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Storytelling Analytics

Using big data and artificial intelligence to inform decision making across content value chains

Storytelling Analytics is McKinsey’s predictive micro-segmentation and content analytics capability that brings together a team of storytellers, data scientists, marketers, content industry experts, and software engineers to help clients at every stage of their storytelling journeys.

HOW WE HELP CLIENTS

Marketers

Augment customer segmentations and data-driven marketing performance through network analytics that combine artificial intelligence, social, and proprietary customer data; enhance creative operations through automation and predictive analytics.

Content creators and studios

Identify new stories and content formats to produce while minimizing risk and cost; Deploy digital production and predictive content analytics to improve operations.

Streamers and content buyers

Use data and artificial intelligence to increase customer acquisition and retention and improve the profitability of content investments through content portfolio optimization.

Publishers

Optimize content selection and presentation for customers to improve the profitability of content creation, licensing and syndication.

Social media and content distributors

Enhance customer analytics with network graph and content micro-segmentation to accelerate value created from integrated content and distribution stacks.

Advertising inventory owners

Improve selling profitability with enhanced value propositions by combining network graph and storytelling analytics to reveal your consumers’ behaviors and preferences.

Investors

Identify growth hot spots in the content and marketing industries to stay ahead of the competition.

Growth companies

Identify expansion opportunities in new customer segments and business concepts with network graph analytics.

Our Approach

Custom analysis

We leverage our vast data repository, analytical models trained on content and social data, and industry expertise to address your most critical content needs, working with your teams to customize a solution for you.

Capability building

Our goal is to build your predictive content and network analytic capabilities. Achieving this goal often means building custom tools that can operate within your systems and training your content and analytics teams to ensure that impact is sustainable over time.

OUR CAPABILITIES

Predictive content analytics
We use machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to forecast outcomes in content creation, marketing, distribution, and content portfolio optimization.

Network analytics
We combine multiple layers of social, viewing, engagement, story features, media, transaction, and economic data to cluster audiences and identify opportunities at the microsegment level.

R&D and prototyping
We provide access to advanced research from leading machine learning and artificial intelligence experts with deep experience in prototyping and deploying predictive content and network analytics.

Cloud infrastructure
We collect billions of session-level content datapoints with an automated ingestion and processing engine to enable faster insight generation through our partnerships with cloud platform providers.

Content workflow deployment
We build custom applications that integrate with existing content production and content marketing systems to facilitate sustainable, real-time decision making.

OUR DATA

Viewing and engagement

Set-top box, streaming, syndicated viewing research, and content-based consumer behavioral data

Story features

Thousands of variables in content themes, cast and crew, ratings and awards, that enable predictions based on the natural language vocabularies of content creators and consumers

Social

Real-time social media graph data that fuels the foundation of our network analytics and micro-segmentation capabilities

Transactions

Revenue, pricing, subscription, advertising, marketing, box office, home entertainment, and commerce data across content types and global markets

Events and economic

Macroeconomic, consumer spending, geospatial, events, seasonality and other recurring and one-time indicators

Our Impact

A premium streaming television provider used Storytelling Analytics to combine comprehensive viewing histories with rich, nuanced storytelling vocabulary to make better decisions about content. Together, we created the right portfolio of content for the right audience segment, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in ineffective content spend.
A global streaming video provider used Storytelling Analytics to identify new formats and genres that resonated with local audiences to expand their market presence and cement their position as a global leader in streaming video.

Featured Insight

Article

AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators

– Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will.

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