Beyond the Bandwidth: Turning Data into Dollars with AI

Sure, AI can make it easier to organize your to-do list or rewrite that email, but how can it make money? Media and telecom companies are exploring new ways of generating revenue through AI and finding some success.

Driving Ad Sales

Media company Spanish Broadcasting System, which includes full-service digital marketing agency Digidea, has been using AI to expand its business. It’s been working with Futuri’s end-to-end sales intelligence system TopLine, which uses AI to automate consumer and audience research. By being able to use data and show a client specific areas that they aren’t reaching, particularly with Latino audiences, it’s opened up more than $1.5 million in new revenue, Dara Kalvort, SBS’ VP of Sales and Strategy, said during a panel at NECTA’s annual convention this week.

“If you feed AI with the right information, it’s going to give you really amazing information back with the right prompt and that backend information. I’m really passionate about it, and I think it’s changing the industry in a really good way, because at the end of the day, what we’ve lost in ad sales is the face-to-face time,” she said. “AI is changing that in a profoundly positive way. By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining complex workflows, it frees us to do what we do best—connect with people. For me, the true potential of AI goes far beyond data and dollars—it’s about the time it gives back.”

Kalvort, who also has an AI consultancy business, sees its as a tool that can improve the personal as well as the professional world. “AI isn’t just reshaping industries; it’s helping us reclaim our humanity, putting relationships and purpose back at the center of our work and lives,” she said.

Exploring Efficiencies

Leap Media Group is going beyond the traditional ad agency role and actually acquiring and co-producing its own television shows that it distributes and syndicates with ads. That includes a current block of half-hour travel shows that includes branded shows from Expedia that offer deep dives on various destinations complete with ad breaks with QR codes to take the consumer to info to book a trip through Expedia. “In order to do that for a new program every week, for a different destination, we have to have a way to sort of automate that process. That’s where AI comes in,” explained co-founder Chris Pizzurro. “We took our voiceover guy and brought him in and we AI his voice so that we can update the destination and the voice just reads it. What used to take a long time to do in the voiceover is now instant.”

But Pizzurro sees further possibilities for AI. Right now, Leap Media is using traditional media planning to buy up infomercial time—maybe that’s 7am on a Saturday on AMC or noon on Sunday on a local broadcaster. “In my brain, I think that this is the right ad in this show with no other QR codes. It’s very manual, which is fine, but the more the platforms grow, the more ads we have, the more platforms that it’s available on, and the more shows we have, it just becomes unattainable,” he said. “I would really just love a system that would be like, ‘OK, here I have this ad. Should it be on Roku in the Peter Greenberg travel show on a Saturday? And to be able to do that for every ad and decision that we’re placing on the fly. That’s where we’ll hopefully get to.”

Churn Buster

While AI is often mentioned in terms of content discovery, some think it could be the answer to DTC streamers’ growing churn problem. “What you see generally with streaming services, streaming platforms is that they’re in data-rich environments, but they’re not really insight-rich environments. I feel like this is where one of the biggest opportunities is going to be with AI,” Damien Organ, VP of Product Marketing for Cleeng, a SaaS platform specializing in subscriber retention management.

It’s working with the NFL, Sinclair, NHL and others. Cleeng’s Churn IQ platform uses advanced machine learning algorithms to identify subscribers who are at a high risk of canceling their subscription, and it’s doing so with 95% accuracy. “Now we are at that point where we can really also use AI for the users to really explore that data themselves,” Organ said.

While there was this idea 10-15 years ago of a democratization of data, it didn’t really come to fruition. Analyzing data took teams of experts and technological tools, with multiple studies finding that only about 24% of the global workforce feels confident in working with, reading and analyzing data. In the streaming world, there’s streaming data, viewer data and payment data all to sort through for actionable insights. But that’s all clean data that AI does very well with. “The whole promise of data democratized will happen because you’re going to be able to very easily tell stories and investigate data sets purely through Gen AI,” said Organ. “It’s not going to be something where you have to go to your data team and they have to spend a week building some charts that you don’t like in the end anyway. The rigid pre-built analytics is also something that’s going to change in that is going to be as easy as conversational prompts to generate a kind of insights environment.”

When it comes to churn, that could mean using AI to glean data to personalize the streaming packages offered, what sort of value discount makes the most sense at different points in the user experience and how to best target re-subscribers—those who dip in and out of a service subscription. “The traditional Netflix idea was there was one subscription for everybody and that’s it. That is definitely something that is on the way out, and it is much more about, how are you way more dynamic about this, how you tailor your offerings and how you target individual groups or customers with those offerings,” Organ said.