How Ricky Ray Butler Uses AI Technology to Disrupt the Media and Entertainment Landscapes

AI has dominated media and entertainment headlines recently. While much of the focus has been regarding concerns of AI potentially being used to replace screenwriters and other industry professionals, this is far from the whole story.

In fact, while AI is becoming a major disrupter of the media and entertainment landscape, it is often being used to create new opportunities.

Case in point: I recently had the chance to speak with Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of BENlabs, an audience and content intelligence tech company that has been at the forefront of using AI in media and entertainment. Our conversation highlighted how Butler and his company are using AI in truly transformative ways.

An Early Adopter

“AI is new to a lot of people, but it isn’t to us,” Butler says. “We’ve been working with AI for about 15 years, training it to understand audience behaviors and interests, with an emphasis on the media landscape. This has been a powerful learning opportunity for us, as it’s given us time to fine-tune our systems and test them repeatedly to ensure we’re getting the right results with social content, music, Hollywood and streaming product placements and more.

“Most importantly,” he continues, “this has helped us learn how to personalize AI insights to the specific needs of our clients.”

The time and resources that have gone into AI over the years allows Butler and BENlabs to offer a variety of AI-powered resources, including tools focused on audience insights, re-purposing content to create viral shorts, optimizing videos and even matching with creatives for influencer campaigns.

Using AI to Better Understand Audiences

In Butler’s opinion, one of the most important uses for AI in media and entertainment is its potential to help brands, influencers/creators and others better understand and reach audiences.

“Today’s audiences are incredibly segmented across different social media platforms, streamers and more. At the same time, they’re producing an incredible amount of structured and unstructured data (which are the images, videos, audio, and large groups of text that don’t fit inside a spreadsheet),” Butler explains. “With AI, we can analyze that data to develop meaningful audience insights for better targeting, psychographic mapping and personalization. We can come to understand what appeals to them and why — and this tells us how to speak to them, and where and when to do it.”

AI is especially important in taking a large quantity of data and turning it into meaningful insights. According to Statista, each minute of the internet sees 4 million Facebook posts receiving likes, 360,000 Twitter posts getting published and 6.3 million Google searches.

The most meaningful insights from much of this audience-generated data cannot be easily quantified — but with AI, Butler and his team are better positioned to quickly understand that unstructured data and what it means for their clients. AI can dig deeper by analyzing conversations that don’t directly tag brands or refer to them by name to uncover insights that might otherwise be overlooked.

Combining Audience Understanding With Media Savvy

While AI has proven foundational to Butler’s work, it isn’t the be-all end-all. His two decades of experience in the digital media world also plays an essential role in ensuring AI technology effectively disrupts media and entertainment on behalf of BENlabs’ clients.

“AI and the human element have to go hand in hand,” he explains. “We start by using AI to get to know a company and its audience and data. We learn from that data to develop and implement a plan that will drive meaningful media engagement, while also using predictive analytics to fine-tune our work. And once we put a media campaign into action, we continue to use AI to analyze outcomes and optimize the campaigns.”

This creates a cycle of continuous improvement, fueled by both Butler’s strong media background and the insights that are collected by AI. As Butler notes, “Essentially, with the data we generate from each campaign, we’re able to collect more and better data, which positions us to scale for even greater success with future campaigns. The process still relies on talented creatives to develop campaigns and make decisions. But with AI, we start from a position where we already understand the audience and what will work with them.”

With this combination of AI and human-led media savvy, Butler and his team have helped clients uncover opportunity audiences, identify relevant creators for influencer or Hollywood partnerships and suggest content topics that drive engagement. With AI’s capabilities to predict creative performance, decisions can be made with confidence.

A Track Record of Disruption

As a leading practitioner of using AI-derived insights in the media and entertainment industry, Butler and his team have already helped many clients scale their business through influencer campaigns and product placements that have dramatically increased conversions and customer lifetime value, while lowering acquisition costs.

“By letting AI do the heavy lifting in gathering insights and analyzing creative, we’re able to optimize campaign performance well beyond what we’d be able to do on our own, no matter how talented we are,” Butler says. “It helps us make smarter advertising choices for our clients and empower them to generate buzz that makes a lasting impact in their niche. I truly believe this is the future of media and entertainment — using AI to deliver more relevant content to audiences in the time and place that will be most meaningful to them.”

Butler and his team have already created several disruptive moments, and as their embrace of AI indicates, there are many more to come.

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