Getting to ROI: Rights metadata and the smart content life cycle

Calculating return on investment (ROI) on individual content assets has long been a dream of content companies. Even the most sophisticated media and entertainment companies cannot be exact about how much a piece of content has made in the past and what its lifetime value might be. However, some companies are doing a lot to create rich data about their content assets by investing in systems that track content usage, and by creating metadata not only to describe the content but also to provide rights, financial and usage data that can be linked to the binary content asset (ie the photograph, video or music). Storing rich metadata in databases rather than in Excel or offline will help content companies to know, protect, value and monetise their content efficiently and broadly. Predictive analytics, machine-readable licensing, and ultimately complete content ROI will all become more important to media and entertainment companies competing in the complex digital ecosystem, where optimising channels, territories and platforms is becoming more crucial. Transparency into what content performs better than other content, and how much to invest in content will lead not only to short-term monetisation opportunities, but also to intellectual property value creation for content when companies look to sell and need to point to the quality of their metadata to prove the worth of the company overall.