by Julia Pierrepont III

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- 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 U.S. 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.

Lorre said writing for a streaming show has changed his writing style. "The streaming environment is driven by subscription. Networks are driven by audience demographics. Now, I'm not concerned how old the audience is, just if there is one. (At Netflix) ...in the commercial-free zone, you are not writing to an ad break to bring the audience back ... so the story flows differently."

Another well received panel was "Winning with eSports." E-marketer estimates that 30.3 million people in the United States watch eSports at least once a month, up 18 percent over the previous year and nationwide, pulling in over 213 million U.S. dollars in ad revenues - a trend expected to continue to grow.

Lindsay Ullman, head of Business Development for the NBA's 2K eSports League, said she was surprised to discover that community is even more important for eSports than it is for sports.

PepsiCo's Head of Brand Communications and Consumer Engagement for Mountain Dew, Erin Chin, added that community goes beyond just eSports themselves. "Women in gaming is a big initiative... so we have a program with ATT for a Women's Development Training Camp where ATT female executives come to teach and inspire young women gamers."

Ron Rheingold, director of strategic partnerships for Twitch, subsidiary of Amazon and the leading U.S. eSports video streaming service, told Xinhua that all kinds of people are now identifying as gamers and embracing it as a lifestyle - celebrities, rappers, mainstream users.

Other hot topics were iSpot's summary on how big data is influencing entertainment industry acquisitions and sales; how Comcast, Disney, Viacom and Horizon Media are using addressable advertising to revamp network and cable television's ad spend ROI's; how to reestablish trust in advertising, and more.

"AI and machine learning are enabling us to optimize our search capabilities. It was just text originally, then images, now we are able to search video images frame-by-frame," LinkedIn's Director of Engineering Liang Zhang, originally from China, told Xinhua.

For addressable sales in the legacy network television and cable arenas, Comcast Advertising's VP of Strategy, Claudio Marcus, quoted epic sci-fi writer, William Gibson's line, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed."

Marcus told Xinhua he feels that addressable advertising can provide a 55 percent incremental reach for a significantly lower price, but that the industry as a whole needs more scaled data and more collaboration across the entertainment ecosystem to maximize addressable ads impact.

For Laura Nelson, senior vice president of Advertising Solutions and Performance Marketing of Disney's Advertising Sale Division, addressable ads add real value to their marketing strategy.

"Disney is built on great content but doesn't have the great data that Comcast has ... You'll pay higher rate for targeted ads, but these investments are worth it," she asserted. Enditem

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