The challenge
Making Best Use of Existing Data Resources
The company’s Global TV Distribution arm generates over $3 billion in revenue annually. Fincons software engineer and consultant Bruce Bui (former PDG) has been working with the company Distribution Sales Analytics and Data Insights team for five years to help the company make better use of existing resources and drive greater value.
“Fincons has been working with the company for 10 years now,” says Bruce. “Before we came in, teams operated in disparate systems and their operations and processes were becoming more complex. What we did was build out the distribution arm’s proprietary software so they could more easily enter in licensing information about where they sold and who they sold to, in turn generating data that connected better with different functioning areas like financing and budgeting. Fincons’s value to the company has been its ability to identify and create forward-thinking solutions in a dynamic industry.”
As noted by Bruce, this kind of data is critical for the company. “In the war of the streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services, a lot of different studios launched their own over-the-top (OTT) or SVOD services and started pulling back their content. The company was one of the only distributors that decided not to take that route.” Instead, the company is licensing a mix of new content and surfacing its deeper library to drive revenue growth.
The solution
Delivering Data Stewardship
To ensure that both core and deep library titles—those that are 20 years old or more—generate revenue, robust data analytics is critical. To do that, Fincons Group took on the role of data stewards. Or, as Bruce put it: “We were teaching them to use what they already had.”
This started with the establishment of a core network. “We had one central team that pulled in data to help teams better understand its content and context and also build out automated processes to reduce time and effort spent on tasks such as creating Excel spreadsheets for the analysis of new deals or agreements.”
With the help from Bruce and the Fincons team, the company’s customer is able to spend less time gathering data and more time utilizing the data to make data-driven business decisions. With a more comprehensive view of their data, they are able to quickly adapt to market or supply changes.
Fincons initially serviced sales teams, but as they started asking more questions and seeing more value, the Analytics team expanded to help marketing and other departments. Today, Bruce describes the team as a “home office” that allows the company teams in different territories to ask questions or explore data analysis.
To achieve this goal, Fincons assists with key functions including:
Data cleanup and connections
Data storage and accessibility
Data transformation
Analytical applications of data
Data refreshing
Data reporting
One of the goals of the Tableau dashboards was to democratize the data into self-service data views so that Sales, Marketing and other divisions (e.g. digital home entertainment EST/VOD) could access information quickly and without having to rely on Sales Planners to extract data sets from department-specific systems and manually connect disparate datasets. The suite of dashboards and tools built centralized the data and enabled quick access to views and ultimately saved the organization significant time and effort.
Bruce helped build out an analytical database in Teradata—a technology the company was already heavily using—that stored replicated and blended data sets from across the organization. One of the key technologies that Bruce relied on was Alteryx, which he used to translate complex SQL stored procedures and data manipulations into easy-to-understand workflow jobs that the Analytics team could maintain themselves. With Alteryx’s user-friendly interface, anyone on the team could enhance or modify an existing job regardless of their technical experience.
The Analytics team then creates Tableau dashboards that connect to their various data sets which allows users across the organization to leverage the analyses or export the data themselves for more nuanced analyses.
The benefits
Better Understanding of Asset Value
The emerging SVOD market has changed the entertainment landscape. To succeed as a global distributor, the company must deliver a mix of content driven by current events—such as movies related to a celebrity currently in the news—and library titles that are once again becoming popular.
“One of our biggest initiatives is our Catalog Growth Initiative,” says Bruce. “We have the relevant performance data, and it shows that older titles perform really well. This gives us the reason to enhance standard-definition (SD) content to high-quality (HD) content and sell it to 300 territories worldwide. And within these territories, pricing is nuanced. We provide data to drive discussion on fees and revenue.”
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