Wicket Labs unveils audience insights platform
Tuesday, October 10th, 2017Wicket Labs Unveils Wicket Scorecard, an Audience Insights Platform for Media Companies
- With Wicket Scorecard, media companies can for the first time see their video customers across digital platforms with unique insights into conversion, engagement and likelihood to churn
- Company announces $2 million seed financing from Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures and angels
SEATTLE — Today, Wicket Labs introduced Wicket Scorecard, an audience insights platform, to enable media and entertainment companies to automatically see, measure and predict video customer usage and growth for their direct-to-consumer subscription businesses. Additionally, the company announced $2 million in seed financing from Madrona Venture Group, Divergent Ventures and angels.
As the traditional pay TV market continues to fragment, media companies are investing in new OTT channels including direct to consumer and premium subscriptions. As these channels scale, subscribers come from various partners such as Amazon, iTunes, Roku, and Xbox while viewing occurs on the web, smart TVs, OTT devices and mobile phones. This diversity makes it increasingly difficult to collect and synthesize customer stats in near real time across channels. This data is crucial to companies as they hone their content and work to attract new viewers. Wicket Scorecard brings this data together and provides valuable insights, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions to grow their video businesses.
“The Wicket Labs mission is to level the playing field for media companies in an arena where data determines the winners,” said Marty Roberts, CEO of Wicket Labs. “The Wicket Scorecard is designed to inform decisions and grow an audience’s lifetime value, through more trial-to-customer conversions, longer subscription terms and more frequent visits. We believe a data-driven decision process will be a key determinant in any successful media business.”
Wicket Labs was founded by Marty Roberts, CEO and Ian Blaine, CSO. Blaine founded thePlatform which was acquired by Comcast in 2006. Roberts joined thePlatform in that same year, leading marketing, sales and eventually taking on the role of Co-CEO. The team deeply understands the challenge presented to traditional and new media companies as channels grow and cost structures shift.
“Cord cutting has dramatically shifted the balance of power for media companies,” said Len Jordan, managing director of Madrona Venture Group. “For many of these companies, audience lifetime value is a new metric as they establish direct relationships with their customers. The team at Wicket Labs is working to help media companies better understand their audience to fuel decision making about new content, new promotions and even new cost structures.”
Additionally, Krishan Bhatia, Mike Berkley and Dustin Hillard joined as Wicket Advisors. Bhatia serves as EVP, Business Operations & Strategy for NBCUniversal’s Advertising Sales division where he oversees the division’s product capabilities, technology platforms and operations as well as the strategy, research and analytics functions — spanning its TV and digital portfolio. Berkley was most recently the SVP of Product Management for Viacom, leading a team of 50 product managers and designers working across the digital platforms used by Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1, BET, Spike, TV Land, and CMT. Hillard is the CTO of Versive, leading the innovation and development efforts behind their artificial intelligence platform. He has deep experience in delivering diverse machine learning products, from cyber security to language understanding, and advertising.
Wicket Scorecard brings light to key stats like audience lifetime value, customer acquisition costs and engagement. Having insight into these stats and their trends over time empower media companies to make decisions to grow their audience, improve operational reliability and collaborate throughout the process.
In the Wicket Scorecard, media companies can immediately see many important measures of their audience including:
- Customers counts by month and by product, customer acquisition costs including lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios, subscription heuristics, and current subscription status by the acquisition source.
- Conversions to subscribers on a daily basis, yield per customer acquisition source, and a drill-down into each marketing activity to better understand its effectiveness.
- Lost customers by method of loss, and risk analysis for current customers based on trends.
- Engagement metrics that measure number of series and days of watching activity.
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