As the playing field for cable and broadcast media evolves, companies that deliver the content available through them have been forced to adapt. Not only is the medium that is used to offer that content itself changing, but so are the ways in which it is being delivered.

Shiv Sehgal, product manager of the Media Mantra Platform at RSG Inc., and Daniel Hernandez, VP Information Integration Governance at IBM, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the BigDataNYC 2016 event at the Mercantile Annex in New York, NY. The discussion included the metamorphosis the media content and broadcast industry is undergoing and how Big Data and deep analytics are being used to enhance productivity and value in that sector.

The importance of understanding your audience

In the past, targeting audiences to bring them advertising content has always been straightforward. The devices used to deliver and view content, such as newspaper, radio or television, had been the same for decades, Sehgal explained. But in recent years, these platforms have been changing rapidly. Today you have tablets, desktops, laptops or mobile phones being used to deliver content that could range from news to short videos to entire movies. And as the end users evolve, the industries delivering their content must change as well, he added. RSG is assisting these content providers to help them more fully understand who is viewing what content so that they can more efficiently target their viewership with advertising and marketing.

“Over time it’s been evolving much more to understand who your audience is and where people are going to engage with their content,” said Sehgal. “It started off as being ‘what’s available?’ and ‘what can we use?’, but now it’s ‘who’s watching our stuff and on what platform?’, ‘what are they engaging in?’ and ‘what are these different types of content that are driving our viewership?’ and ‘how can we better understand those people who are watching our content?’ so we can provide them more personalized content and hyper-target them for advertising and marketing.”

Big Data analytics is creating better targeted advertising

In the past, targeted advertising was quite limited because content delivery methods were limited, as were methods of feedback from the viewer. With the transformation in content delivery and viewership methods, RSG is creating tools and working with these content providers to use deep analytics to better understand their audience not just by age, but by specific varied interests. This is allowing content providers to target the audience much more accurately for specific advertising, Sehgal stated.

“In a nutshell, what’s happening is that cable and broadcast networks are starting to get much more granular,” said Sehgal. “We want to understand specific viewing behaviors and understand how do we better target ultimately that one individual eyeball. In today’s day and age, data provides a competitive advantage, where you can run your business smarter and you can mitigate risk.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE