Exclusives

Media Execs at HITS N.Y.C.: Challenges Remain for Metadata, Master Data

NEW YORK — The importance of metadata and master data was stressed by several media and entertainment executives at the HITS N.Y.C. event, held Nov. 8 at the Microsoft Technology Center.

But while metadata is a “big focus,” according to Andrew Jablonski, VP of East Coast and international sales for Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, master data is the “most important asset you have to drive business moving forward,” he said, adding: “That’s something that you hear over and over again.”

Technology in general is “driving business across all areas of entertainment and all areas of distribution,” Jablonski also said, pointing out how important it is to use technology to “maximize audiences at a time when a lot of young consumers are going unplugged or going off of cable.”

In an interview at the event, he told MESA that his company “is very focused” right now on developing digital, cloud-based payroll- and production-management solutions for its clients. “We’re focused on every aspect – from start to finish – of the entertainment production lifecycle, and it’s the metadata being sent to, and accessed from, the cloud that is enabling this process.” He cited Cast & Crew’s suite of digital solutions: Start +, used for digital on-boarding, and Hours +, used for digital time capture and management. He told us: “Digital time timecards provide efficient time capture, automatic timecard calculation and greater accuracy, streamlined and flexible approval flows, and faster turnaround time.”

Digital on-boarding, meanwhile, not only shifts on-boarding to digital from paper forms, it enables efficient crew starts for any type of project and gives producers immediate visibility into onboard data.

“We’ve gotten great feedback so far from our clients,” Jablonski said, adding: “We’re working closely with them and making adjustments for better user ability so that Start+ and Hours+ both work in a way that our clients are used to and are very intuitive.”

Jablonski noted that Cast & Crew is focused on developing tools across the entire production lifecycle, citing the company’s acquisition of screenwriting software leader Final Draft early this year. He said: “It all begins with the script. You start producing data and that data flows all the way through the production process, through scheduling and budgeting, through the shoot and through post-production. At the end of the day, this digitized lifecycle provides producers and studios with a 360-degree view of project data, while allowing production employees easy access to the employment records they commonly request.”

Michael Jeffrey, VP of market solutions and partnerships at TiVo, was among those who pointed to the challenges media companies are facing with such data.

There’s especially challenges involved in “master data management [for content owners] with rights — or, as I call it, the collisions of rights data with master data management,” Jeffrey told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) in an interview at the event. There are “hurdles that we have to overcome in the ecosystem to bring that together” because there are “competing interests,” he said, explaining: “Some of the folks that create a lot of this content – from your prop artist to the music to the writer to the producer to people that do a lot of engineering — a lot of that work is subcontracted out, is trade secret — and the supply chain process is fraught with multiple systems with multiple data with multiple titles for that project.”

For the industry to “drive standardization there has to be something in it for all those suppliers in the value chain,” he said, “so, it’s not just a technology automation investment in standardized, normalized data.” Jeffrey added: “That is work that is going on right now and TiVo is one of those leading companies doing that.”

He went on to say: “I also think that we need to move closer into the value chain to incorporate the creators’ components that go into that work, and bring them in – so that there’s something in it for them to actually supply data and standardize … It’s real important. Some of the suppliers may actually consider it trade secret, and that makes it really tough to get data … standardized and normalized.” But he said: “I do think that opens up many opportunities to fragment long-form content, distribute and globalize for many different audiences.”

Jeffrey also said that “one of the key challenges is we’re at the stage now where there’s tremendous amounts of automation being introduced for content owners.” He said: “With it, enormous amounts of content metadata is being generated – unprecedented – so things like who is in that scene, what are the objects, semantic analysis, actually classifying imagery.”

During a panel session at the show, he spoke about a couple of customers that are taking and using different imagery for different peoples’ interests, based on their consumption and their profiles. Referring to that panel, he told MESA: “So, really personalizing a whole image display … based on that person’s preferences, interests and backgrounds for the identical content. That’s a whole new world of image-driven personalization.”

TiVo, he added, is “working with several of the content owners automating – extracting and using multiple imagery – not just sizes – but actually that have different visual meaning, with different scenes shot to convey a story and a message, which in turn gains engagement which drives consumption.” He predicted that “we’ll see even more personalization, more engaging images, more content … which, in turn will drive more consumption.”

That’s “great for the consumer, it’s great for the content owners and for the whole ecosystem,” he said, adding TiVo is “doing groundbreaking work with several broadcasters and studios in that exact area, with technology, automation and all of the metadata management around that.”

Earlier at the event, Scott Taylor, market development and strategy leader at Dun & Bradstreet Master Data, said aggressive adoption of standardized metadata across media companies, agencies and brand owners is drastically needed.