Announcing the Audience Anticipation Index™, and measuring success in the modern media age
As the media landscape continues to undergo rapid and transformative change, so do our needs for insights to help with decision making. Clarity around audience viewership has become muddied, with platforms occasionally releasing self-selected numbers and traditional measurement companies falling behind in their ability to account for all screens and formats. Entertainment industry stakeholders have sounded the alarm, pushing for fresh solutions to the new challenges we face. The need for actionable and transparent data has never been stronger, and these are the very tenets that Diesel Labs has built upon in order to architect and deliver the best possible audience analytics to our partners in the media industry.
This week we launched the Audience Anticipation Index™, a first-of-its-kind ranking of all upcoming titles that are breaking through with audiences. Given the extremely high volume of content releases across the entire media landscape (averaging nine show/movie premieres per day lately), attracting the attention of audiences has become increasingly challenging and yet remains a crucial component of a successful launch.
Content has traditionally been evaluated on viewership — how many people ‘tuned in,’ how many people watched over a seven day period, etc. This statistic will always be a critically important one, but it may not be the only important one anymore. Consider the scenario where a highly viewed piece of content attracts a tremendous amount of audience attention (e.g., Squid Game) versus a highly viewed piece of content that attracts a lukewarm amount of audience attention (e.g., Red Notice). In today’s landscape, we’d argue that a title which delivers on both vectors (viewership and attention) is much more valuable as awareness is being built outside an established user base. Maintaining a strong share of conversation related to titles / platforms reinforces the importance and relevance of a service above all others, helping to reduce churn (‘there’s nothing to watch’) and increase subscribership (‘I want to watch what everyone else is watching’).
