M+E Daily

HITS Spring: Data and AI Play Key Roles in Winning the Battle for Consumer, Advertiser Attention

Each content company today is engaged in a battle over audience attention for their direct-to-consumer businesses and their advertising ecosystem is under more pressure now than ever before to drive performance-based outcomes.

The need to personalize the video experience is crucial to keeping audiences engaged and driving effective ad targeting solutions. Predictive analytics and real-time data science use cases can help media and entertainment (M&E) companies boost engagement, reduce churn and maximize customer lifetime value.

Although there is a huge opportunity around data and artificial intelligence (AI), many media companies are struggling to take full advantage of this opportunity and move from experimenting to production use cases, according to Steve Sobel, global head of communications, M&E GTM at data and AI company Databricks.

During the Audience + Insights breakout session “Winning the Battle for Consumer and Advertiser Attention with Data + AI” at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) on May 19, Sobel noted that Databricks was “born out of the open source community” and Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow are “three of the key technologies” that it created.

Databricks played a key role in creating the datalakehouse category, which he said is the “best of what you get from a data warehouse in terms of being a great place to run” business intelligence (BI) workloads and the “best of what you get from a data lake in terms of being able to store all of your data.”

The company raised about $3 billion and started 2022 with 3,000 employees but is now “on our way to 6,000 employees by the end of the year,” he told attendees.

Sobel discussed best practices and real-world machine learning (ML) use cases in the broadcasting and studio space as industry leaders move aggressively to personalize, monetize and drive agility around the consumer and advertiser experience.

The sector is “clearly in the midst of a transformation,” he said, noting: “You are hard-pressed to pick up a newspaper every day to see either a different direct-to-consumer model that’s coming out [or] a different ad model that’s coming out.”

There are “a number of key considerations that our customers are focused on, first and foremost is competing in the direct-to-consumer world,” he said. That is followed by “how do you kind of wrap your arms around data as it pertains to competing with Google, Facebook and Amazon, which now own 70 cents of every dollar in the digital ad market,” he told attendees.

Meanwhile, “everyone is talking about cookie lists, world privacy, compliance [and] how do we kind of move beyond the world where we’re kind of doing our targeting in our media buys and executions based on cookies and then creating a personalized experience,” he pointed out.

At the same time, the M&E industry is learning how to use a “new set of tools and a new set of competencies that you need in order to win in this new market,” he said.

There also is no industry that “has really been affected by what’s happened with digital” than the M&E sector, he noted.

“In a lot of cases, organizations struggle with moving from the domain of data science, being kind of focused on experimentation and data science and not really being at the core of the business,” he said. “A lot of that is because there is not really a focus on how is this helping you drive the business forward from a revenue perspective [and] from a churn mitigation perspective,” he explained.

He advised: “Really focusing on … the business value in mind and really helping to win the hearts and minds of the organization, I think, is absolutely key to any successful implementation.” But, too often, when it comes to AI and machine learning, what Databricks sees is that a lot of media organizations “kind of start on a path and it becomes the domain of experimentation and not really adding business value,” he said.

“Being able to kind of build a model [and] know that it’s going to be able to scale over time is a key success factor,” he added.

To view the entire presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.