[Music] Hello, welcome back to the movie marketing and distribution podcast powered by Ashi U. My name is Alex Stoltz, as well as hosting this show. I'm head of film here at Ashi U, and I will spell that about his US H-E-E-R-U, and you can find out more about us at ashiu.com. So, as anyone knows, listening to this show, analytics and data are a recurring theme. More specifically, how can we make better use of data to make smarter, more informed decisions? How can we understand a market more deeply? So, we can create products and campaigns that are effective and cut through. Well, Ashi U were focusing a lot on the marketing end of this process. My guest today is diving into the data from the production and, well, across the whole entertainment spectrum, in fact, Angelie Mida is the co-founder and CEO of Diesel Labs, a content analytics company that addresses the toughest questions facing media companies today, from what to produce to where to distribute and market it. And so doing, they are able to help their clients devise winning content strategies to attract and engage audiences worldwide. And before starting Diesel Labs, Angelie was the global director of media research at Twitter, where she developed the playbook for television, illuminating the synergies and opportunities across traditional and new media. I am so looking forward to this conversation today. I feel like I'm going to be maybe geeking out a little bit. I hope that's going to be okay with everyone. And really, yeah, looking forward to diving into this area of someone who shares the same passion in innovating and data and analytics in the entertainment industries. Angelie, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited and I will be geeking out right there with you. I hope that I'll have the exciting data. Excellent. I love it. I love it if you could start. Okay, just tell me about how Diesel Labs came about. Because, particularly your journey from Twitter, yeah, just tell me what the Genesis was, please. Absolutely. So my story actually starts a tiny bit before Twitter. I was at a company called Bluefin Labs, which it's been over a decade now, but I feel like it's worth mentioning. We were pioneering social TV analytics back then. And that's really when I started studying how people will respond to content that they're watching in places like Facebook or Twitter or their favorite social media platform. And so that in and of itself became kind of a really strong signal, if you will, for what audiences were doing. And that's precisely what we were measuring back then. That company actually ended up getting acquired by Twitter, which is how I found myself in the role of global media, global managing director for media research and agency research. And it was such a privilege to do that work, essentially trying to understand how everything from World Cup to your small, you know, TV episode on a Wednesday afternoon could shape the entire conversation and what was happening in spaces like Twitter, like Facebook, etc. I still vividly remember, okay, this is going to age me completely, but I'm going to tell the story anyway. You might recall the fiasco with the blue, black, gold, beige dress. Does this rig a bell? You may have seen how that basically popped from social into linear television within a 24-hour cycle. So for those of you who remember seeing it online and remember looking at the photo and having your own interpretation of the dress colors, that's just a great example of how stories, narratives, reactions can move seamlessly, not just from digital into linear content, but also back and forth, if you will. So I remember, you know, within hours of that hitting the Twitter platform, we were seeing it all over the morning news and trying to understand how something became such a sensation overnight. And so those were the things we were studying. It was around that time that I also recognized that the way we were defining content had fundamentally changed. If something like that dress could become TV newsworthy, then we're in a weird way only limiting ourselves to looking at certain flavors of content and ignoring all of these other kind of emerging areas, things like esports and gaming, video gaming, podcasts, even live streams today, which compete and vie for all of our time, you know, just alongside theatrical releases, streaming releases, etc. So it was then that we kind of got our old team back together in a way to create diesel labs. And we are now a content intelligence company studying 100% of the reactions and attention that audiences are paying to contents across the entire spectrum of social and video platforms where you can share your thoughts and feelings on that material. And so it's been a very exciting time to take all of that signal and turn it into something really useful for our partners who are making content, distributing content, etc. Wow. Yeah. It's so exciting. And it's really helpful to hear that that journey and how you came into this space. So tell me, tell me about the metrics you are using, you're looking across social, how, what kind of data points are you providing to studios, for example? It's a long list, but I kind of simplified it into two buckets. So one bucket is all of the vast user level data that we have. And so this brings me around to this kind of insight that we had a while ago, which is you look at platforms like Netflix or like, you know, Hulu or Disney Plus. These platforms are amazing. They deliver fantastic content. They keep all of us engaged, but it's important to remember that they don't have deep user level understanding of what's going on. So think about Netflix, just for example, they mostly have data at the account or profile level. And I think we can all agree that a lot of people share profiles, share accounts. It's very kind of confusing. It's not a perfect one-to-one ratio. So when it comes to understanding who the actual audience is, who those users are, it becomes a little bit tricky. That's one of the areas where diesel labs actually has that user level insight because we can see all the people within spaces like Twitter, like YouTube, like Reddit, for example. We have that user level understanding, which means not only can we derive from that things like demographics, but we also know the interest profiles of all those individuals across everything else that they care about. And I should pause here to share that we absolutely anonymize and aggregate all of the data we pull in. And we do not make any kind of user level information available, a specific as individuals, to the partners we work with. It's a really important part of our own data, protection, and privacy, you know, ethic, if you will, to make sure that we're cleaning that up, aggregating it, anonymizing it so that our clients can get everything they need out of it, but we're protecting the users as well. So that's kind of one of the big buckets, and then the other big bucket is obviously volumetric, right? Which is, you know, spaces like Facebook, for example, very, very big populist places with lots going on, but they're a little bit harder to tap into that user level data because a lot of those profiles are private. So those two things together allow us to not only understand the volumes of conversation, but who is engaging? And between those two things, that's the type of information that we can share. So we know, for example, things like, hey, for the Barbie movie, we know that right now, the vast majority of engagement, about 50-50, is coming from spaces like TikTok and YouTube. We know for Spider-Man, for example, that just came out this past weekend that the vast majority was on TikTok, but when you look at Ant-Man, we can see a lot of the engagement was in spaces like Twitter and Facebook. So that's just one of the ways we can look at the information, and then of course, from there, you can go as far into the weeds as we need to go, which are how are people engaging? Are they making their own comments or engaging with things? Are they watching video? What are they doing? And this kind of information is precisely what our partners need to make the best decisions that they can. So what stage of people using this data do you find? Is it right of a start in terms of green lighting or further down the line? That's a great question. And right now, I think for the most part, there are kind of three major application areas of the data that we've seen take off with our partners. Number one is in the content strategy area. So this is kind of like in the green light zone, although I would say maybe it's maybe even a little bit upstream from that, to be honest, because think about this problem, which is let's say your Netflix, and let's say you know exactly what people are watching on your platform, but you actually have no idea when people lean your platform to go watch Apple TV Plus or Peacock or Paramount Plus or Disney, whatever it might be, you lose track of them. So how do you actually know what you're missing in terms of what to make? So from a catalog composition,
perspective, we're able to actually make that understanding to say, hey, 10% of your audience from X, Y, Z title went over here to watch this other high-end sophisticated drama. We should be thinking about that kind of content to fulfill the needs of this particular audience segment. So that's one area we call that the content strategy application, if you will. Then of course, there's marketing, which is everyone's favorite topic. And I know that's what we're here to talk a little bit about today, too, which is, how do you break through in a world, in a universe that's as cluttered as it is right now. I think right now, at last count, we had over almost 3,000 brand new pieces of content that we measured that came out last year. That's a staggering amount of content and very large compared to where we were maybe 10 years ago. So fundamentally, the way that we think about getting people to become aware about content has completely shifted in the last couple of years. So it's become a big, big challenge. And then there's kind of the third, which is the audience research. Who ended up watching it? Who should you market it to your theatrical releases when they become digitally available? All of that kind of audience research is kind of what the tail end, if you want to think of it like that. Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. Let's jump on the marketing. Okay. A little bit, I suppose. And think about, I suppose, yeah, what are some of the insights for you? You are uncovering their, obviously, it must be different, different pieces of content, but are there some sort of interesting trends or how do you, yeah, how have you been presenting that recently? Yeah. Absolutely. I think, and you reminded me of kind of one other point, which is that marketing right now is so intrinsically connected to wanting to inspire audiences also to talk about and anticipate content. And the reason that has become so important is, you know, I always say about 10 years ago, let's say you and I were having this conversation, you know, back in the day, you could tell me that a particular TV show had a 2.0 and that would tell me almost everything I needed to know about the content, right? It would tell me how many people watched it, it would tell me the monetization potential of that show, everything was tied up in that one neat little number. Today, you can have millions of people watching something, but if no one is talking about it, how does that actually drive a subscription economy? It actually does not. So when you think about the business model of a Netflix or the business model of a Disney Plus, these platforms are trying to drive greater adoption, greater subscriptions, if you will, of their platform. And really the way to do that is to make sure your audience is never let anyone else forget that your platform has some of the best content out there. And so that's why we strongly feel that these metrics that we're just now, you know, we're developing them now. And of course, iterating on them. And surely, there's, you know, still more work to be done. But it's so important to look at those two things side by side. And I'll give you a great example from a couple years ago. You watched Squid Game, I think, probably. Of course. Okay, all right. Did you watch Red Notice on Netflix as well? I know. I didn't watch Red Notice. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. I'm not trying to, this isn't a trick question. I promise. I was just curious. I did end up watching both of them at the hazard of the job. But both of them did remarkably well in terms of viewership as we know, because of course, Squid Game was on the press for being such a surprise, run away hit. And Red Notice was also in the press for being probably at the time. I think one of Netflix's most watched films. It was, you know, star studded, super, you know, heavy budgets, et cetera. The difference between the two was that Squid Game had 30 times the engagement that Red Notice did. And that's a remarkable difference. I once say, when I say engagement, I mean people talking about it in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all these different spaces, engaging with content related to those topics. And that made a massive difference because I believe it was Netflix themselves whose data came out to say that Squid Game was worth almost a billion dollars to them in terms of the shows intrinsic value back to the platform. And I believe that that is very just directly tied to the fact that everyone felt like they had to watch Squid Game to be a part of the conversation in that moment. So I know I'm answering your question in a very convoluted way pardon me for that. The question is really about marketing, but from where I sit, marketing is about, of course, breaking through to audiences, making them aware of what's going on, but also inspiring enthusiasm so that everyone else also finds out about your content because marketing dollars can really only go so far. Barbie is a great example of that. They did some great marketing over the course. And I know the movies on the cusp of coming out, but dropping stills and imagery from the production, kind of teasing audiences with what's to come. These beautiful vivid, you know, with that Barbie pink imagery kind of all over the place. And so we're already seeing that right now, Barbie is one of the most highly anticipated films of the year. Thanks largely to a lot of that marketing. And I know you would argue, well, Barbie is a well-known beloved figure. I could say the same for almost all the other films that have done really well this year, almost all of them are franchises are based on characters that we already know. So just pointing out that right now, you know, getting audiences excited about actually going to see something is, you know, a tremendous achievement. You'll listen to the movie marketing and distribution podcast powered by Usher you. How is your marketing strategy right now? Are there areas you want to improve? Or perhaps you are looking for some fresh inspiration? And ideas on how to remain ahead of the curve. While the Usher you marketing scorecard is a completely free resource to identify your marketing strengths and opportunities in less than five minutes, head over to scorecard.usheru.com. And you receive a personalized report on your marketing. What's working well? Areas of improvement and quick wins. So that's scorecard.usheru.com. Score your marketing today with Usher you at scorecard.usheru.com. And now back to the show. It seems like the marketing and the content creation piece is so, they're so, they're so fused right because Barbie, I saw portray Olivia the day. Wow, it looks amazing. And, but not what I was necessarily expects. And they've taken such a really interesting way to approach that IP. And that's so fresh and original and incredibly remarkable. And I suppose it's bringing these, guess what you're doing? You're also bringing these marketing insights into the content strategy piece. And so when you're devising, when you're in production, when you're in your own development, you're thinking about these things about how I can really pop in the space. Absolutely. You know, we have insights on people who engage with Barbie. What are their favorite favorite musicians? Who are their favorite celebrities? Who are their favorite influencers? And again, being able to just seamlessly understand all of that information if you're a decision maker. And again, I'm certainly not saying that, you know, there's no creativity left in the process. I'm the first one to say that, you know, the creative aspect of generating new and fresh, exciting content is so critically important. But if you're, you know, deciding between two individuals, two different music tracks, couple different things are trying to figure out which influencer to bring on. Sometimes that data can point you in the right direction. And at least help guide some of the decision making even if at the end of the day, it's the creative folks who make that final call. And so that's kind of how we're thinking about funneling some of this insight to our partners to help them with all of that, that great work. Yeah. Yeah. For costing as well. I'm sure it's pretty helpful. It's very, very interesting. And we sometimes get asked, you know, hey, there is, you know, so and so celebrity or talent is on the market. And we're thinking about putting them in a, you know, X number of camera comedy sitcom with, you know, this kind of setup, what would that look like? And those are other things that we can do as well as essentially marry together, you know, like content, comps. If you want to think of it like that to actually create a proxy for how well, which audience we think is going to really like this kind of content. And that also helps our partners figure out like, hey, is this the audience that we really need to engage right now? You know, is this a segment for us that is lagging behind and not watching as much as we'd hope? So can we target something, you know, you know, can we design something for this particular group to keep them really happy with our service and our offerings? Yeah. I think that, yeah, it's really interesting to reframe it around engagements and its quality is obviously really important. But is that it's also that quality?
of how it resonates with people and how they share it. And we've talked about TikTok quite a bit on this show, and particularly on the marketing campaign. And some people have talked about how they have found with some campaigns they've run on TikTok that they got good engagement, great engagement in times at times, but that didn't translate to people then buying a ticket at the theatre. And I wonder if just how you, if you have any thoughts on that, I know it's no easy answer, but just the balancing that thing about people enjoying entertainment on the platform itself and then bringing it back into the. Actually going to do something afterwards. I feel like that's the big challenge for marketers in media and entertainment, but also outside right now because there is just so many. There are so many new spaces where we can talk to people, right? One of the things we do just to kind of directly answer your question and then I might opine on some of the other ways is we actually look for a signal we call anticipation. So it's one thing to like or share a particular piece of content with your social network just because you think it's funny or you think, "Oh, this is my favorite celebrity or what have you." It's another thing to actually vocalize, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to go see something." And that's one of the signals that we measure here. So in addition to knowing, "Hey, your campaign right now is doing very well in terms of engagement, which is wonderful, is are we seeing a proportional amount of people who are actually stating their intent, if that makes sense?" And that becomes a really important vector of our data that people look at. In addition to the opposite metric, which is people who are either talking about canceling a service or people who are talking about not being excited to go see something. So we look at both of those streams kind of together. The canceler conversation or engagement, as we call it, has become super, super interesting. You might recall Netflix very recently changed one of their password sharing policies, right? And instituted an upcharge if they can detect that you might have multiple people tapping into your service. But the canceler conversation, prior to that event, that was the largest for Netflix, was when they had a live stream technical issue a couple weeks earlier. And give me one second and I'll pull up the information here. But I believe it was for a lot of blind, if I'm not mistaken, where they had a technical snafu and they were supposed to have a live airing, which didn't actually occur. And it ended up getting posted several hours later in its entirety. And so it's very, very interesting to see what kinds of, what's the rationale for people to say they don't want to see something or they want to cancel a service and happen we get smart about that. And no conversation in today's day and age would be complete without me mentioning generative AI at least once. So I'll mention it here and then I promise I won't break it up again. But those are some of the new tools we're applying to all of this information to be able to very quickly and in real time, summarize the sort of temperature of what's going on with audiences so that our partners are, you know, on their toes, if that makes sense, and able to react to things in real time. Yeah, that sounds, that sounds very exciting. Can we talk a bit about branding and how you see branding in the entertainment space? I guess we've been talking a lot about the different platforms and they have their own unique brand. And there's brands like Barbie and Squid Game. I don't have a specific question, but I'm interested, I suppose, in how you see consumers responding to different brands. And yeah, and you know, does each piece of content really have its own brand? Like that is it's so so interesting that you're bringing this up now because I feel like one of the questions we're getting asked about a lot. So you can think of it like this. So here at these alabs for the most part, most of our partners were very just focused on launching their own services, their own new content, etc. These past couple of years, but lately now we have, you know, people who are asking us, hey, you know what, I really need to pay attention to my competition here. What's going on with these other platforms that are essentially stealing share away from me or my content or my company or my portfolio. And to kind of go back to your point about brands, I liken it a little bit to franchises because I think the under, if I unpack your question a little bit, the question is, hey, you know, Disney has obviously done up like untouchably good job in terms of turning their IP into repeat successes. Right. So you can take a frozen, you can take a marvel or a Lucas. These are now, first of all, their cultural. I don't even know what to call them anchors. These are things that everyone knows about they've become part of our zeitgeist. But then on top of that, we can all understand and appreciate the actual value that the fact that you can put out a movie every couple of months in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and almost guarantee a certain box office return is a very lucrative and it's a stable, it's a stabilizing factor when you think about the business of producing content at the risk that comes in with that. And you can actually see that folks are striving for their own franchises. So Squid Game is a great example and I know we're talking about ancient content at this point, but I believe there is, you know, a reality show that's coming out based on the Squid Game premise. And so understanding out of the, for example, and I'll just stay on the Netflix topic, for example, Netflix puts out almost 750 pieces of content last year. And so I think the ability to see out of those 750 titles, which of which ones actually kind of had that escape velocity and never went away entirely, which were the ones that people still talked about a few months of, you know, a year after they came out and are those the ones that you flip the switch on and then turn those into something or attempt to turn those into something that could be a continuation of the story. And I'm a branding perspective, you know, when you think about how do you create a foothold, how do you, how do you create a regular drum beat so that people on Netflix know that there's always going to be that next thing that they're going to watch and it's familiar and they are excited about it. And so that's the challenge that sits ahead for everybody and you know, Max has done a great job where almost this entire year every weekend we've had some blockbuster, you know, episode area of some show that we all know and love. And I think that making their own approach, but I think that having those recognizable brands in your portfolio is an incredibly important. It's become critically important to mitigate that churn, which is such a one of those things that everyone is trying to get a handle on. This is being great and jelly and really felt like I've already learned a lot. I'd love if you could share some thoughts advice for anyone listening who is involved in the content production side or looking to market a piece of content. What would you, what would you council them? Well, there's quite a lot that I know everyone is worrying about these days. I think where I would go would be. I just I feel that we are in a different era, you know, we all kind of raise it as oh we're in the streaming more is and what have you and we certainly are there clearly is, you know, more content than any one person can consume. But I think the way that we are using content today is different than how we were using it 10 years ago where you turned on a TV set and everything was kind of linearly programmed for you. So my only my my big advice and one of the things we think about here a lot of diesel is what is the overall objective now that content is essentially consumed asymmetrically on demand whenever you want in a lot of these spaces. How what is the objective of an individual title and an overall offering to to your audience, thinking about it's like just having the on the taking the step back and looking at it from that perspective, I think opens the. It opens the need to have better data better understanding on what's going on with audiences what's going on you know you. It's sort of one of those things were like 10 years ago everyone was just putting out a reality show right we know that that became a big. You know easy win for folks because those tend to be smaller on the budget side but had a greater outsides impact in terms of the viewership what is what is that now today sort of how do you keep people happy with the diversity of content that they want to see and so that's one of the questions we get a lot from our partners and that's one of the things we strive to provide inside and information on that can you know augment the information that you might already have internally is just is understanding the role that the content plays overall. content plays overall and of course.
from a marketing perspective. And I think we covered this a tiny bit, but it's not just about knowing 10 movies in a year anymore. It's 3,000 pieces of content. How many of them can one person possibly be aware of, let alone sit down and actually watch? So understanding the role that your content plays and how much effort, what you need to do to actually cut through and get audiences excited about that. And what signal can you tap into to make sure that you're accomplishing those goals? Those are some of the big things that we are focused on right now. And we know our partners are also being very thoughtful about. It's one big entertainment ecosystem, isn't it? And being able to think about it in that way is definitely mind, expanding and very helpful. Yeah. And I think just from our perspective, I would say only one last thing, which is I feel where audiences are actually going to need more and better information too very soon. So it reminds me of the old and day the whole day with TV guides and the glossy first few pages where you learned about all of the new stuff and how difficult it is now to find new stuff, right? Because you have to kind of go individually into every app. And then within the apps, seek out the content that you're looking for. And so I think there's also, there's another challenge for us as an industry to solve, which is how do we actually make that? How do we make it easier on audiences to find what they're looking for and to find something great to watch when they sit down on the couch? So those are just a few other things that we're thinking about here. I can see what you're doing. There's a potential to flip it around back to the consumer and provide a curation. And yeah, if you like this, then you're likely to like that. If you like this podcast, then you may enjoy this TV show. So-- Exactly. Are you feeling like there's a big hole in your life? Since succession ended, well, here's where. So here are the three things. Succession people all branched off to go watch. In case one of these has helped ease the pain of the show being over. That sounds like a great product. I look forward to seeing the value in the market in the near future. I'm really good on it. Yeah. I'm sure you've got many other things to do. And Jodie, thank you so much for taking the time. I've really enjoyed this. How do people find out more about you and diesel apps? Yeah, happy to help anytime. So we're at dieselabs.com. In case you want to go poke around in some of our materials, or I'm on Twitter at @amidha, which is just my first initial and my last name. And would welcome anyone reaching out to find out more or to share thoughts and ideas with us. We're always on the lookout for cool new things to try. Amazing. Thanks so much for joining me, Shay. All right. Have a great one. Thanks for having me. Keep it listening to the movie Marketing and Distribution podcast powered by Ashi. If you want to know more about how Ashi you can transform your marketing and distribution, just head over to ashiu.com. Or, why not drop me an email at
[email protected]. But in the meantime, thank you again for listening and look forward to welcoming you back on the podcast. Very soon.
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