OTTAWA – Producers, broadcasters and distributors have talked for years about the critical importance of having deeper access and understanding of customer or viewer data.
A panel at the Canadian Media Producer’s Association annual Prime Time event in Ottawa last week said more granular data on viewing habits has the potential to both improve programming and target audiences with more compelling content.
Until recently, this data has been available for broadcasters but largely elusive for producers. Now, however, companies like Parrot Analytics and Watpad are demonstrating that they can provide content creators with the data they need to make content viewers want.
Parrot Analytics, for example, has leveraged a data analytics platform initially developed to track pirated content downloads, to provide its customers with a weighting coefficient that signals the popularity of a piece of content.
Wared Seger, co-founder and chief executive at Parrot Analytics, explained its global platform measures the popularity of programming based on viewer engagement and interaction. The weighting system cuts across traditional viewing but also includes social media interaction through Facebook and Twitter as well as searches through engines such as Google, all with the goal of providing its content customers a single popularity score.
“What we developed was a system that allows us to weight the different signals according to how much demand that they represent,” he said, adding that streaming three episodes of a show back-to-back would represent a stronger demand signal than clicking the “like” button on the show’s Facebook page.
“So we weight each of those different signals that we capture be it social, or blogging or video streaming into a signal metric that you can get a bottom line truth of how much demand is there for my content in any given market around the world,” said Seger.
The Parrot Analytics data can do much more than too. For example, Seger says it can determine which parts of the world have the highest demand for a particular piece of content. He used the example of Shaftesbury’s Murdoch Mysteries over the previous 30 days. While one might expect Canada to be in the top spot, it wasn’t. Hungary was the country with the highest rating. Croatia had the second highest demand and Luxembourg was in third spot, which is interesting because Shaftesbury doesn’t have a distribution deal for the small European country. This means all viewing is done illegally.
The data demonstrates that Shaftesbury should be trying to secure a proper distribution agreement for Luxembourg.
The science around measuring viewer attitudes to programming and even to particular pieces of a specific program can seem like science fiction. Christina Jennings, chair of the board and CEO at Shaftsbury, spoke about V Morgan is Dead, a program the company did with RBC. Rather than just doing traditional focus group testing to get feedback on the show, RBC brought in Brainsights, a Toronto-based company, to actually measure the brain waves of a select group of people while watching a program.
“We could see when actually people would tune out of your show because that camera angle was too wide.” – Christina Jennings, Shaftsbury
By attaching electrodes to the heads of the viewers, Brainsights was able to measure in real time the reaction to the show based on three levels: attention, connection and encoding. The data revealed that viewers didn’t like a specific character and tuned out of the show at specific points. It was astonishing, said Jennings.
“We could see when actually people would tune out of your show because that camera angle was too wide,” she said. “It was a mind opener. We’re now talking to this company and I’ll come back next year and tell you if this works.”
While Jennings acknowledged that this is a bit of the future, using social media to measure viewer engagement is critical. Three or four years ago, there wasn’t a social media department at Shaftesbury, now there is a staff of five who are constantly interacting with viewers.
“You can’t not do it. You have to do it,” she said.
Watpad, a social network for readers and writers, is also mining the data it has on readers’ engagement with content in order to turn the written word into films and TV series. This is becoming very important, noted Aron Levitz, head of Watpad Studios, because the big brands are looking for this type of information to feed the new content beast.
Data is about helping content creators make smarter and more successful decisions. So by using data, there is perhaps a 10% better chance at success to get to season two or season four or eight rather than busting at a pilot.
The big players are spending more and more money so they want to reduce risk and data is their way to do it, he added.
