Day 6 | Hollywood has an AI problem

Day 6 | Hollywood has an AI problem. What happens when fans start making better content than the studios? Go on YouTube right now. You'll find AI generated movie trailers featuring actors fans have always wanted in certain roles, along with short films that would probably never survive a Hollywood pitch meeting. Some of it is rough. Some of it is scarily good. Hollywood has survived plenty of disruptions, including COVID. But COVID changed how people watched movies. AI could change who gets to make them. And that's where things get interesting from a data perspective. Studios have decades of audience research, box office results, and streaming data. But nearly all of it comes from a world where audiences depended on studios to create their entertainment. How do you predict consumer behavior when that fundamental relationship starts changing? This reminds me of one of my biggest frustrations working with electric vehicle adoption forecasts. Nearly every model relied heavily on historical data from early adopters to predict future demand. You see the problem, right? Early adopters tended to be wealthier, more enthusiastic about the technology, and willing to tolerate inconveniences that mainstream consumers might not accept. Yet we were using their behavior to predict what an entirely different group of consumers would do. The data wasn't necessarily wrong. Using that data to create 5 year EV adoption forecasts was b****t in my opinion and I'll gladly die on that hill. And I think Hollywood could be facing a similar blind spot. If I were analyzing this market, I wouldn't be particularly interested in how many people are experimenting with AI-generated videos. I'd want to know whether people keep coming back to watch more, whether that content is replacing traditional entertainment, and whether there's a viable business model behind it. Because there's a huge difference between a technology people enjoy experimenting with and one that actually changes consumer behavior. Now, AI could just as easily make studios more valuable. Established franchises, recognizable characters, and professional storytelling might become even more important when anyone can create content. I don't know which way this goes. And anyone claiming to know exactly how it plays out is guessing. But after more than a decade in market research, I've learned that recognizing when your assumptions might be wrong is just as important as understanding what your data says. And that's something every business owner should think about. Your historical data might be completely accurate. But will the conditions that produced it still exist five years from now? So tell me I'm wrong. Sometimes having good data that gives you confidence in an assumption you never thought to question is worse than bad data. Please enjoy what Mike Tyson would look like as Gandalf that I made on ChatGPT in under 15 seconds. #AI #MarketResearch #CX #BusinessStrategy #EV #Data