Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few different use cases and segments and understand how people are using your technology. You started about the movie and entertainment industry. You can pick a customer and talk about how, where, and how this is being used.

Stephanie Newby: I’m actually now sure which customers I can discuss from that industry.

Sramana Mitra: You can just talk about the use case without naming a customer. I’m interested, for instance, how film studios are using this.

Stephanie Newby: Five of the six movie studios have been our customers for many years. They use this to predict box office ratings by following movie trailer releases. A movie like Fast & Furious for example has a huge social media following because the actors themselves are very big users of social media. They will actually start the buzz about a movie while they’re filming because they will be talking about the stunts and the scenes they’re doing.

They start building that buzz early on. Importantly, what they can do is monitor their reaction to the movie in social media and give some time to tweak things which might mean changing a trailer. It might mean how they’re endorsing the movie. It might mean changing where the placements are. It’s extremely valuable at predicting box office takings, well in advance of the movie release. With social media, it’s been very predictable up to three months in advance of a new release.

Sramana Mitra: Most of your work with these movie studios is before the movie is released. Is that what you’re saying?

Stephanie Newby: That’s just one example but of course, movies have very long tails these days because of the many different ways that people view them well past when they’re in the box office. They can continue to monitor the conversation and learn where people are consuming the movies. Netflix, for example, is using that to monitor its own movies versus movies that they buy in. I think movies is just one example.

If I were to take a different example, it would be in the CPG industry where companies are not just monitoring brands because it’s a fairly obvious use case. That’s easy because you’re just tracking keywords. We have all of the data rather than just data associated with a specific keyword. Our customers can also monitor the unbranded conversation.

For example, if you’re a big CPG company, you’d be interested in trends like organic or GMO. This can inform the product managers to know when something has gotten enough traction over enough period of time to potentially bring out a new line of yogurt, for example. That’s by tapping the conversation around very broad topics like food. We have customers who even track economic indicators because they’ll be tracking things like loans, mortgages, and prices so they can see how people are talking about their budgets and the ability to pay up. This can inform people’s views about the economy.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon
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