Navigating the Next Wave: How Data is Revolutionizing India's Entertainment Landscape
New Delhi: In an exclusive conversation with Pallabi Dey Purkayastha, Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO of Ormax Media, a leading audience insights and image consulting firm, shares his insights on the evolving role of data in shaping the future of entertainment across cinema, OTT, and social media platforms.
According to Ormax Media's 1,000 content testing projects, key learnings and trends emerging from this research indicate that content testing can play a significant role in influencing the success or failure of films, TV shows, and OTT series. The company asserts that over 80% of newly released content flops without leaving any noticeable mark.
Content testing provides valuable insights on business decisions related to greenlighting scripts, casting, screenplay rewriting, edit changes, re-shoots, as well as helping marketers maximize returns on marketing investments by providing data on how to position and market properties to target audiences. This has proven particularly effective for genres such as horror movies which Ormax suggests have a high success rate when content is thoroughly tested.
With the Indian cinema industry displaying signs of recovery post-pandemic, Kapoor emphasizes that Ormax Media assesses the potential impact of cinematic releases on advertising revenues through data analysis and case studies shared with its clients. The company encourages filmmakers to make informed decisions by taking into account changes in audience behavior over time - a change in appetite for theatrics among viewers could suggest whether a film would do well as an OTT series.
Ormax Media's CEO Kapoor sees the evolving role of data playing out in the creation of content tailored specifically towards diverse audiences. Over 16 years of industry experience has witnessed greater acceptance for analytics and research tools like Ormax Moviescope, Stream Test and True Value which can assess critical aspects of a scripted material, making them better positioned to succeed with their audience. There is still however a disparity - South Indian content remains underrepresented in these tests.
To tackle an increasingly important challenge where Instagram's advertising plays such a significant role in defining audiences around movies and shows, Kapoor stresses on gathering insights across social media platforms and other marketing campaigns because he feels that 'it’s the collective impact of all marketing exposure that we focus on tracking'. Instead of relying only on social media trends or isolating these efforts away from broader consumption environments.
When asked how they are navigating this rapidly diversifying entertainment landscape, Ormax Media highlights taking their client's insights further by integrating additional data points in a seamless way to cater for diverse mediums like cinema and OTT advertising, fostering interplay between platforms as the next wave plays out.