Over the past 10 years, the cable television sector in the United States has enjoyed a period of growth that has enabled unprecedented creativity in the creation of high-quality content. AMC Networks has been at the forefront of this new golden age of television, producing a string of successful, critically acclaimed shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead.
Dedicated to producing quality programming and movie content for more than 30 years, AMC Networks owns and operates several of the most popular and award-winning brands in cable television, producing and delivering distinctive, compelling, and culturally relevant content that engages audiences across multiple platforms.
Getting Ahead of the Game
Despite its success, AMC Networks has no plans to rest on its laurels. As Vitaly Tsivin, SVP Business Intelligence, explains:
We have no interest in standing still. Although a large percentage of our business is still linear cable TV, we need to appeal to a new generation of millennials who consume content in very different ways.
TV has evolved into a multichannel, multistream business, and cable networks need to get smarter about how they market to and connect with audiences across all of those streams. Relying on traditional ratings data and third-party analytics providers is going to be a losing strategy: you need to take ownership of your data, and use it to get a richer picture of who your viewers are, what they want, and how you can keep their attention in an increasingly crowded entertainment marketplace
Zoning in on the Viewer
The challenge is that there is just so much information available-hundreds of billions of rows of data from industry data-providers such as Nielsen and com Score, from channels such as AMC's TV Everywhere live Web streaming and video-on-demand service, from retail partners such as iTunes and Amazon, and from third-party online video services such as Netflix and Hulu.
"We can't rely on high-level summaries; we need to be able to analyze both structured and unstructured data, minute-by-minute and viewerby viewer," says Tsivin. "We need to know who's watching and why-and we need to know it quickly so that we can decide, for example, whether to run an ad or a promo in a particular slot during tomorrow night's episode of Mad Men." AMC decided it needed to develop an industryleading analytics capability in-house and focused on delivering this capability as quickly as possible.
Instead of conducting a prolonged and expensive vendor and product selection process, AMC decided to leverage its existing relationship with IBM as its trusted strategic technology partner. The time and money traditionally spent on procurement were instead invested in realizing the solution, accelerating AMC's progress on its analytics roadmap by at least six months.

In the past, AMC's research team spent a large portion of its time processing data. Today, thanks to its new analytics tools, it is able to focus most of its energy on gaining actionable insights.
"By investing in big data analytics technology from IBM, we've been able to increase the pace and detail of our research an order of magnitude," says Tsivin. "Analyses that used to take days and weeks are now possible in minutes, or even seconds." He added, Bringing analytics in-house will provide major ongoing cost-savings. Instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to external vendors when we need some analysis done, we can do it ourselves-more quickly, more accurately, and much more cost-effectively. We're expecting to see a rapid return on investment.
As more sources of potential insight become available and analytics becomes more strategic to the business, an in-house approach is really the only viable way forward for any network that truly wants to gain competitive advantage from its data.

Questions for Case 7.2
1. What are the common challenges that broadcasting companies are facing today? How can analytics help to alleviate these challenges?
2. How did AMC leverage analytics to enhance its business performance?
3. What were the types of text analytics and text mini solutions developed by AMC networks? Can you think of other potential uses of text mining applications in the broadcasting industry?

Transcribed Image Text:

Whol Weekly Delivery by Sales Daypart vs prior week Ending Sales Prime 12/03/2015 4 i.. IH Sales Weekend 538 toco) Live Pus SD 1,000 750 500 882 AMC Competitive Delivery by Network Sales Prime 250 0 Sales Prime Sales Late Night 208 Sales Day 123 2015-3263/0208 Sales Weekend NETWORK AEN AMC IDISC IFX THIST SPIKE 18SC TNI USA Sales Fringe Live Plus 3 187 Total Day 457 Sales Late Night Set Salee Fringe Day Weekly Delivery by Daypart vs prior week Prime Daytime 1,336 142 6% Frince 222 Delivery Week Over LAST Year - Sales Prime Prime Weekend 661 Weekend PERSONS 2+ Late Night A 443 Total Day AP 457 Top 10 Cable Network Telecasts (Competitive). Sales Prime AMC AMC-WALKING DEAD-20130003-2100 DISO ALA Late Night Fringe Day AYC WALK AVC-FETER CALL SALL- 0-1000 Dec GOLD HUSH FERSONS 18-49 PERSONS 25-54