Top 5 Reasons Media and Entertainment Companies Should Care about Data Governance

The new normal

While earlier economic downturns led people to spend more time in front of their digital devices than ever before, the 2020s pandemic and subsequent economic downturn pushed considerably more people to shop online, work remotely, engage in activities online, and also consume more content from video sharing platforms and online streaming services.

Digital and mobile consumption of the media and entertainment (M&E) industry’s products is still expected to rise dramatically through 2025, generating increases such as 30% in virtual reality, 29% in cinema, 11% in out-of-home advertising, and 8% in internet advertising (global growth by segment, CAGR, 2020–2025 % – Source: PwC Perspectives from the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2021–2025). In line with all this growth will be an appropriate increase in data creation, storage capacity need, and processing necessity, in order to fully utilize the potential benefits all this data has to offer to their companies.

This situation presents many implications – primarily the opportunity for content creation, monetization, and advertising. However, in order to utilize these opportunities, the M&E industry must realize that they cannot be achieved before a less visible, underlying implication is addressed: A rapid increase in the amount of data generated by customers of media companies means that if this era of opportunity is to be fully exploited, all this data must be manageably processable every day.

Data governance stands at the start of every such initiative, for without properly defined data governance rules, no business can hope to efficiently process and gain added value from such a sheer amount of data.

Here are the top five reasons for media and entertainment companies to care about governing their data properly:

1. Operating in a globalizing market

The media and entertainment world are globalizing at a very fast pace. Content is no longer always being licensed to external territories, rather, it is being made available all over the world from its source. Studio owned streaming services such as Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and others are attempting to further their brands globally by directly offering their original content themselves, throughout the world.

Global expansion and licensing not only mean greater amounts of data but also having to keep separate and clearly defined versions of the same data, maintaining reporting service for business and regulatory purposes for each of them, and also understanding customer segmentation and trends of individual segments in their respective markets.

Accurity is built with the philosophy that every decision concerning data should be driven based on a business need. That is why Accurity enables you to capture your business world, thus creating a basis for describing your data, faithfully reflecting real-world connections and models.

2. Reporting and trendsetting

Reporting customer data has been known to be one of the most valuable business resources of the modern world for some time now. Being able to tap into the potential of what your data can reveal about your customers’ interests, opinions, viewing habits, or demographic information is now a solid cornerstone of analytics.

With the boom of streaming platforms and increase in market for short-format media rapidly spat out of services such as TikTok or YouTube, there is now more of this data, and it is of greater value to M&E companies than ever before.

In order to properly tap into the potential and make tangible use of customer data in reports, you must be able to trust your data and know the context and definitions of metrics used in your reports.

Accurity provides solutions to glossary definition of any metric including the relationships between them and their methods of calculation, effectively providing all users with clear context and information of what exactly their data mean. In addition, Accurity offers its users a web browser plugin that scans any text being read online e.g., Power BI reports, documentation, and get context of the defined business terms in your business glossary.

3. Increasing advertising revenues and customer retention

A follow-up from the previous point. Having clearly organized and well managed customer data opens the way to more effective targeting of consumers for any purpose, be it advertising, marketing, customer retention, loyalty, or experience. While in traditional media, advertising and show planning rarely goes beyond targeting a segment based on viewing time, online data generating media have the option to precisely target specific consumers based on the customer data gathered about them.

Knowing what data is important to any targeted customer-centric process and having it available in adequate quality, is crucial for any online media advertising effort.

Accurity enables its users to create rules for managing data and its quality, tapping into your databases to give you a detailed and constantly evolving overview of your data, looked at from a variety of business defined perspectives. Accurity’s data quality features help automate data quality management in order to create trust in your data. This means you will know that customers are being targeted correctly and not via inadequate quality records.

4. Regulatory pushback

“During the pandemic, power shifted to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix as e-commerce, digital advertising and time online boomed. But their success and increasing size have inspired a series of reactions and counterreactions around the world.” (Source: PwC Perspectives from the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2021–2025.)

As data become an increasingly more valuable commodity for M&E businesses, governments are swooping in to regulate how customer data is handled and monetized. More and more we will see data protection agencies requiring detailed reports on origins, transformative processes, end uses, and anonymization of data used to gain consumer insights, in order to demonstrate compliance with the latest data protection standards.

Forthcoming major additions to the regulatory landscape include the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), both proposed in December 2020. The DSA includes obligations for platforms to disclose to regulators such things as how their algorithms work, how decisions to remove content are taken, and the way advertisers target users. The DMA covers eight different sectors, aka Core Platforms Services (CPS), and includes obligations such as prohibiting the combining of data collected from two different services belonging to the same company.

Compliance cannot be achieved without managing processes, data, and metadata, and using all of these to create a comprehensive map of your data landscape.

Accurity includes solutions for describing business processes and the data they affect and are being affected by. It allows users to create a detailed process map of which parts of the process model connect to data in the data catalog or business objects of your business model, and in what way. This means all data systems can be effectively described and mapped to individual processes. Accurity assists businesses with their regulatory requirements providing users with valuable tools to help meet these rules.

5. Industry digitalization

Data about customers and service operations is not the only type of data that should be a major concern for media and entertainment businesses. As the industry digitalizes and moves more of their content online, the need to manage and govern all this data becomes paramount. Making content available worldwide and for licensing brings its own set of data complications that need to be solved.

Centralizing metadata fields, objects, classes, and schemas for all systems starts to become crucial along with managing the relations/mapping between those schemas, objects, and metadata fields.

Robust tools are needed that enable visualization of data assets and their connection to the various systems while being able to create proper business lineage with an overview of exactly what the data contains.

Accurity empowers its users to catalog and describe data from several business and technical perspectives in varying degrees of detail. It includes features for describing, visualizing, and managing connections and lineages between data and its various representations. It also now comes with artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools to assist with the discovery of these lineages.

Preparing now for the future

Between now and 2025, the media and entertainment sector is expected to further grow by 1-trillion USD with the areas of the industry that generate the most data leading the charge. While traditional media are here to stay, it is digital streaming and content distribution platforms where the focus of the action is going to be. The “streaming service” business model is expected to become even more prevalent in the coming years.

Amidst not only technology shifts, but also consumer trend and business model transformations, M&E companies need reliable tools to help them ensure efficient and safe data governance that is easy for business users to comprehend and use.

If your company would be interested in a comprehensive but easy to get started with and use, data management tool, why not schedule a free demo session with us to see what Accurity can do for you firsthand. We can discuss the individual needs of your business and adjust your Accurity experience to best meet them.