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Sustainability in Entertainment through Corona?

In the times of Corona, our world of entertainment has been turned upside down. What does this mean for the future of the entertainment industry? We talk about the importance of sustainability in the entertainment industry and how the landscape will change post-pandemic.

What you learn

We reveal what the entertainment world of tomorrow will look like, what impact the Corona pandemic will have on the industry, and why the slump in Netflix user numbers was already predictable.

This article summarizes the findings from the latest study on the importance of sustainability in the entertainment industry and provides insights into the world of implicit market research with a focus on AI-based neuro-semantic network analysis.

Is the entertainment world a new one since Corona?

Since March 2020, our lives have been turned upside down. Many things are different today than we knew until 2020. The Corona pandemic has forced us all to reorganize and redefine our daily lives. Whether you’re a high school student, a college student, or an employee, you’ll find yourself in Zoom meetings with friends, family, and work more and more often. Many of us are increasingly exercising at home, finding walks less boring, and diligently sharing cooking recipes digitally with our friends and family.

However, the pandemic has not left its mark on us individuals alone. Entire sectors and industries are significantly affected by the challenges posed by the pandemic. One of these industries that has been and continues to be affected by the pandemic like no other is the entertainment industry.

A new study by the leading Swiss marketing research institute LINK in cooperation with the Hamburg-based AI start-up neuroflash now provides exciting insights into the changing world of the entertainment industry since 2020 and answers the questions of what role the sustainability megatrend plays for the entertainment industry. So do we possibly owe Corona a development push towards green entertainment?

in the entertainment world. Has it always been an important component or do we owe a change to green entertainment to the Corona pandemic?

Key Takeaway: Corona has really shaken up our understanding of entertainment

The results of the implicit survey methods show that the understanding of the Swiss towards the entertainment industry and towards entertainment offers has changed significantly in the past 12 months.

One of the main changes is that since Corona, entertainment is much more linked to the megatrend of digitalization and digitalized entertainment products such as e-sports, music (Spotify) or home trainers (Peloton).

At the same time, the sustainability megatrend is strongly interwoven with entertainment. The study results provide indicators that Swiss consumers today have a changed understanding of entertainment and that “green entertainment” is on everyone’s lips.

The study under the magnifying glass - actors and methodology

The study results presented here are the result of the merger of the Swiss market leader in market and social research LINK and the Hamburg-based AI start-up neuroflash.

The respective core competencies of LINK and neuroflash were utilized for this study. In order to be able to present results that are as meaningful and valid as possible, the entire study is based on implicit data. Why this was chosen is made clear by the well-known iceberg example.

The iceberg model provides a sense of how many of our everyday decisions are made implicitly, that is, unconsciously.

While we often think that we make everyday decisions consciously, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité Hospital in Berlin and the Bernstein Center For Computational Neuroscience, also in Berlin, found in 2008 that implicit, unconscious activity in our brains can predict the outcome of a conscious decision up to 10 seconds before it is made. In an interview about the study published in Nature Journal, research leader John-Dylan Haynes said, fittingly, that conscious decisions are logically only the tip of the iceberg.

Accordingly, the majority of our daily decisions are already made in the subconscious (implicitly) without us having any active influence on them. This way of thinking and decision finding is today also associated with the term “System 1”. System 1 (as the counterpart to System 2) goes back to the Israeli-American psychologist, Nobel Prize winner and author Daniel Kahneman, who in his worldwide bestseller “Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking” demonstrates through a multitude of experiments the characteristics of the fast, intuitive and implicit System 1, which takes the upper hand in most of our day-to-day decisions.

Such implicit, unconscious decisions are based on memories, feelings, and attributions and are less at risk of being influenced by external confounding factors in the way that conscious decisions are, which is why it can be more exciting and, above all, more accurate to elicit implicit responses from consumers.

For the study on the importance of sustainability in the entertainment industry, LINK and neuroflash went one step further and collected implicit data on two levels: On the collective and the individual.

neuroflash was responsible for collecting the collective implicit data, working with so-called neuro-semantic analyses. Thanks to the artificial intelligence used by neuroflash, the Hamburg-based start-up was able to collect over 30 billion word mentions from the German-language Swiss Internet within the last 12 months, analyze them and put them into semantic relationships or associations. The result of this analysis is nothing more and nothing less than a collective opinion of Swiss consumers on selected topics.

But what exactly does this mean, based on specific examples?

Let’s look at country-specific associations for this. What do you associate with Switzerland in culinary terms, and what with Germany? Neuroflash can help with this by building a collective association network by analyzing large amounts of text and words from the Internet. We see the result below. Represented by the distance and thickness of the strands between two terms, it is clear that Switzerland is more strongly associated with cheese fondue than Germany, while the analyzed word mentions suggest a strong association between Germany and beer. Have you possibly thought of the same thing?

This highly simplified association network illustrates exemplary country-specific associations with Switzerland and Germany

In order to contrast the collective associations with individual associations, a representative online panel survey conducted by LINK investigated individual, implicit associations of 902 Swiss citizens using reaction time measurements.

The study of the importance of sustainability in the entertainment industry since Corona has followed the same pattern – contrasting the collective and individual data collections.

The study results in detail

In the first step of the study, neuroflash addressed the question of what German-speaking Swiss:in today associate with the term “entertainment” in contrast to the time before the Corona pandemic. The result of the AI-based analysis is the associative network listed in Figure 4, which shows the most important words associated with “entertainment” and also highlights those terms that have significantly increased in importance compared to the pre-pandemic period.

The association network of the term "entertainment" based on a neuroflash analysis provides an overview of all terms associated with "entertainment" and highlights those that have been mentioned significantly more often since the beginning of the Corona pandemic.

The data reveal that certain words are now up to 60% more prevalent in social discourse related to “entertainment” than they were before the pandemic. These terms, now strongly associated with “entertainment,” include outdoor activities, walking, fitness, health, but also music, Spotify, exercise bikes (Peloton), and e-sports, and are highlighted in orange in Figure 5. In addition to a now stronger link with the topic of “digitization,” it is also clear that terms are represented that are close to the megatrend of sustainability.

This enlarged section of the association network highlights terms that have been associated with "entertainment" up to 60% more frequently in social discourse since the onset of the Corona pandemic.

In a second semantic network analysis, neuroflash investigated the question of whether the entertainment industry has actually been more strongly associated with the topic of sustainability since Corona.

This association network prepared by neuroflash gives a comprehensive overview of all words associated with "sustainability".

And indeed, as shown in Figure 7, Neuro-Semantic Network Analysis reveals a large number of terms from the “entertainment” domain that are more strongly associated with sustainability today or in the last 12 months (all terms in black font) than they were before the pandemic.

This enlarged section of the "sustainability" association network shows in black type all those terms close to the entertainment field that have become more strongly associated with sustainability since the onset of the Corona pandemic.

Such entertainment terms, now more strongly associated with sustainability, include words from the area of (outdoor) sports such as fitness, health, running, cycling, biking, mountain biking, etc., but also fashion & shopping, travel and the area of live events with words such as musicals, theater, Hollywood and circus.

These results therefore represent important findings for the entertainment industry, because they make it clear that sustainability is not only associated more strongly with entertainment in isolated cases, but that sustainability now has a completely new significance for entire subcategories of the entertainment industry, such as sports and live events.

Are the results confirmed by LINK's online panel survey?

When asked about the future use of entertainment offerings, the reaction time-based, implicit data from the survey of 902 Swiss consumers yields a picture that matches the collective data from the neuroflash analyses almost 1:1.

A look at the current reporting provides another indication that streaming service providers might have a harder time in the future than was suspected. Just recently, Netflix reported a drop of 200,000 user:ins during its quarterly results (reference) for Q1 2022, Netflix’s first decline since 2011.

The loser and the winner of the entertainment industry of the future. While Swiss consumers will turn away from streaming in the future, the live entertainment industry will grow, according to Corona.

What does this mean for suppliers and brands in the entertainment industry?

The results of the neuro-semantic network analyses by neuroflash provide a clear indication that the importance of sustainability for the entertainment industry has increased strongly and across categories since the beginning of the Corona pandemic. Since the results reflect a current collective opinion of the German-speaking Swiss, the results are accompanied by a changed attitude of expectation towards providers and brands from the entertainment industry and an expected change in user behavior with regard to entertainment. The results of the LINK Online Panel also show that those entertainment offerings that are most associated with sustainability enjoy expected growth.

The results suggest that the issue of sustainability could shape the future of the entertainment industry. Providers and brands in the entertainment industry should therefore quickly review their offerings with regard to sustainable processes, offers and solutions. It may make sense to expand or change the product portfolio in order to continue to offer entertainment products that are in demand from consumers for whom sustainability and entertainment are moving ever closer together.

Green Entertainment: The Berlin Show Orchestra shows the way!

The Berlin Show Orchestra, for example, demonstrates that sustainable entertainment, also known as “green entertainment,” can work. Since its foundation in 2015, the orchestra, which can be booked by artists as a service provider, has been committed to sustainability in live entertainment. According to Stefan Lohmann, one of the founders of the Berlin Show Orchestra, sustainability is the basis for any business decisions. For example, all products or services purchased are checked for the most sustainable option available, and when it comes to travel, the orchestra also takes care to always make the best decision in terms of sustainability. The importance of sustainability to the founders is also made clear by the Sustainability Rider, a guide designed to help other players in the entertainment industry review their business processes and solutions for sustainability.

What's next for the entertainment industry?

The implicit methods used in the study by LINK and neuroflash make it clear that there have been strong changes in both collective opinion and individuals about what issues and terms the entertainment industry is associated with before and since the Corona pandemic. As one of these changes, the study provided indicators that the issue of sustainability in general has gained massive prominence in public discourse since the onset of the Corona pandemic, but that it is also increasingly being heard in the entertainment industry in particular.

At the same time, the study also provides a glimpse of the time “after” Corona. Both the collective sentiments and the implicit individual responses of respondents indicate that sustainability and entertainment will become increasingly intertwined. Respondents’ answers underscore these findings by revealing that future growth areas for the entertainment industry are precisely those that are more strongly associated with sustainability. Examples of these growth areas are primarily live entertainment offerings from the areas of live theater, live music, live trade shows and live sports. According to the respondents, the big entertainment loser “after” Corona is streaming, which will lose users compared to live entertainment.

Teaser: There's more to come!

In addition to the focus on the megatrend of sustainability, the study also concentrated on another important contemporary and future field, namely the field of digitization. Because just as sustainability has gained in importance for the entertainment industry, digitization plays an important role for the entertainment industry of the future. To find out exactly what changes it is causing and which area might be potential competition to live events, see the next article on the LINK and neuroflash study.

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