Exclusives

The spring edition of the “M&E Journal,” examining our industry’s new remote-work reality from all angles, is now available online, with a full digital edition being offered by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) shortly.

Geared toward senior media and entertainment executives who oversee their companies’ digital futures, the 140-page publication features insights from nearly three dozen MESA members, from Avanade to Whip Media Group, with the issue’s main focus centered on the struggles, lessons and benefits we’re discovering in Hollywood’s “new normal.”

Along with the cover section — “Now What?”— the issue features a host of “Smart Content” insights, including from Digital Nirvana, Gracenote, MarkLogic, OnPrem Solution Partners, Salesforce, SAP, Signiant, Spherex, Tamr and Veritone. Here’s a look at what they’re seeing the smart content arena:

• Michael A. Malgeri, principal technologist for MarkLogic, explores how In global enterprises, products and services have multiple representations, aka “twins,” and the notion of “digital twins” has emerged in the manufacturing sector. He sees major benefits is we extend manufacturing’s digital twin concept to M&E.

• Trent Wheeler, SVP of video product for Gracenote, highlights innovative content personalization initiatives designed to maximize engagement, and the key role metadata plays in user experiences.

• Badhrinath Krishnamoorthy, market head of AI and analytics, for communications, media, technology, education, publishing and marketing at Cognizant, examines how media companies can put customer data to work in new ways, like predicting churn and taking proactive steps to retain customers.

• Richard Whittington, SVP of M&E for SAP, challenges the “content is king” narrative, arguing instead that consumer experiences are just as important as the content they pay for.

• Alp Pekkocak, global head of media strategy solutions for Salesforce, offers ideas into why consumers cancel their streaming services, and what can be done to retain them before they walk away.

• Pranav Joshi, director of product solutions, and Davinder Luthra, global digital leader, for Spherex, point Hollywood’s eyes away from the blockbuster for a moment, and asks that we recognize the major power of short-form content.

• Russell Wise, SVP of Digital Nirvana, details how the rapid closed-captioning of content, across all platforms, can be done swiftly and accurately using the power of AI. But users must be able
to integrate AI- and ML-driven microservices into the on-premises workflows that already support day-to-day operations to make it happen.

• Matt Holzapfel, solutions lead for Tamr, sees creative talent management firms creating very human stories with mutually successful outcomes for clients and media companies, all by using machine learning to serve up analytics-ready data from disparate data.

• Ryan Steelberg, president of Veritone, stresses that M&E companies can meet ever-changing, ever-fragmented consumer demands with highly accurate, hyper-indexed structured data, resulting in highly intelligent content.

• OnPrem’s Melinda Lu, Grace Wong, Mark Herzog and Kavita Anand combine to voice the importance of not only your rights management system, but also the people, process and
technology changes necessary to prepare for the future of content distribution and exploitation.

Beginning Thursday, June 11, look for stories from the spring edition of the “M&E Journal” reprinted every week in the “M&E Daily” newsletter, and appearing on MESAlliance.org as well.