29 Jun DEG Welcomes BB Media as a New Member | Meet Laura Ghisiglieri, Global Development and Marketing Director
June 29, 2022 | DEG recently welcomed BB Media as a new member. BB Media is a worldwide, award-winning data science company that has specialized in media and entertainment for over 35 years. It monitors more than 3,200 streaming services across 249 countries for data including prices, plans, bundles and commercial offers, as well as complete title libraries, including normalized metadata. Streaming services, networks, agencies, advertisers, studios, content discovery apps and technology companies rely on BB Media’s information and value-added analysis to make strategic decisions. The company has offices in Miami, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and São Paulo.
DEG recently connected with Laura Ghisiglieri, BB Media’s Global Development & Market Director, to discuss the difference between data science and market research, and the unique content consumption patterns in different countries.
DEG: BB Media call itself a “data science company” rather than a market research provider. What’s the difference and what data, specifically do you put to work for your clients?
LG: We started as a market research company. By the 1990s we started measuring traditional pay TV service with phone calls to households asking them which pay TV provider they had. We used to deliver complete reports with hundreds of pages analyzing the industry. (Now everyone wants nuances and they don’t have enough time for reading lots of pages!)
Laura Ghisiglieri
Then we changed our minds, and our core. Since 2019 we’ve gathered information in an automated fashion and our one developer from 2019, Joe Moreno, is now our CTO, leading a team of 160+ data engineers, software developers, scrapers, etc.
When we collect millions and millions of data points, we process it using sophisticated programmatic techniques. For example, to understand that ‘The Notebook’ is the same as ‘Diario de una Pasión’ we need to match different metadata automatically. To detect when one player change its prices to access their libraries, we need automated processes. We mange to discover new offers before than anyone else! We also catch when players do A/B testings for different audiences.
DEG: The company has specialized in media and entertainment for over 35 years. What would U.S. content and platform executives be surprised to learn about streaming consumers all over the world?
LG: Every country has its own patterns and consumption style. When U.S. players want to expand their services into other regions they really need to understand what is going on. Korea, India, Japan are growing fast and the audiences there are completely different than in the Americas.
We do online surveys to households with internet connections to understand which services have more users; which are the most demanded movies, series or documentaries; what people like the most, etc. We even ask non-users why they don’t consume online content! But this is a really small portion of the market. Nowadays it’s not common to find someone– anywhere in the world – without access to a streaming service.
DEG: What are your plans to expand your services into more countries?
LG: We have a robust business plan to expand, including building our team of sales executives specialized in our global dataset, and our marketing team, which is focused on ad-hoc materials by country. We are traveling all over the world, attending events. During the second semester of 2022 you will find us at NEM (in Croatia), The Stream TV Show (U.S.), KOBA (Korea), Kidscreen Summit (U.S.), OTT.X Fall Summit (U.S.), IBC (Netherlands), MIPCOM (France), MIP Cancun (Mexico), Dubai International Content Market (UAE), Content London (U.K.) and ATF (Singapore). We also trust in new media outlets specialized in the industry to share our insights all over the world.
DEG: When it comes to your personal media consumption, what’s your favorite “binge”?
LG: ‘Friends’. If you have watched it, probably you love it too! Rachel is my favorite character.
For more information, visit bb.vision