Summit brings entertainment executives together for key exchanges

Industry leaders and media experts across the entertainment industry gathered at Variety's Innovate Summit in Los Angeles to share the best practices in how data mining and analytics are reshaping the worlds of advertising, marketing, and the powerful online streaming services, organizers told Xinhua on Wednesday.

On how to drive box office returns, Matthew Weinbecker, senior vice president of Media, Sports and Entertainment for Conversant, said the future depends on identifying individuals most likely to see a specific film by using data across multiple transactions and devices. Conversant is a subsidiary of leading US advertising marketing services and direct-marketing agency, Epsilon.

"Data can find people most likely to see a movie," he told participants. "We have 35 million moviegoers in our database. I should be able to find half a million to a million that are specific to your film."

But that requires connecting and correlating user data and transactions culled from individual transaction ID's, IP addresses, and emails across multiple retail sources to get a more three-dimensional view of moviegoers, their viewing habits, related purchasing behavior, then designing a tailored marketing effort to impact their ticketing and purchasing decisions.

Tying data from multiple devices together is a process enabled by Conservant's strength in anonymized transaction ID's that does not require cookies, which does not work on mobile phones.

The summit also featured special in-depth appearances and interviews with two Hollywood heavyweights, iconic writer and producer Chuck Lorre, the talent behind such TV hits as The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Mom, Bob Hearts Abishola; and Scott Stuber, head of the successful Original Films Division at streaming giant, Netflix.