HITS

By Steve Rosenberg, COO, Premiere Digital –

A decade-plus into digital distribution the marketplace looks as expected, with millions of avails across hundreds of retailers and platforms in more than 100 territories. However, product lifecycle management for distribution (or storefront management) has lagged far behind what it needs to be due to a series of disconnected portals, internal systems, pools of data, emails, spreadsheets and manual processes.

The results are inefficiency and money left on the table for both content owners and distributors. The goal of storefront management is to assist content owners and distributors in connecting consumers with content. This requires data, data correlation, research, decisions, execution and refinement.

The goal with any product lifecycle storefront management software solution is to drive cost savings and monetization by enabling organizations to eliminate manual tasks, gain business intelligence, operate at scale, work entire catalogs, correlate social media interest to availability, update storefronts and execute social media advertising.

Premiere Digital’s Storefront offering aims to do just that, with a big-data back-end designed specifically to support content distribution. It has applicability for transactional VOD/EST, SVOD, ad-based VOD and even pay and free TV. The software and its many use cases apply to content owners and distributors of all sizes, handles both features and TV, and supports all territories.

First implemented by major studios in 2013 for management and delivery of Temporary Price Reductions to iTunes, Storefront and its dataset have grown dramatically to support numerous use cases for content owners and distributors and has integrated modules for library, updates and marketing.

The key components powering Storefront’s modules are daily refreshed data, title correlation, and functional UI. These components enable the most basic to the most complex use cases and create the foundation to correlate other data sources (e.g., POS data, EPGs, sentiment data, etc.) against the avails, which in turn drives more use cases and/or automation.

Meaningful data

There’s a lot of data. Considering the sheer volume of avails, it’s easy to understand the magnitude of the challenge and complexity behind providing a meaningful solution. Adding to the complexity is the fact that availabilities and interest levels are perpetually growing and constantly in flux, so daily information is critical.

Title correlation across platforms is the only way to make the data meaningful. This is a challenge unto itself since there isn’t a ubiquitous content ID in use across the marketplace that’s associated with all availabilities used by all market participants. To solve for this, Storefront includes a title correlation engine that continually associates features and TV series across the global dataset. With the data gathering and correlation engine in place we can efficiently add new title oriented data sources as the demands of the user base require.

Storefront’s UI contains smart dashboards, extensive search/filer, alerts, saved filters, data export and data sharing that enables users to quickly and easily find the data they are interested in seeing. This allows teams across an organization to collaborate and leverage the system as needed for their function.

Viewing, searching and analyzing avails is done in the library module. There are dashboards to support overall search, avail exceptions reporting, competitive price analysis and charting/ placement review. We’ve created numerous filters (location, platform, provider, content type, offer type, genre, price, release year, territory, region and more) that allow users to easily search the data set as it applies to specific areas of interest or responsibility. Users can also search by title or actor as needed.

Search results are displayed in the dashboard with the ability to drill down to the individual avail level. Results can also be sent directly to the updates or marketing module in order execute changes on storefronts or create/ deliver ad campaigns. This functionality can eliminate thousands of hours of manual work and enable use cases that until now have been impossible to consider, thereby limiting opportunities.

The updates module provides the ability to make changes to storefronts. Historically this has been a tedious process and thereby typically done on a limited basis compared to the volume of actual storefront avails. With Storefront, executing changes is dramatically simplified. It can be done for single title, retailer, territory combinations or in bulk across the catalogs, territories and retailers. Users can queue up thousands of updates at once, refine as needed right from the dashboard, and then push the changes to storefronts. Updates can be temporary or permanent and cover a wide array of changes to availabilities (e.g., price, clearance, dates, pre-orders, etc.). The ability to work in one system across retailers also deliveries greater efficiency and auditability.

Marketing applications

Creating a fully localized global marketing campaign, or even a language specific marketing campaign, can be very time consuming and expensive. Correlating the interest in content against availabilities by territory and language at scale just hasn’t been possible until now. Storefront Marketing (in beta) does just this. It starts by correlating interest levels on Facebook to content availability at retail.

Not only are we correlating interest points against the availability but doing so by Facebook user language settings. This enables ad campaigns to be targeted to users by the language they speak, for content available in the corresponding language, in the territory where they are located.

This gives content owners and retailers a highly scalable way to deliver off-platform marketing to interested consumers for new release/catalog content or currently available or even upcoming programming (SVOD, AVOD, FOD, linear broadcast). If your organization is after transactions, subscriptions or viewership and you believe in social media advertising, then Storefront Marketing is a powerful tool that can drive the underlying tasks at scale.

Use cases range from basic to complex. For example, a basic use case is “Availed, Not Live.” This sounds simple but when you have millions of avails it’s a needle-in-the-haystack type of problem. In the transactional space the problem is compounded by the fact that there are frequent pricing and availability changes so keeping the platform in sync with avails is an ongoing challenge. Storefront solves for this with its Exceptions Dashboard that displays when the platform data is different than the content owner avail data.

A common example of “Availed, Not Live” is a missing VOD avail. As VOD goes in and out of window it’s common for one to accidentally not be live. Depending on the title, platform and territory this could add up to significant revenue by the time the issue is discovered. Using Storefront, if the avail exception can be fixed by the system, there will be a fix icon next to the avail exception which can be clicked to send the fix to the platform.

Driving sales though temporary price changes is another common use case. With the entire library easily searchable content owners can easily take advantage of these opportunities. For example, a content owner should be able to see all horror titles / availabilities worldwide, that are more than five years old, priced higher than $10. Then within minutes, execute a price reduction to $4.99 during October, generate a fully localized worldwide ad campaign targeted to social media users interested in those titles (and aspects of those titles) and have it delivered to the targeted consumers in their native language. From there, review results, refine as needed and repeat.

There are numerous other use cases for analysis and action. Examples include avail and price parity analysis, avail placement/charting analysis, competitive pricing analysis, price aging analysis, pre-live monitoring, platform availability change awareness, advanced availability search, single/multi-platform updates, EMA avail delivery, avail normalization, social media interest level correlation, ad campaign localization and delivery and more. With POS data integration, predictive price analysis and auto execution based on results are completely possible.

The business intelligence combined with the ability to execute updates to storefronts and/or social media advertising drives what everyone is truly interested in; creating a great content offering and connecting consumers to it. However, the tasks required to execute are complex and shouldn’t be underestimated.

—-

Click here to translate this article
Click here to download the complete .PDF version of this article
Click here to download the entire Winter 2018 M&E Journal