Predictive Consumer Insights for the Media Market

By Gil Canaani with contributions from Shaneel Parekh, Hearst Ventures

Today, Vault AI (“Vault”) announced its $8m series A round to accelerate its global growth initiatives and to enhance its predictive consumer insights technology. As part of our thematic search for companies that are disrupting legacy markets with the use of data and AI, we are delighted to take part in Vault’s journey and work closely with David Stiff and Vault’s incredible team who are a combination of tech pioneers and media market research experts.

Based in LA and Tel-Aviv and founded by a super-strong tech team, Vault provides consumer insights and market predictions by leveraging their massive proprietary database that was built by extracting creative attributes from over 50k titles, movies and TV shows. By identifying the attributes with the most predictive power and then mapping them against real-world results (e.g., ratings), Vault provides market research insights and predictions that are by far more granular and accurate than the traditional focus groups or online surveys that are slow, expensive and many times inaccurate and biased.

Market research is used throughout the entire process of content development by multiple stakeholders. For example, creative teams use market research insights to adjust scripts and finetune the characters/plot to better match the target audience. In tandem, the marketing teams use market research to optimize their marketing strategy by targeting the right audience, demographics, geographies, and distribution channels (e.g., Netflix or Hulu). Ultimately, this means that a simple set of questions need to be answered:

• Should I buy this script?
• Who is the target audience?
• How big is the audience?
• What is the best distribution channel?
• What elements of the story should be highlighted in marketing materials and campaigns?

Vault is able to answer these questions in a matter of days.

The global media market is experiencing a renaissance, with massive growth of streaming services, and the production market is exploding, with over $150b spent today on the production of content. Surprisingly, media market research hasn’t fundamentally changed over the last 50 years. There are small improvements and iterations using online surveys and sourcing target focus groups online, but it’s pretty much the same respondent’s model based on small focus groups. These traditional market research methods are inefficient, labour-intensive and slow. Market research can take anywhere from two weeks to two months, depending on the scale of the survey, especially if the research includes international markets. In the current market, we learned that a decision to buy a script needs to be made within days, so these old solutions don’t work anymore, because they simply take too long.

One market research executive told us “This is the last generation that will be using focus groups. The future is in platforms such a Vault, the market is trending towards AI adoption to replace cumbersome respondent models.”

Vault offers two products: Vault AI Reporting, where market research teams can generate an on-demand report on specific content, whether it is a script or movie trailer. Vault runs an analysis against the database and generates a customized, highly accurate, unbiased report with consumer insights and prediction reports within days, without ever needing a single respondent. The second product is a SaaS analytics platform where users can compare and benchmark existing titles in the market.

We have been tracking Vault for over 2.5 years, during this period we were not only impressed by their progress but also saw the massive growth in streaming services and an explosion in the demand for content. As one executive told us “There isn’t anything else like Vault and I don’t make a move without them”. We are excited about this investment opportunity and look forward to working with the team as Vault continues to grow and further disrupt this legacy market.