HPA 2016: Big Data for Dollars

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—It’s all right there in the numbers. From the key to interactive advertising to creating responsive content. It’s in the data, Steve Wong of Siemens and media technology consultant, Christy King, said Wednesday at the HPA Technology Retreat.

Wong talked about the necessity of having the proper metadata for interactive advertising. He said there is now “an opportunity then to license metadata rights. Think of the opportunity to negotiate now with another revenue stream.”

King, who collected and interpreted data for the UFC, spoke to specific applications. She said she is working with companies introducing new content for over-the-top Internet delivery.

“We’re starting to see people looking at data around titles that already exist, and what opportunities they present,” she said.

When King says “data,” she means everything, not just the shoot date and the technology used, but information about the content within the content. E.g., the city in which action is taking place, an actor’s nationality, their brand of clothing, the time of day in a scene, the items in the scene, the age of the characters and their emotions.

On the audience side of the screen, a company by the name of “Canvs” gleaned social media and identified 4 million terms that define emotions, King said. They narrowed it down to a lexicon and created a timeline bar chart of “reactions” so clients could determine how people are responding emotionally to content based on their social media posts.

King also pointed out that genres aren’t simple anymore. She said Netflix recognizes a multitude of “discrete” genres.

“Horror with 14 knives only shot at night is a genre,” she said.

There are 597 genres that include the term, “about marriage.”

One issue here is “scope creep,” where you’re just collecting and looking at too much stuff, King said. There need to be best practices and possible a data chief to mine data and deliver the results to creative so they can, in turn, respond to audience appeal.