Connections

Collecting and effectively making use of analytics and data are important tools that media and entertainment (M&E) companies can use to understand their consumers and deliver the content that will keep them coming back for more.

That’s according to Judy Lee, senior business consultant at Teradata, speaking during a breakout session at the Oct. 18 HITS Fall event, the largest fall gathering of the Hollywood IT community and its technology partners. This year’s edition drew 350 people, including industry CEOs, CTOs, and executives from major studios and top distributors.

There’s an “incredible proliferation of data that’s going on out there,” she said, pointing out that was one of the key themes discussed at the event. “There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s all good. We all trust in the data that we have…. We’re all using it efficiently,” she said.

But companies are also “finding things we could be doing differently with the data that we have available to us today” to help them “understand the customer journey,” she said.

She went on to say: “The customer is still the audience. What you didn’t have previously was that direct connection to the audience — or at least an opportunity to have that direct connection to the audience” that M&E companies have now. The big difference now is that audiences are basically informing content suppliers that they “want that direct connection” — so much so that in many cases, they’ve essentially “raised their hand and said ‘I’m a fan” of the content, she said.

Analytics and data are “absolutely unleashing” greater potential for content companies who are using them, she said. “Many of you know that already because you are our customers. Some of you may not know that because you may be our customer, but in a different division … . But we can tell you example after example where customers have been able to unleash the value in data and analytics.”

She then stressed the importance of “finding meaning in analytics.” The first thing that content companies must start doing, of course, is “to collect information.” But that’s sometimes easier said than done. Pointing out that some attendees didn’t seem to know that Teradata even worked with their companies, Lee said: “We have to change that. We have to change the way we talk to each other – between the media company and their customer, between us and the media company as well. But, most importantly today, between you and your customer what we want to do is understand how that change takes place.”

She then stated that about 83% of business and IT leaders are focused on using analytics to improve the customer experience. But they must first understand who the customer is, she said. Sometimes that customer is a distribution partner such as a theater, but the main customer of content companies is ultimately the viewer of the content in many cases, she said.

Lee continued: “Right now, the average Internet user spends almost four and a half hours a day online.” Connected customers tend to interact with “many, many channels” today, and “they’re spending 20% to 30% more when they are connected to you and they’re more loyal and they do influence others,” she said.

If a company’s customer up until now has been a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), a theater or one of the other mass distribution partners out there, that company can start collecting analytics and data on those interactions, starting with the customers they already know something about, Lee said.

Not every M&E company has a direct-to-consumer relationship yet, but that’s “a direction most M&E companies are looking at going in in one way or another — whether that’s been through home entertainment, through licensing, through app development” or through Web e-commerce or social media, Lee said. If a company offers a streaming service and a customer wants to download something but something made it difficult to do that, it’s important for a company to know that, she said.

Lee went on to explain: “Even though we’re plotting all of these steps out as a journey, in fact the way we see it from an M&E perspective, it’s these individual moments along that path that we think an M&E company has to be most focused on. Some of you believe that your brand is critical and some brand loyalty process may need to be in place here. Some of you may have CMOs who believe the most important thing for your company is the brand and the relationship to the brand. But when you’re talking about a direct-to-consumer relationship, you’re talking about these moments along the way that allow you to interact with them in one way or another to have an impact on that person as an individual.”

She added: “The point is the consumer could be abandoning the conversation they’re having with you along the way if they came to you in a direct-to-consumer environment” such as a promotional e-mail. “Others of you are certainly building out applications,” she said. But it’s important to know the answers to the following questions, she said: “Are consumers getting the benefit out of that application that you expect them to get? Are they downloading it successfully? What kind of optimization is being done around their ability to actually do that download? Are they getting everything they were expecting to get?”

Those are the things that a company wants to learn if they don’t know the answers already “because it’s the only way you’re going to start to build on that consumer relationship,” she said, adding that the data that’s accumulated “scales” and “builds.” She explained: “Those consumers invite friends to participate. They show your applications to their friends. They talk about whatever it is that you’re doing in a 30-second video. They’re looking at what you’re doing on YouTube and they’re passing that information along to their friends. So that’s going to start to scale and you need to be capturing that information. So what it takes is obviously, number one, you’ve got to have that ability to connect your interactions” with the customers and do so “flawlessly at every touch point.”

Lee further stated: “If you’re not doing it right now, you’re not going to do it flawlessly at every touch point every step of the way. The process is the same as it is with other technologies: crawl, walk, run.”

Using the analytics and data collected effectively allows companies to experiment and test new marketing messages, she said. From there, customer experience improves, return on investment improves, consumers become fans and start recommending the content to other people, she said.