Content creation has evolved greatly over the decades. In India, we love entertainment, drama and creative forms of storytelling, and with the emergence of OTT platforms, the diversity of content and audience has increased manyfolds. Zee, a household name in India, has been traversing this transformation with the technological prowess of Accenture. In the swanky office of the Zee Tech Innovation Center in Bengaluru, Devyani Ozarde, Managing Director- Media, Accenture in India and Nitin Mittal, President, Technology and Data, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. tell us about their partnership and what awaits the entertainment space in today’s data and tech-driven world. 

“Countries like India, have got not only day-to-day, life stories, but also so much of legendary stories to tell. To me, it’s a fascinating and exciting space” said Nitin Mittal, “Our job at Zee Tech and Innovation Center is to bring those stories to life”. In the constantly evolving realm of content creation, reinventing and reimagining technology is imperative. “The definition of good content or successful content doesn’t exist, right? It’s very subjective. So therefore, there has to be some method to the madness and which is where technology plays a role.” said Devyani Ozarde. 

Zee’s style of working is focusing on the outcome rather than the output. As Nitin explains, their priority is to deliver what customers expect and want from Zee’s platform, rather than merely meeting targets and completing tasks. Their partnership with Accenture which started in 2021 helped them deliver the best outcome to their audiences. The first step in their partnership, as Devyani tells, was the strategy exercise of bringing all the data together, figuring out the pain points and designing engines that would ease their day to day tasks of scanning through reports and excels. This, further, led Accenture to create the ‘Data Intelligence Hub’. 

“A data intelligence hub, which is nothing but a beautifully designed visualization interface which brings all your reports under one umbrella, or a click of a button” explained Devyani, “Designed specifically for executives on the go, specific to your business function, you could take a look at the data that is relevant to you”.
 
A discussion of technology inevitably involves AI. Zee has planned on leveraging AI to define the future of content creation. They have identified somewhere around 180 use cases where AI would apply and make a difference in 3 key aspects— augmenting creator ecosystem and improving creativity, improving monetization of content and relationship with brands and improving their productivity across organizations. An interesting tool at Zee is the Script GPT, which amalgamates previous stories, studies social media trends and suggests scripts for the next episodes. These suggestions are forwarded to the scriptwriters, helping them deliver the best outcomes.

Zee has built an ecosystem that harnesses the data that their audience conveys through social media platforms, comments and personal pages. “Consumers are dropping signals every single minute. They are consuming your content, they’re talking to you on social media, they’re, they’re constantly telling you what to what to give them what to supply. So are you picking up those signals?” said Devyani.

With the help Accenture’s of intelligence, this data-driven approach has helped Zee create a future-ready hub of content creation that stands strong as one of the largest media organizations in India.