CC #2: How to simplify complex workflows in the entertainment industry with Johan Wiklund
In this conversation, we sit down with Johan Wiklund, the CPO of Clipsource, and discuss the best ways to simplify complex workflows in the entertainment industry when it comes to:
Accessing marketing materials and data and ensuring everything is up to date.
Sharing marketing materials and data with external stakeholders and platforms so that your content gets discovered.
Johan has over 20 years of experience providing communication and media sharing solutions for top companies in the media industry.
Some of the main points touched upon in this session include:
The change in the media industry with more competition between content.
Getting your workflows in line and simplifying your distribution processes.
Repurposing content from other teams and siloed systems by integrating internal platforms (planning systems, media systems, metadata systems, DAMs) to one user-friendly interface where you can find everything you need for a program or movie regardless of what team you work for.
The importance of having the right data and media to promote content.
Ensuring your content is visible within your own platform and easily searchable.
Using tools to share sensitive, secure content such as pre-premiere screeners.
Automating your entire communication and sharing process.
Read the full transcript below.
Mattie: Hello everyone and welcome to our second Clipsource Conversation.
Today I will be sitting down with Johan Wiklund, who is the CPO of Clipsource. So welcome to the show, Johan.
Johan: Hi, Mattie. Thank you for having me.
Mattie: Yeah, thanks for coming. And I have to ask, the first question is, what show are you watching right now?
Johan: Well, so many things on my watchlist, but currently I'm trying to close the final seasons of "Curb Your Enthusiasm". You know, people who love that show, I think I'm the last one to see it, but it's really good.
Mattie: I haven't even heard of that. What platform is it on?
Johan: It's on HBO.
Mattie: I'm adding it to my list then because I haven't seen that one.
Johan: You should, it's great.
Mattie: And then today we are going to be discussing the complexity of marketing in the entertainment industry and the importance of having the right tools in place to make it easier.
So just to get started, I think it would be great if we start by talking about you because you've been working alongside and with the entertainment industry for over ten years or so.
So you've seen all the changes with more content platforms and the competition between all the programs and stuff now.
So I thought it'd be great if maybe you could talk about that a little bit.
Johan: Yeah, actually, in fact, I realised a few weeks ago that it's almost 25 years, but thanks for the 10 years.
Mattie: 25 - oh my gosh. I was off.
Johan: Yeah, but it's been a really interesting journey, you know, going from online TV, web TV being a new concept into what we have today with so many platforms and so much content to choose from.
I see of course, the marketing perspective of all of it for the platforms and the content producers. They need to make sure that they have the right kind of data and media to promote their content.
And they need to make sure that it's not just, you know, visible within their own platforms and searchable in a good way, but also externally.
They have to make sure that they they share the content with external content discovery platforms and also within their own systems.
For example, if you take media companies that have both streaming and linear platforms, for example, where a lot of content is being used in both places, it's super important for consumers to be able to know where they can find things and when.
And also, we will see a lot of data that's quite new, actually. But the last year or so, we've seen a lot of new tools that are interesting, that are built to try and help consumers to find what to see and where.
And those systems need to be fed as well with metadata and information from the content owners. So that's kind of new, but it's a very interesting new thing that we see.
Mattie: So, I mean, one of the biggest issues then, would you say is it's feeding all of this content to the different places where people can find it.
That's like one problem with marketing in the entertainment industry, especially because there's so much more content than there used to be 10, 25 years ago.
Johan: Yeah. That's one of the issues.
And, you know, the other issue is a big part of that and that's having the marketing and press people being able to share that.
How can they find the right information?
Because a thing that we see today that might be problematic is that a lot of the media companies, the different departments, they work in silos and they don't really have access to the different systems within the organisation.
And even if they did, some systems aren't really meant for all the departments to work with.
For example, if you take a planning system, a planning system can be everything from super simple, like an Excel sheet to extremely complex systems, and they are not really built for sales and marketing purposes.
So they are quite tech-heavy.
In many cases they control the playout system or what to publish in a VOD platform.
So it's not really supposed to be for marketing and sales people to access those.
But in those systems, you can find a lot of data that is super important for sales and marketing and that they need to share with the external systems that we talked about earlier.
So that's a problem, getting access to the data within the organization, and that goes for media as well.
Media systems can also be extremely complex and not really built for marketing purposes.
Mattie: Okay. And that's kind of where I think we can get into, like, the tools that help make it easier to share this information. Because, like you said, there is a lot of information that marketing can use inside the planning systems.
But since you can't access it, it's kind of, you know, redundant and then they have to store it in their separate places.
So how does a platform like Clipsource make it so that you can access that information and save time for, you know, the internal teams and stuff like that?
Johan: I mean, one of the main ideas with Clipsource is to provide data and media layer that kind of sits on top of all these, these bigger and more complex systems.
So we can produce an interface, a place where everyone can log in and find the information that you need when you need it.
And the systems that we connect to, they can be planning systems, media systems, they can be separate metadata systems or even external DAMs or things like that.
We make sure that everything that belongs to, for example, a program or a movie or a documentary is saved into one place in a useful or certainly user-friendly interface where you can find everything around your content regardless if you're working with marketing, press.
It can even be useful to, you know, production departments or the legal departments that need to see things before they are broadcasted.
So everything in one place and also make sure that this is automated so we pick up everything when it's changed in the subsystems just to make sure that everyone get access to the latest and correct and verified information.
Mattie: So like if I wanted to share a thumbnail or something from a film with somebody, I could just go in and grab it and it could have been taken from the planning system rather than me storing it in like a Google Drive or something where it can get outdated.
Johan: Exactly. So you know that if you log in, you will be able to see the images that belongs to your episode, for example, or a trailer or even social media clips that are already prepared by the social media department and saved into this interface.
But of course, it can be full-length episodes or full-length movies as well.
Mattie: So, I mean, obviously, it's great you have all these assets that you can share and it's there, but then also one of the problems with the entertainment industry is that there are a lot of problems with like rights and leaks and making sure that you share secure content.
So I think it'd be great to talk more about the sharing aspect.
So now you have all the data, so then how do you share it? If it's something like a screener, like you said, a full-length episode that you have to share with the press, how do you do that and make sure that it doesn't get leaked or that you don't let out too much content?
Johan: First of all, it's important that you have the tools to share the content you want to share with the right people.
It should be possible to, you know, invite an individual or a selected group of people and you want to give access to, let's say, an episode or a movie.
But then of course, it's about making sure that the assets are stored and saved in a secure way and that they are streamed in a secure way and then you can apply a lot of different security aspects to this.
You can, for example, use watermarking. Either it's visible watermarking showing that you get access to seeing a file where your username or email address might be printed into the video.
That's a simple way of doing it.
But then you can have digital watermarking as well, making sure that you can track everything that you share to someone if it goes somewhere it shouldn't.
Then you can always make sure that you know why it happened.
Mattie: And you can do all that in the platform so you don't have to use something else to watermark it and then share it.
You have the video there. You can easily add the security you need and then share it directly all in the same place.
Johan: Yes, exactly.
You can do all these steps in one go, basically.
The more security you want to apply to it, the more time it will take.
But, you know, do we automate a lot of that work so you don't have to do manually watermarking and things like that?
Everything can be done from the system with a few clicks.
Mattie: And so when it comes to sharing, like you said, to discovery platforms and stuff, like you want to share your metadata, you want to share images and you want to make sure that those are up to date.
So when you connect to the planning systems and then that automatically gets updated in the Clipsource platform, would that also automatically get updated in other platforms if you’re sharing it through an API? That way you don't have to always be like, you know, downloading an XML and then sharing it with them and having to send a whole new one if you want to update something.
Johan: Yeah, that was normally how it was done before. You shared something like your schedules in Excel sheet.
You didn't have that much space for sharing media at that time, but you had those you emailed perhaps, and you called someone if there was an update.
But now today it's all about the API, of course, and that's what we do.
We see more and more that, you know, all our customers invite more and more external platforms and users to take part of the metadata and the media, the media through APIs because then you can make sure that they always have access to the latest event information, the latest metadata and of course the latest media as well that you want to share.
So everything can be done in an automatic way by using APIs.
Mattie: And that is almost the most important thing when it comes to marketing your content is making sure it is discoverable. Otherwise it's going to get lost in the sea of endless content that we have now.
Johan: Exactly. It needs to be updated and correct verified.
You need to make sure that you send as much media as you can because, you know, its images are super important.
But we're also seeing more and more requests of getting trailers to promote content.
So, yeah, as much as you can making sure it's correct, too, to give the consumers a good base of finding what they want to see basically everywhere, regardless if it's external content, discovery platform or even Google.
Mattie: Okay, great. So then, I mean, to kind of conclude here the two biggest problems that we have today when it comes to marketing in the media and entertainment industry is, one, being able to access all the content that you need and making sure that it's up to date.
And then two, it's being able to share it to all the platforms and stakeholders that need it and being able to to do that in a secure way.
And by integrating with your platforms and getting the right tools like Clipsource, then you can repurpose content from other teams.
And what else. I mean automating the systems and…
Johan: Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think automation is a very important part here.
And you're absolutely right. It is all these things that you mentioned, but the data that we have from planning systems, from media systems, from metadata systems, it's being produced within the organisation.
But if you can make sure that you connect these in one place and also share it, you can in fact make sure to automate that entire process.
So you're confident that your content will be promoted with the latest, the most correct and updated unverified information and, you know, not too many people have to be involved in that process.
Mattie: So at the end of the day.I mean, if you're going to be successful with your marketing efforts, it's all about getting your workflows in line and simplifying the process.
Johan: Exactly.
Mattie: Great. Well, thanks so much again for joining me today.
