Veteran Hollywood executive Scott Greenberg is heading to MIPCOM to pitch the global production, distribution, and commissioning community on Chronicle Media’s AI-driven social optimizer model for overcoming the challenge of audience discovery.
Rather than a tool for one slice of the market, Greenberg says Chronicle is aiming to be of value to everyone in the deal chain. “We’re really building a platform for audience layer,” he says, “and how that works for all the different parties.”
For distributors and buyers. Chronicle can test a film or series against social audiences territory by territory, helping buyers decide what to acquire and helping sellers show that a title will perform in, say, Italy or South Korea. Independents and creators who are self-distributing can show that an audience exists rather than relying on a relationship or a platform’s brand name. Broadcasters and platforms can use Chronicle to help them spend marketing budgets more precisely, lowering the customer acquisition cost and raising the return. Creative decision-makers can validate ideas against a real audience before committing to them.
The concrete example he offers: a trailer is tested and shows a total addressable audience of 80 million people, broken into five behavioral cohorts. A buyer can use that to price a minimum guarantee, while an independent seller can use the same data to argue for more. In his hypothetical, that is worth an extra $100,000 on an MG.
Greenberg is the co-founder of Chronicle with Aaron Sisto, having moved to the social-media audience optimization space after many years in Hollywood, including co-founding and leading the acclaimed animation outfit Bento Box Entertainment. A serial entrepreneur who also spent time at Film Roman and Starz, the transition to the social media and tech space felt natural to Greenberg, he tells ScreenMDM. “I always chose to be an independent; I felt I could work with creators better that way, and I personally like to pave a path to do it.”
After leaving Bento Box in 2023, having sold the studio to Fox four years earlier, Greenberg could see where the media world was going next and knew that finding an audience was the biggest challenge in a highly fragmented ecosystem. Chronicle has built an AI-powered system to help creators expand their reach by microtargeting audience cohorts. Still, Greenberg sees a much bigger opportunity than just driving digital scale.
“If you’re a creator pitching, you can use social as a place to validate a market and an audience. We’re talking to some international sales groups. If a distributor is taking a film or a TV show to market, we can test it against social audiences and show there’s a demand. We’re also seeing people using [our data] now as a sales tool. So I’m not just a sales executive sitting across from a buyer and leveraging my relationship. If we can map your future audience, potential audience, and demand, that information then can help you go into a market and sell better.”
Greenberg is a big proponent of the democratization of the media business ushered in by social, and believes Chronicle can empower creators even further. “The digital world can enable independent creators or small production companies to be viable businesses or become the next Spelling or the next somebody. Ultimately, creativity drives, but I think data can help inform decisions.”
That applies on all sides of the table: creators pitching a show to a bigger platform, a development executive or commissioner evaluating an idea, or a seller looking for further value down the long tail of an IP. With tighter budgets and fewer slots, he says, “every decision becomes much higher stakes.”
On the business of social video, Greenberg is clear about where the money is. “AdSense is not the big payday for most of the creators. AdSense is not their biggest ticket; it’s sponsorship. It’s audience quality, watch time, and returning viewers [that matter]. If I have 1,000 fans who have long watch time and come back, that’s valuable.”
Chronicle has developed alliances with a diverse range of content creators, including digital video series and podcast Inside the Arthouse, the heritage IP The Wombles, U.K. digital studio Wall of Entertainment and the food and lifestyle studio Simple Alien. Its enterprise customers span podcast companies, game studios, film distributors, and vertical drama companies that use YouTube to drive viewers to their apps. “Our enterprise users are really using it for creative, acquisition, marketing, and user acquisition decisions,” Greenberg says. “We think we can help companies know who their audiences are more specifically to spend those dollars more accurately.”
