MUSIC TECH STARTUP: PlumResearch focuses on data

Lukasz Jeziorski, managing director at Plumresearch, explains how big data are important for firms of all kinds.

You were among the finalists at MidemLab 2016. How important are labs like this, or in general incubators, accelerators and such?

Going out to the world with your product and building awareness is one of the most important things in building a startup, especially a b2b one. 

MIDEMLAB is very industry focused and it's hosted at MIDEM the leading music business conference in beautiful Cannes. 

It's very important for startups to attend these kind of events, but it's even more important to choose wise – those industry focused that really matter. For me it's music, video, tv, esports, research and big data. I don't attend every event I get invited to, especially the massive ones about startups or business in general. You need to have a business focused approach to these conferences and use them to schedule meetings with potential corporate clients and partners that visit these industry focused events – it's often the only way to get to talk to them as calls don't work too good with enterprises as a first meeting. 

Many early stage startups or aspiring entrepreneurs make the mistake and go to every conference possible, they often get recognition in the startup world and some of that recognition converts to funding, but that takes a lot of time that in my opinion should be focused on the product and driving business. 

How important is data in this era? 

I am not going to be original to say that data is the new oil, but it's true. 

Today data drives the world, we generate more data points every day than we will ever be able to analyze. It's also  getting harder and harder to pick which data sets are important to your business and what is just noise generated around it. Nevertheless my advice would be gather everything you can, because gold is often in the trash. 

Data Scientists and Data Engineers are currently the most desirable employees over all market segments and territories – I think this shows how important is data. 

What is the idea behind your system? What kind of need did you try to cover with it? 

First of all the core value of Plum Research is to completely change the approach to the market research industry. We track people and what they do, where and how they interact with products, services and content. 

Due to the model we have created called "sample on demand" we can easily build a very large sample of highly targeted users. 

We turned the model around instead of having a 1000 person representative sample for a certain country and doing some generic surveys or behavior analysis, we identify and acquire targeted samples f.e.: only paying users of a certain service (often competition of our client) or medical doctors in a certain territory. Some of those samples go in millions of users if the analysis requires granular data. 

We focus on bringing real business intelligence to our customers and their day to day operations, it is crucial for us to understand their business problems within their organization value chain. Only then we can identify their data needs and make sure we build up the perfect sample for them and track the right events. 

How did you come up with it? 

The initial idea was something completely different, but after pitching it to entertainment industry executives the feedback we got was that the real value is in the rich data we have, not the single end product we had running on top of it. We started asking more questions and it seemed that the current industry research was left behind somewhere in the analog era and not tracking online behavior in full or at least not focusing on the business goals – that is when the concept of Plum Research was born. 

Do you aim to work with managers, artists, promoters…or just anyone who’ll ask your advice? 

We choose our projects very carefully, only the most interesting ones that can bring a real breakthrough, I would say we take around 1 in 10 of those which are sent to us. We have  potential clients asking us about helping them with their marketing efforts, identifying core audience and so on – these are not things we currently do. Although they might be important for their company, Plum Research has been brought to life to answer a lot more complex problems. 

We focus on bringing high tech to the world of research by creating the best possible tools to give our clients access to data generated by the largest possible (highly targeted) sample for real data extrapolation instead of guesstimation. 

Is that data collection something your team will door is it a system that can be used by anyone? 

No data is a mass product, everything is a case by case scenario and only then we can really be helpful. Every company has their own KPIs but indeed we strive to put together data driven products on top of the data such as our global Netflix Audience Measurement which can be used similar to any enterprise SaaS or DaaS (Data as a Service) I should say. 

You talk about “audience” on your website – you mean people watching a video or what else? Can you make some more specific examples? 

Our focus is on providing intelligence towards the entertainment industry (although we have non-entertainment clients), right now we have moved a little bit out of the music sector towards motion picture, but of course by "audience" we mean everyone who consumed any sort of content. 

To best visualize our market advantage – we did a study on the impact made to streaming services by certain artists choosing to publish their content with one streaming service and not the other. Due to the fact that we gather data at a low (operating system or browser) level our data is much richer than anybody else.  

We saw some of our users searching for artist X in a music steaming service 'A' and when not finding it going to YouTube and listening to it for hours. In that same case we saw other users switching to a streaming service 'B' where that content was present, some of them uninstalling 'A' and closing subscriptions others have just split their attention span between them, but it's the volume and value of those users that should matters most. 

I am not sure if there is any other research company in the world that can so clearly see the transition between certain online services and what impacts them. 

In January we also did Twitch monitoring for an e-sports tournament where we used our logo identification for live streams and identified the most often shown brands on screen as well as the impact it had to the Twitch chat across all the multilingual streams. A short summary of that is in this infographic – plumresearch.com/eleauge.jpg 

Could you be a little more specific on the service you’re running? 

Right now our core product is Netflix Audience Measurement, we provide data on show and movie consumption going down to episode level – demographic distribution, binge watching, period of the day activity, the moment users get hooked on a series, which shows share the same audience, which are the main reason for users to subscribe to Netflix and so on… 

This is especially interesting to our clients as Netflix as treats their data as their secret sauce. 

We also have a service that evaluates the sponsorship value of certain ad placements for sporting events. 

Other than that most of our activities are case by case built for customer specific needs.   

What kind of feedback have you had? 

We are in touch on a daily basis with many Hollywood studios, film distribution companies and TV broadcasters. Up to now all the feedback we received was very positive. 

We get a "wow moment" often when mentioning our research sample size or just by showing how easy to use and intuitive our end products are. 

Usability is something we put a very strong emphasis towards as our full team did mass market B2C products earlier so that concept of "plug and play" with no additional tutorials is in our DNA also when providing data products for enterprise clients.

Is Poland a lively environment for startups? 

Poland is a wonderful place to live, it's one of the safest places on earth with top world class coders due to the Polish high standards of education, but it's still not the best place in terms of looking for early stage capital. 

Gladly due to our global reach and networking at the events we have investors from all over the world knocking on our doors.