HITS

The challenges confronting media and entertainment companies today when it comes to data can be daunting.

Disparate data sources that need to be sliced eight different ways for a marketing campaign. Complex analytics, covering everything from sentiment analysis to social responses. Forecasting estimates that need to incorporate everything from release dates to comparative titles.

It’s a challenge MicroStrategy has taken head on for decades now, according to Jennifer Bittner, senior account strategist for the company, speaking May 17 during a presentation at the HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit.

“Media and entertainment companies have a lot of data to deal with, and it continues to grow and change, because the business keeps changing,” she said. “How do I get all of this data out to my business in a very easy way, within existing workflows, without having to train on new tools?”

When one Hollywood customer first approached MicroStrategy for its services, the company began with four data sources, and “they needed to slice and dice the data many different ways within one dashboard.” Over the years, the number of data sources the company has looked to MicroStrategy to handle has grown to more than a dozen that need to be accessed live.

Mobile has become more important than ever, and MicroStrategy has built a solution that offers analytics that can deliver data within current workflows (including Alexa, Slack, and others), that just needs to be built once before it can be deployed on any device, including online, iPads, Android devices and others.

In the area of data governance, MicroStrategy has taken an approach opposite that of using Excel or other visualization tools, which have no common layer for governance and security. Those solutions have a per-dashboard, per-report limitation, where if anything is changed, it won’t port across to anyone else. “With MicroStrategy, we have a single schema layer where you can capture this information, and changes show for everyone,” Bittner said.

Bittner and Richard Frausto, analytics engineer for MicroStrategy, shared a presentation that showed how a studio can simplify its data analytics using Global Box Office Performance dashboards, covering everything from distributors’ market share to media spending trends to market trends.

The key — and the company’s focus — is to make data ingest and usage as simple as possible, from the top on down within a company.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

To access the MicroStartegy presentation, click here.