Top 10 Technology Trends in Entertainment & Creative Talent Management Industry — Part II

(Part I of the Tech Trends can be read here)

The technology trends discussed below are a continuation of what we discussed previously. There are already a lot of companies doing good work in these areas so we plan to bring some of what they offer to our platform.

TL;DR — Automated News Alerts, Multiple Social Media Management, Digital Revenue Sources, Online Scouting, Team Collaboration

AUTOMATED NEWS ALERTS

Traditionally talent agencies would have a PR rep who would look out for news pieces in print and digital media about their top 10% clients. With an explosion in digital news media ranging from main street newspapers to nićhe news sites to online blogs, a lot more is being covered than agencies can keep up with. Some agencies intelligently started employing Google Alerts to get automated emails if someone they represented got media coverage. For simple purposes that is fine, but once you start looking into large scale tracking with fine grained analytics into what works and what doesn’t, you need more complex and automated solutions. A good example is Mention. Their media monitoring is the best in the class and some top agencies in this industry are using it. The only drawback is that as a platform it sits outside you choice of workflow or scheduling system.

MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT

If you are an agency, social media tools should be indispensable for you and your clients. Talents use platforms like Facebook Mentions or Live, Twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, Line, Periscope and Twitch. for expanding their reach, interacting with their fans, acting as influencers to promote brands or just simply promoting their work. Agencies increasingly are needed to manage these platforms on behalf of the talent they manage. Tools like Buffer & Hootsuite help with re-posting across networks. But social media is becoming ever-more complex. New tools like Klout and Speakr provide services like complex influencer analytics and social media post analysis which can help talents to better understand their post reach and quality.

DIGITAL REVENUE SOURCES

Traditionally, sources of revenue for agencies have been commissions on media projects, contract fees, talent management fees, styling and other service fees. With increasing number of digital avenues (some touched upon earlier), sources of revenue are diversifying — social brand endorsements, ad-supported online content on YouTube like unboxing videos, game reviews and scripted shows. Agencies are increasingly helping their talents diversify their income streams via digital channels, hence stabilizing their own revenues. We think apart from increased revenue channels, the agencies will slowly start to collaborate more hence bringing down their costs as well. We at Staragent are excited about something in this space that we are working on — so keep an eye out!

ONLINE SCOUTING

There is a good amount of talent surfacing via digital avenues like YouTube vloggers (Ray William Johnson, Casey Neistat, VSauce), channels with shows (Screen Junkies, HISHE, WahBanana), musicians and singers on Soundcloud and models on Instagram. Agencies are capitalizing on this by finding and signing up these talents early on. Still discovering talent by these channels is more art than science. Word-of-mouth is still the best way to surface them. At Staragent, we want to help agencies reduce their cost by focussing more on these digital ways of finding talent. With our data science team, we are building something that will be a game changer towards this - so stay tuned!

TEAM COMMUNICATION

Agencies still rely on calls and SMS for communication between a manager and a talent OR a creative director and the agency casting agent. But that is changing rapidly. Chat apps like Line, WeChat and WhatsApp provide group chat services to get all relevant people within an agency or associated with a project under one roof. Internal communication between agency staff is also increasingly being handled by enterprise chat apps like Slack, Lync or Facebook for Work. This is an important step forward to bring together all areas of an agency on the same page, operation-wise.

Again we would like to stress the immense benefits that an agency can reap by going digital. If you would like to learn more about these benefits, please feel free to get in touch with our team at hello@staragent.co