According to Wikipedia’s entry on Entertainment, “Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience’s attention.”
While this description is quite general, we can infer from the choice of words that there are at least three key concepts that are meaningful when trying to define what the notion of entertainment encompasses. The first concept is attention, of which any individual has a limited amount that can be dedicated to leisure activities. That leads into the second concept, interest. To be engaged in an entertainment activity, the consumer must be interested in the activity. The third concept is pleasure – if the individual is to remain engaged, the activity must produce feelings of pleasure and enjoyment.
There is a more subtle implication that there is a necessary virtuous cycle for any entertainment provider to produce entertainment products that are interesting, can grab an individual’s attention, and provide enough enjoyment and pleasure so that the individual will remain engaged and maintains a level of interest in the entertainment provider’s products. This sounds simple, but as we will discuss in future posts, there are numerous sociological, psychological, technical, and operational challenges that add a significant amount of complexity.
That is where analytics comes in. Entertainment businesses can employ analytics to understand what their customers are doing and what they like and evaluate ways to inform the development of products and content that are interesting, can hold the audience’s attention, and provide pleasure. There are actually many different personas within that audience, each with different interests and attention spans, so data analytics can be used to help classify the different consumers, create market segments, help develop marketing strategies and messaging to these different sub-audiences, as well as monitor product, content, and delivery performance, customer engagement, and overall value.
This web site is all about data analytics and how data analytics contributes to the creation and maximization of value in the game, entertainment, and media industries. We will look at different aspects of the entertainment businesses and then consider how different types of analytics can lead to increased visibility and mind-share while improving the overall customer experience.