SVP, U.S. and Global Production Research 

Sony Pictures Television 

Sony Pictures is a producer of premium television content for all platforms, and our research team is a shared resource which supports production and sales across all outlets. In order to succeed, we are organized as a single, holistic, cross-functional team. That’s both rewarding and challenging for us individually and as an organization. It’s rewarding because it empowers our team to bring more dynamic thinking and richer insights into everything we do. We aren’t familiar with just one slice of our industry, but rather we bring a broader set of experiences and a truly holistic understanding of the market and our industry today. Our consumers, after all, are watching programming across all platforms, and I believe we are better able to serve them and our organization from that perspective. It’s also incredibly challenging because the entertainment marketplace is more complex than ever before and continues to grow increasingly so every day. Never have consumers had so many entertainment choices, and it’s all on their terms today – what they want, when they want, how they want it.

Our industry is based on a linear broadcast consumption model that is increasingly shifting to an on-demand experience. We are also challenged because we produce and distribute content to our client network and video platforms, so we don’t own and don’t always get data on consumption. Trying to break through these walled gardens of data is a challenge, but we’ve also made some significant progress in this area over the past few years. We’ve done some groundbreaking work with Nielsen to help create new measurement systems in the non-linear space.

One of the great things about working in entertainment, and especially television, is that we have passionate consumers who are excited to share their opinions with us. They want to tell us about their persona...