Image: The House of Flowers (La Casa De Las Flores), Netflix. Written by Parrot Analytics Regional Director for Latin America, Alejandro Rojas.
Over the last week, Casa de las Flores, a dark comedy production recently released by Netflix, has become the most in-demand digital original series in Mexico, with almost twice as much demand as its nearest comparable.
Its success reminded me of a conversation I had with a Mexican TV executive over a month ago where she asked me to uncover trends for dark comedy as a genre in Mexico.
Leveraging Parrot Analytics capability to measure the popularity of thousands of shows in hundreds of countries, we compared trends for this specific genre in the U.S. and Mexico. By the time we did the analysis, we observed that the gap between the demand for dark comedy in the U.S. and Mexico was growing: During the first half of 2017, demand for dark comedy in the U.S. was 2-3 times that of Mexico. And by the time we spoke in July 2018 – U.S. demand for dark comedy had grown to 5 times as much as Mexico!
The increasing spread between the two markets made me wonder if this was indeed a signal for a “white space” strategic opportunity and by this I mean: Was dark comedy as a genre being under-served by current content offerings in Mexico? Or was Mexican demand for this genre untapped and unattended?
Fortunately, the release of Casa de las Flores on August 10th served as a natural experiment to test this hypothesis: Since its release, we have seen demand for dark comedy in Mexico quadruple, allowing Mexico to close the gap with the US and other markets like Spain.
And intrestingly enough, Casa de las Flores is traveling quite well in those foreign markets, driving demand for this genre to rise in those markets as well, as shown in the graph below:
Anticipating trends and finding strategic “white spaces” is a recurring theme you hear at media networks all over the world.
In this example, a simple genre comparison between relevant markets led us to uncover potential audience interests that were not being met.
Applying artificial intelligence algorithms across a wide dimension of content factors will certainly have an increasing role in helping content creators and distributors identify opportunities to differentiate themselves: Both to get ahead of the pack in today’s competitive landscape as well as mapping out “white spaces” to carve out strategic growth opportunities for the future.
