But the sector is undergoing a revolution, thanks to the growth of streaming services, which have allowed those at the forefront to capture real-time data around viewing figures and patterns which can be used to guide investment decisions.

Data in this sector isn’t a new thing – traditional cinemas have heavily relied on data to thrive. But what kind of data do they collect now, and how can analytics help enhance their operations?

At Qlik Connect in Florida, TechInformed caught up with Nordic entertainment company Nordisk Film to hear how it used Qlik’s data analytics engine to boost productivity and achieve significant cost savings.

Big data in Little Denmark

One of the oldest movie production companies still in operation, Nordisk Film has been a cornerstone of the Nordic entertainment industry since its founding in Copenhagen in 1906.

Now owned by the Egmont Group, Nordisk Film has expanded its operations across Scandinavia and beyond, encompassing movie production, distribution, and even the largest cinema chain in Denmark and Norway.

Additionally, Nordisk Film is the official distributor of Sony PlayStation consoles in Scandinavia, produces computer games and operates a significant gift card business.

As a diverse portfolio company, Nordisk Film collects data from various business ventures. According to Mikkel Hecht Hansen, head of business intelligence at Nordisk Film, the company gathers in-house data such as cost and revenue analysis.

“We also collect external data from content that is publicly available on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or other platforms. We manage the interactions, likes, and comments on our content on social platforms. But also, how much our movies are talked about in public areas and public groups,” he said.

But collecting so much unstructured data comes with its own set of challenges.

Houston, we have a (data) problem!

Previously, Nordisk Film faced several challenges in managing and utilising its vast amounts of data. The company needed to ensure that its creative processes were informed by data-driven insights, from understanding movie performance to optimising cinema operations.

However, the unstructured nature of much of its data, particularly opinion and sentiment analysis from social media and public reviews, posed significant hurdles, especially for gamers.

“Gamers are very talkative, and they’re very emotionally connected to the computer games they like. But the biggest problem we have on the gaming side is that people use a lot of irony,” he explained. This made it difficult to gauge genuine sentiment in gaming reviews.

According to Hansen, the sheer volume of cinema reviews was also overwhelming: “Each time people buy a movie ticket, we send out a survey. People are actually quite good at responding, but that’s too much information to get a handle on. There could be 50,000 reviews, each with a lot of information.”

Recognising the need for a robust data analytics solution, Nordisk Film embarked on a journey to find the right tool to address these issues.

Eureka!

Enter Qlik, a data analytics platform that Nordisk Film chose after a strategic vendor selection process in 2018. According to the entertainment company, the platform’s flexibility and existing competencies within Nordisk Film made it an ideal choice.

Nordisk claimed that another deciding factor was Qlik’s ‘enterprise-ready setup,’ which allowed for complete control over data sharing and access.

“We have six different business units. Some of them are in open competition with other companies, and we need to ensure to the authorities that they don’t gain any unfair access to data that they shouldn’t have access to,” says Hansen.

The implementation of Qlik transformed Nordisk Film’s data processes. By centralising data ingestion and analytics, the company was able to provide daily operational dashboards to a large user base, enabling informed decision-making across various business units.

One notable success was reducing cinema energy consumption, achieved through a detailed analysis of energy usage patterns.

“We can see the energy consumption on all our different sites, and we use that analysis for our ESG so we can find how much carbon we’re actually consuming. But it was the analysis and dashboards we created in Qlik that enabled us to find out we were turning on the lights in cinema screens hours before the screens were actually utilised,” he adds.

By fine-tuning when it turned on the power in cinema screens, Nordisk Film was able to save 10-15% on energy consumption. As such, it is now working on using the same strategy to decide when to cool and heat its different sites.

Cloudy, with a chance of migration

Moreover, Qlik’s cloud migration further streamlined operations, allowing Nordisk Film to maintain a small but efficient team to manage the platform. This shift also facilitated remote access to data, enhancing collaboration across different regions. Hansen explains:

“We are three people maintaining this entire platform for six different business areas with 600 users. We have over 300 different apps and solutions on the platform. So, we need to minimise the time we spend on maintenance service and stuff like that — none of which is a problem in the cloud.”

At the same time, with people located across Scandinavia, migrating everything to the cloud makes it much easier for their team to access data. “As long as they can connect to the internet, they have access to our systems.”

Hansen explains that maintaining a data warehouse platform on an internal system makes little sense when almost all of the systems his team interact with are migrating to the cloud.

“We’re actually sort of like a hybrid setup because we have a lot of our production systems still onsite. But at the same time, I see almost all of the internal Nordisk Film systems we work with are either on the way to the cloud, in the cloud, or being changed to SAS or PAS solutions. I need to follow the trend and the trend is every interaction surrounding my ecosystem is migrating in some way to the cloud.”

Mission impossible?

Egmont’s strategy to focus on users meant pivoting the types of data they collected. But for Hansen, the most difficult challenge with Nordisk’s transformation was convincing everyone to come along for the ride.

“We must know how the consumption of our users is actually changing because we’re moving into a digital world; they’re changing from magazines and books to streaming,” he says.

“We had to fight the “We’ve done this before; we know our consumers” sentiment that was very strong within our organisation. We had to prove the need to be data-driven because, from a strategic point of view, things are changing very rapidly. We need to understand why.”

Hansen’s biggest challenge was to gain the organisation’s trust and demonstrate the value of the new processes. His team achieved this by creating organic use cases in areas they knew people were interested in or had the skillset to work with and showcasing them internally — but that wasn’t enough.

“It was like a two-front war; we had to find it from both sides. We started looking for the best possible use cases that we could produce for them. Slowly but surely, people started building solutions and assets on the platform. In half a year, it changed from us trying to push things to being overwhelmed by demand.”

Hansen explains that although many people are initially resistant to change, worried about their jobs being replaced, frustrated with changes to their workflow, or feeling as though they are losing ownership of their work, they eventually become ambassadors once they can tangibly see its value.

He suggests that without the Qlik software, the change would have been slower and less exponential. Indeed, it would have been harder to fight for it to happen at all.

“I think that without a central platform, different parts of the business would have attempted to create their own solutions, but they would have been small in scale. Without a centralised platform, implementing Power BI in these small pockets would have been time-consuming and less successful.”

Whilst at Qlik Connect, we also caught up with another Qlik customer, Centrica’s director of data and engineering, for a coffee.

Back to the future

According to Hansen, Nordisk Film is well-positioned for future growth with Qlik’s data analytics capabilities. The platform has enabled the company to build a more stable analytical framework, particularly for complex areas like its gift card business, where fraud detection has been significantly improved.

As the entertainment industry evolves, Nordisk Film is prepared to leverage data analytics to stay ahead of trends and make informed production and distribution decisions.

In addition to optimising operational efficiency and driving down costs, Nordisk Film’s ability to understand and predict audience preferences has enabled it to remain competitive.

“Otherwise, the audience will consume some of the other entertainment products out there. We’re competing for time, and it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that the great content you have is actually something that they should spend time on,” Hansen explains.

That’s a wrap!

Nordisk Film’s journey with Qlik offers valuable lessons for the wider entertainment and film industry. Hansen’s key takeaway is the importance of a strong data foundation and the need for effective change management to drive cultural shifts towards data-driven decision-making.

“You need to either read up on or get help with change management. Because this is not really a technical process. It’s a people process,” he says.

By embracing advanced analytics, companies can gain a competitive edge, optimise operations, and better understand their audiences. But Hansen explains it all amounts to nothing if the data is good to begin with.

He adds that despite the advances in AI across all sectors, none of the advanced analytics that people would benefit from could be achieved if time and energy aren’t invested in building a strong data foundation: “You can’t do any of the fancy stuff if you don’t have complete control over the boring bits.”

“It’s a cultural thing we need to work on continuously. Otherwise, it will never be part of business. It will be a white elephant project that people spend enormous amounts of time and energy on, but when you look at the data, no one is utilising it, still using all the small Excel sheets that they did before.”

Read about what else TechInformed learnt this year at Qlik Connect here.

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