How's this for a business model: attract the top talent in a tough industry, and solve their most pressing problem. That's exactly what Parrot Analytics is doing, and although it's early days, so far they're onto a winner.
The problem they're solving is measuring the demand for TV content across the current highly fragmented landscape. Their solution enables producers and distributors to measure the performance of their content across geographical markets, and also to compare specific programmes against their competitors within a market – across all channels, traditional, streaming, even offline. Content buyers can use this information to ensure that they're getting the best bang for the buck. Their mission is to help TV executives make better content decisions, and to better connect content creatives to consumers.
This problem is a hard one. In the olden days before the Internet, Nielsen had set-top boxes which recorded all of a viewer's activity, but it isn't so simple any more. You might watch a programme on live TV, then switch over to Netflix or Lightbox, Google Play, Amazon Video, Hulu, and even God forbid torrent an episode that you're geoblocked out of. Parrot's solution very cleverly doesn't care how you're consuming the content – it's more concerned with how much buzz it's generating in various online platforms, which turns out to be a much better and accurate measure of the demand for content.
Their system uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques to evaluate public reaction to each piece of content, and all of this complexity is reduced to a single number to rate the value of the content: the Demand Rating™ – one metric to rule them all.
Co-founded by Wared Seger and Chris Riddell, the Parrot Analytics team is a mashup of the creme-de-la-creme of NZ's top business, data, and science people, and funded by investors across New Zealand, Australia, and the US.
The Exec Team also includes CTO Jason Hunter, VP Product Arturas Vedrickas, and Ops Manager Dil Khosa.
One of their big customers is the BBC, for whom they were able to help uncover untapped opportunities for Dr Who in South Korea [see The Economist's case study]. Nobody had predicted that, and the good doctor has turned out to be a big hit south of the DMZ.
Parrot Analytics has plans to apply the same technology across the entertainment vertical, as it works equally well for movies, music, ebooks, and games – but the biggest pain market pain and opportunity right now is in TV.
Parrot Analytics established an office in Los Angeles last year. There's a small but growing cohort of Kiwi tech companies there, including 8i, The Appreciation Engine, Vista Entertainment, and recently high-profile Rocket Lab.
They've grown from six to 15 FTE over the last year, and raised both a seed round and a “pre-series-A” round, both among the largest that have ever been raised in NZ. They're likely to raise another larger round in 2016.
Parrot Analytics are hiring right now, so if you know anyone interested in being a Software Engineer Intern or Chief Data Scientist, do let them know.