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Managing your media and entertainment company for future success

Media companies are better leveraging technology to streamline operations

4 min read

Strategy

Studio

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Raghu Seetharam

As the world of media and entertainment continues to be disrupted by new entrants and increasing content, companies looking to stay ahead of the competition need to streamline processes and better manage their operations.

In this post, we talk with Raghu Seetharam, Global Solutions head at Birlasoft, and Salesforce Global Media Industry Solutions Lead Steve Sobel about their innovative collaboration, which is helping studio executives increase their efficiencies to focus on producing quality content.

 

Where is the industry currently, and how is the solution being used?

The media and entertainment industry is at the crossroads of significant disruption driven by consumer behavior and technology-led changes. On one hand, it is becoming easier to produce and distribute content, and on the other, there is a propensity toward consolidation in the industry.  The emergence of digital channels such as YouTube, Hulu and Netflix is forcing large studios to realign their plans to accommodate shifts in the industry.

Steve Sobel

As industry consolidation and disruption continue, there is increasing focus on driving efficiencies and cost savings while continuing to create the top-quality content consumers have come to expect. There is a greater need to understand consumer behavior and how the industry can systematically tailor content to cater to consumers. This has led to significant technology investments in cloud computing, machine learning and digital analytics. In a world where elections, democracies and larger macro-events are influenced by social media, media companies are embracing information analysis like never before.

“Content is king,” and while the technology and the industry are changing quickly, the upstream part of content acquisition continues to be saddled with inefficient and unwieldy processes. This is where TruView CLM steps in to help organizations. It is an end-to-end solution powered by Salesforce that automates the upstream processes of content acquisition, manages contractual negotiations with talent and networks, automatically generates and manages contracts, and creates baseline data for downstream processes in scheduling, programming and operations. TruView provides extensive automation and self-learning capabilities, improving the productivity of key users such as creative executives, commercial teams and legal attorneys.

 

What lessons have you learned during this collaboration?

The genesis of the solution was a pilot project for a TV division at a large media and entertainment company. The solution was well-received, which prompted us to package this as an industry-specific product. Birlasoft found that partnering with the Salesforce Customer Success Platform for Media & Entertainment provided the best solution for our customers. During the collaboration, Salesforce and Birlasoft learned that many of the studios use Salesforce as a platform to address various aspects of their business processes, but not during the contract lifecycle management process. This process is vital to upstream content acquisition, and the gap prompted us to investigate and invest in building the TruView solution on Salesforce as a foundational platform.

 

Can you give us an example of successful use?

This solution has been successfully used by some of the largest organizations, including three of the top companies in the business. Recently, a large media company headquartered in Burbank, Calif., used the solution to automate pre-production processes for its studio and network operations. The system is a one-stop solution replacing some as old as 20 years. Some of the benefits the customer teams have observed are:

  • Better collaboration between creative and business affairs teams.
  • A 20% increase in deal closings.
  • A more than 30% reduction in contract administration times, thanks to rights tracking, options tracking and payment automation capabilities.
  • An expected reduction in content acquisition costs of more than 17%, made possible by streamlining the capture of talent fees, royalties, options and other financial data.
  • A 360-degree view of projects, talent, contracts, schedules and financials, helping executive decision-making in pilot budgeting and other scenarios.

How is this moving to other verticals and adding functions?

TruView CLM is built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, Salesforce. TruView CLM has found initial success with studios and networks, and by the end of the first quarter of 2018, the solution will also be available for the radio and music industry, media publishing, internet advertising and other areas. The solution will also integrate machine learning capabilities, predictive analytics algorithms and additional features related to rights and royalties management, scheduling and talent management in the next version.

 

Raghu Seetharam heads the Global Solutions team at Birlasoft, where he is responsible for industry solutions focused on solving the business problems of some of the world’s leading organizations.

 

Steve Sobel is the Global Media Industry Solutions Lead for Salesforce, where he is charged with solution development and account support for some of the world’s most prominent media organizations, spanning broadcasting, publishing, business information, entertainment and new media.