Many echoes here of recent discussions and workshops from Nathan Hull of Beat Technology, exploring the immense value digital data can bring to the publishing table.
Paramount Global may have $1.6 billion on the way from KKR for its sale of Simon & Schuster, but meantime its business as usual for Paramount+, the video subscription service, where business as usual means continuous finetuning of the service to keep it relevant and profitable.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, CFO Naveen Chopra said:
“In streaming, we’re focused on optimizing spending and content and marketing, the two largest expense categories in our streaming P & L (and) carefully-defined specific audience segments (evolving) our programming strategy to super serve them in an even more efficient manner.”
Chopra explains:
“We’re accomplishing that goal by leveraging content across platforms more and more by leaning into franchises and now that we’ve got more data, we’re increasingly able to use analytics to understand how to super serve these key audience segments. And so we can get away from — call it a volume focused game — and be more focused on making sure that we have the right content for the right audience at the right time.”
Many echoes here of recent discussions and workshops from Nathan Hull of Beat Technology, exploring the immense value digital data can bring to the publishing table. And even – per this essay in The Bookseller – from print books retailed in bricks & mortar stores.
It’s always amusing to watch publishers lament that discoverability is their biggest challenge, while eschewing the tools – digital books, digital subscription, AI, etc – that can help solve the problem.
