Canadian media industry still behind on data, conference hears

OTTAWA — The Canadian television industry is behind the curve when it comes to using data to tailor content to audiences and drive ad revenue, panelists at a media conference said Thursday. “We’re in the dark ages of data,” John Young, CEO of Boat Rocker Media, a Toronto-based global entertainment company, said on the first day of sessions at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa. “We’re so far away from getting to the end consumer and understanding truly what happens there.” “For us it’s how do you get closer to that consumer, how do you take the that we created and directly touch the consumer, and we’re slowly starting to have some success there,” Young said. The conference, which is hosted by the Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA), is an opportunity for about 600 business leaders from the film, television, broadcast and telecommunications industries to discuss issues of the day, according to its website. It also brought together two panels on Thursday morning, which discussed the importance of data to help focus content on what both audiences and advertisers want. “It helps discoverability, it helps marketing campaigns, it helps everything, right?” Heather Conway, executive vice-president of English services at CBC/Radio-Canada said on the first panel of the morning. “It’s not just about, is this show popular or not? It’s very much about this personalization, customization and finding the right audience for the show.” But some producers said they feel they are still living in the past when they should be getting concrete data in their hands now. Christina Jennings, the chairwoman and CEO of content producer Shaftesbury Films, said she is surprised by the lack of information. “I find it shocking that producers have not had access to traditional data. I don’t understand it, I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand now,” Jennings, who leads the company behind the acclaimed show Murdoch Mysteries, said on a separate panel. “Ultimately brands buy ad time around those shows. So what I want to see is always, how is my show doing?” She said that in the past, audience measurement data would sell at a prohibitively high price. Now, she added, her company has looked to Alphabet Inc. YouTube to track some metrics. The CRTC had already issued an order for a set-top box working group — with Canada’s major broadcasters working with ratings group Numeris — to measure how audiences consume content. In a 2015 policy decision, the CRTC said the future of the broadcasting industry depends on the tailoring of content to Canadians and viewer information was essential to that success. But some of Canada’s cablecos argued before a CRTC hearing in October that the success of a measurement system would be strained if a business model didn’t exist for it. The importance of obtaining data to attract advertising dollars has been somewhat of a hot topic of late. In its first quarter of 2018, Corus Entertainment Inc. reported lower ad revenue, and its president and CEO Doug Murphy said that ad tech — including dynamic ad insertions, which allow for more targeted ads through data — would be important for the future. Likewise and previous to that, BCE Inc.’s head George Cope said late last year that his company needed to do more with ad tech. For Shaw Communications Inc., the importance of data in the ad-based model isn’t lost either. The company’s vice-president of product development Jay Gardner said on the first panel Thursday that dynamic ad insertion is a “good idea” and “long overdue” that will “breathe life into the system,” which will generate new revenue potential. In any event, Mark Leslie, vice-president of research and consumer insights at Corus, said on the second panel that his company is supportive and encouraged by the work Numeris is doing on the working group. He noted that the smaller networks and lower-rated programs will stand to benefit the most from the system with more accurate measurements, whereas previously those granular insights were a challenge. He added that the advantage of collecting data for Netflix Inc. or Shaw and its BlueSky platform, which aggregate content, is that they are able to make recommendations to viewers based on their habits and cross-promote shows. — With reporting by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Canadian media industry still behind on data, conference hears

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