By Poorvi Nair
Ever wanted to know how many people visit the top social media sites in the world? Or how much time each person spends on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and what demographics are visiting these sites?
This winter quarter, many students took Understanding Media Markets: Users, Makers, Metrics, which explored the metrics side of the entertainment industry through desktop and mobile channels. Students got the opportunity to directly work with CommScore software (an American media measuring and analytics company that provides marketing data and analytics). The class also entailed the methods and metrics creative enterprises use to create their digital audiences.
With training from TA Jacob Nelson, students were free to play with the data available on CommScore for their group and individual projects. Projects entailed coming up with a story based on the available data to study certain trends in the creative enterprises. Students came up with many interesting and keen observations- from entertainment news trends to being able to assume the largest demographic of pornography consumption.
The Media Metrics class was taught by renowned professor James Webster, who used his book The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age to illustrate the ways film and TV professionals strategize media elements such as content creation and release dates, to maximize output and reach target audiences.
Students were also introduced to the themes of targeted advertising generated through consumer behavior on digital platforms.
In this growing digital and technological world, data is increasingly being used in multiple industries. The entertainment industry has also been infiltrated by data usage for content creation. Platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, etc., rely on their recommender systems for greater and more positive consumer growth. Through the Understanding Media Markets class, students were given a glimpse of how complex and intricate the process of data acquisition could be.