Jellysmack at EES: New Syndication Models Are Being Driven by AI
From the tens of millions of digital video content creators out there, Jellysmack’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology detects the most promising and partners with them to try to elevate their programming across multiple platforms, effectively becoming the next syndication model, according to Sean Atkins, Jellysmack president.
Atkins is a veteran of Discovery, HBO, MTV and Yahoo!, who has a unique vision of both where media has come from and where it’s going.
“Jellysmack is one of the small number of creator economy unicorns and our focus is that we use technology to detect and develop the most talented video creators,” he said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).
“We use proprietary data and AI technology to define creators, identify them and then help them get the most value of other content between platforms and helping them scale their business,” he told attendees during the Ethics, Financials & Syndication breakout session “Evolving New Syndication Models Driven by A.I.”
He went on to explain: “Basically the way the system works is [it’s] the same tech that we use to build success to scale our channels over multiple verticals in digital. Because one of the things that’s a misnomer when you’re working in digital content is that just because a piece of content is successful and is in a glowing rectangle does not mean it moves to every other glowing rectangle.”
For example, he said: “No one would ever say in the traditional [business] I like that episode 47 of South Park last night. Let’s put it in a movie theater tomorrow. You would be laughed out of the room, right? There’s format issues, there’s marketing issues, distribution [and] audience challenges. Well, the same thing actually exists even in digital.”
Similarly, if a video is successful on YouTube, that “does not mean it will be successful on Facebook [and] does not mean it would be successful on [Snapchat]. In fact, the formats are different of all three of them. So there’s structural differences, there’s audience differences” on each platform, he said.
As a result of its success with that usage data and technology, “we [ended] up partnering with creators to help to consistently overperform our other platforms,” he said.
“We do industrial scale multivariate testing, so in plain English, that means if we make a video, we have probably made 30 distinct versions of it that we have tested multiple times in front of your audience before we actually publish your final piece of content,” he pointed out.
“Every frame of that video could be tested against the exact audience it was supposed to go to,” he noted. And then Reoptimize is exactly what we do in the digital. We then distribute
The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.