The Change is Real: Industry Trends and Highlights

The ongoing changes in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry are often headline-grabbers themselves. New relationships between producers, distributors, and audiences have redefined the industry. In this environment the majority — well over three quarters — of M&E leaders are extremely or very concerned with the change in competition, change in audience behavior in media consumption, and with the protection of intellectual property.

In response, M&E companies are looking to change their relationship with data, as well as the processes and staff to use the data and analytics, to enable data-driven decision making. This is especially true when it comes to data related to audience behavior. Many companies have begun to use new analytic methods and new data types and sources. They have also started to track new metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) while at the same time exposing data from audience analytics solutions to a wider set of decision makers across all levels of the company.

In the past 12 – 24 months

• 81% of M&E companies have expanded the number and/or type of analytic techniques they use. For example, predictive analytics is used by many to augment descriptive views of data; and a growing number of companies are looking for prescriptive advice from the technology.
• 67% of M&E companies have started using new metrics or KPIs. The introduction of new metrics and KPIs signals a willingness to challenge the status quo, to ask new questions, to measure the business is new ways.
• 63% of M&E companies have expanded the number of data types and/or sources being analyzed. More diverse internal and external data is being used. For example, over 90% of M&E companies in our study are now incorporating social media data and mobile content consumption data. These audience data are used to augment audience behavioral data from other internal and external systems and sources.
• 77% of M&E companies have made audience analytics solutions and the data and information coming from them available to more decision makers at all levels.

Some of the new data types or sources include chatter from social media that is being used to enhance the data sets needed to perform audience analytics. These data types are combined to develop more complete views into audience consumption and behavior patterns. In the case of each data type shown in the following figure, study respondents indicated that they analyze the data more frequently in combination with one or more other data types rather than stand-alone.

Yet still only 38% of M&E companies completely agree that audience data available to them for decision making is complete. There is more work to be done to ensure that all decision makers, whether they make strategic, operational, or tactical decisions, have access to all relevant data. This is one of the challenges facing M&E companies, but there are also others that emerged from our study as is shown on the Challenges and Opportunities section of this iView.