I am thrilled to start 2018 by joining the board of Parrot Analytics. Parrot is a demand measurement platform that specializes in working with media companies to help them understand trends in content consumption all over the world. With an extremely easy to use interface, clients can see how their own content and their competitor’s content and programing strategy are doing market by market and device by device. This enables media companies to make informed decisions as to what to produce next and how and where to program it.

Wared Seger at Variety’s Innovate 2017 on Measuring the Popularity of Content

I first heard about Parrot a few years back when Wared Seger, Parrots’s CEO, was presenting at the International Emmys board gathering. Working in Latin America I was tired of relying on outdated rating services to make decisions about what content to buy and produce. One of the fundamental issues with traditional ratings systems is that they do not include digital consumption. In our region, they still rely on data they collect from boxsets in homes. In every country in Latin America, OTT has become a given and the success of services like Netflix can no longer be questioned. So, relying on service that can’t measure digital consumption of content creates a false data set. Furthermore traditional ratings look back to help you sell the future. Parrot reads the present to predict the future.

Every time connectivity improves in the region, Latin America leapfrogs in terms of innovation. On the media side, it’s been fascinating to see how content producers and networks in the region have started to change their production strategy because of the new consumption habits. Netflix and Amazon Studios are keenly interested in buying, investing in, or coproducing content in Latin America. This has increased the production value by tenfold. As a producer, when you no longer rely only on the local network market, but now have the possibility to sell your content to a global platform as well, everything changes. The story might be the same, but the production becomes much better because you have a global buyer paying top dollar.

This radical shift in production strategy raises the stakes. You are investing so much more on each show that you want to make sure that what you produce really is what the market wants. Basing your decision on data compiled by a service like Parrot becomes fundamental. If not, you are working in the dark and hoping for the best.

I will be participating on a panel at Natpe “The Science of Popularity: Content Demand in Latin America” alongside Wared Seger and Bruce Tuchman. Please come join us on Tuesday, January 16th at 3:00pm if you would like to learn more about Parrot Analytics.