Could you tell us a little about your own professional background?
I'm a serial entrepreneur who’s always been slightly ahead of the market. Besides some opportunistic projects, such as a guerrilla marketing effort selling T-Shirts at major events, I went straight out of University into making high-end gourmet coffee. This was at a time when espresso coffee was just gaining popularity. One of my best mates and I started a mobile coffee cart company and grew it into the second largest coffee cart company in Australia.
I sold that and went to the UK and got involved in a tech company, building computer peripherals and spy gadgets in China and selling them into European retailers like Dixons and Maplins. In 2004 after a good 4-year stint, I invested my coffee business money into a new start-up called MoMedia. This was initially producing and distributing mobile content clips on 2G phones. It turned into a digital media production company syndicating channels of UGC, mixed with professional content to Telco’s, internet and IPTV companies including MSN, Yahoo, AOL and a bunch of other massive companies which don’t exist anymore. I part sold that to Endemol, the Dutch/British TV production and distribution company.
What inspired the launch of Looper Insights and what were the initial goals when you started?
Having worked in the Video on Demand (VoD) industry for 15 years, it was apparent that content and app distributors had very little visibility into the placement and positioning of their movies and VoD apps across the specific devices used by consumers such as smart TV’s, streaming devices, set top boxes and gaming consoles. With more digital entertainment available than ever before, how do you know if your content or apps are being found and consumed by users? I wanted to create a solution that allowed these companies to not only manage their content more efficiently, but also to understand which placements and promotions could produce the best ROI for them.
How is Looper Insights helping Film and TV companies grow their revenues?
Our platform performs visual scans on a multitude of connected devices, and provides clients with actionable data and intel to better promote their TV and film content and VoD apps. The visibility we provide enables our clients to track their campaign performance against their competitors to better understand their digital share of voice. These content distributors can also integrate their historical sales datasets into the platform to correlate against viewing, subscriber and download figures, further helping them to understand which placements and promotions generate the largest return on investments.
How is Looper Insights responding to changes in the film and TV industry?
The way we watch TV is constantly evolving. Only a few years ago you would turn on your TV and would be presented with a long list of channels to watch. Now, the first thing consumers see on connected devices is the artwork of a film and TV show or app logos. In fact, all of these are now fighting for the very same real estate. That's a massive shift in how consumers find content, and when you add in early access to films that are, or would have been, in theatres, as well as voice search, the world of media is in a rapid state of change.
Our solution enables our clients to keep on top of all these changes by allowing them to see what consumers see. It's a unique proposition in terms of being able to do that.
What does the future of Looper Insights look like? What’s the next step?
We’re really excited to be working with the likes of Amazon Prime Video, A+E Networks, Peacock (NBCU) and Sony. We want to help as many companies as possible to understand the value of their placements and promotions. Our company mission is to optimise content placement and merchandising across Connected Devices, and with more and more entertainment devices and services emerging on a daily basis, the possibilities for our company are endless.
