Top 10 Tech Trends in Entertainment & Creative Talent Management Industry — Part I
We have spent a great deal of time talking to a lot of business owners in the last few months who run local, regional and global talent agencies. Technology is rapidly seeping into this industry and agencies broadly fall into these 3 categories — “This is cool & fantastic! Lets try it out!”, “Let’s wait for a few more months and see who else is using it” & “Facebook? Twitter? Yeah…we are not really active on it” (Yes! We have talent agencies who have said that — and the number is much more than you would think!)
Part I contains the first 5, priority-wise and adoption-wise. These are also areas where we at Staragent are expanding our features on. So TL;DR — Workflow Platforms, Intelligent Online Storage, Smart Scheduling, Cloud Accounting, Analytics
WORKFLOW PLATFORMS
Traditionally responsibilities within a talent agency have worked independently i.e. people who send out casting calls, people who are responsible for handling the media and people who are in-charge of tracking project status. Mid-90’s and early 2000’s agencies started using desktop-based software to run parts of the process i.e. calendar software like Outlook to share events OR a tool to create a local database of model features OR even using Excel to keep track of client details. With the rise of cloud-based services, SaaS platforms tackle the disorder using an integrated way to manage all this workflow from start-to-finish. Staragent (shameless plug) is an excellent example of such a platform. We have integrated talent, client & project onboarding followed by seamless CRM (customer relationship) & Project Management modules, customized especially for this industry. Some other platforms in this space are Syngency and Guava Booking.
INTELLIGENT ONLINE STORAGE
Personally people have been using Dropbox/Google Drive/Box for a few years now but their entry into the business world is fairly recent. Traditionally agencies have relied on local hard-drive, network file sharing and even hundreds of DVDs to maintain a repository of model & talent data like pictures and information. Recently, some agencies have realized that by moving all this media to cloud storage solutions mentioned above, they get various benefits like cheap storage, access to files on the go, searching, backup, collaboration and easy sharing. But looking closely these solutions still don’t fit the purpose — this media actually needs to be attached to a talent OR a project OR a client. Hence an additional layer of software is needed to make that connection. Staragent and some of the platforms mentioned above provide not only the benefits of saving your media to the cloud but also that deep integration and intelligence to understand what media belongs to whom and other rich information associated with it.
SMART SCHEDULING
Calendars have been along for sometime now. Outlook and Google Calendar (amongst other purely calendar services) do the basic job but the requirements specific for this industry have driven some feature rich scheduling services. Smart event scheduling, shared audition reminders for agents and the talent they represent, casting call & booking dates which are tied to a specific project are some of the customized solutions needed. Solutions like Guava Booking and Overture provide dedicated solutions to these problems to some agencies. But we at Staragent think such scheduling needs to be much smarter and should automatically tie into your existing workflow solution rather than sitting outside of it. When you have a photoshoot for a project and you schedule it, it should automatically sync up with your talent’s calendar for reminders and ultimately be easily importable to client invoices. This is one of our upcoming features in the next release.
CLOUD ACCOUNTING
Accounting and Invoicing have often come up in our conversations with agencies as one of their biggest operational pain point. Apps like Wave, Xero, Quickbooks and Freshbooks provide services like accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, invoicing and payments to a growing number of agencies. Some of them also provide basic analytics like expense breakdown by category and budget managers. This is already a massive step ahead in terms of operational efficiency but we at Staragent think that this can be taken a step further. The invoicing and expenses should be tied to projects, clients and talents so that some business intelligence can be brought to agency revenues.
ANALYTICS
One of the most powerful trends that have emerged is an increasing number of agencies shifting to making data-driven decisions. With adoption of workflow systems, online scheduling and cloud accounting, a lot of data is being collected which large agencies are starting to use to derive insights like — Agent Performance Metrics, Client Metrics, Lifecycle Metrics for Creative Projects and Revenue Metrics. Agencies which constantly look at these metrics rather than just end-of-year figures continuously keep improving their operations, thus saving on unknown costs. At Staragent we understand the importance of data-driven decisions and we want to bring these benefits to the rest of the industry. Our current set of analytics is just a start and we will keep on providing better insights in the future.
As we have always noticed, the Creative Talent Management industry for a long time was stuck in the 90s with the way they ran their operations. With an increased penetration of technology within our lives, business owners and innovators in this industry are going digital, thus making their agencies less-and-less manual and more-and-more automated.
Our aim at Staragent is to be at the forefront of it all by bringing the most valuable and cutting-edge services to agencies as soon as possible and helping them succeed.
(Part II of the Tech Trends can be found here!)
