio-visual entity recognition, and content and game generation, she said, concluding the session.

To listen to the presentation, click here.

The 2022 Smart Content Summit event was held in conjunction with the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (EIDR APM), and was presented by Whip Media. The event was produced by MESA, in association with the Smart Content Council and EIDR, with sponsorship by BeBanjo, Signiant, Qumulo, Adio, Alteon, Digital Nirvana, Slalom and Rightsline.