There’s never been an era with more opportunity for brands to connect with audiences through entertainment. But more opportunity also means more risk for marketers—and more confusion. Today, with 200+ streaming platforms available globally, it’s harder than ever for brands to have confidence in knowing which content investments will truly reach new heights with their audiences and provide measurable results.
While the heat of the streaming wars has long since cooled, what we’re left with is a wild, tangled jungle of non-linear distribution. The old model of clear release windows and predictable viewership has vanished. A new network series like George & Mandie’s First Marriage might premiere on CBS, show up on Paramount+ or Hulu Live, and then eventually land on Netflix or Prime.
For brands, this makes evaluating a partnership opportunity before a show has even premiered a significant challenge, and requires asking questions such as: Will the production deliver on its promise? Can it break through and generate real cultural momentum? Is it creatively aligned with the brand’s voice—and is it safe? Will it reach the intended audience, and is the production team open to meaningful brand integration?
Measuring success is difficult enough after the fact—forecasting it before a project even premieres is exponentially harder. With these questions in mind we developed a tool, Content IQ, that gives marketers the data backed points they need to make informed decisions on which content is the ideal fit for their brand. A guide through the jungle floor that helps them identify perfect entertainment opportunities.
Meet Your Map: Content IQ
Content IQ is a brand’s compass, machete, and trail guide all in one—built to help marketers explore the entertainment landscape with more clarity, context, and confidence. It’s not here to dictate decisions, but to empower them. It helps brands discover the most buzzworthy entertainment opportunities while ensuring that every dollar leads to true ROI. With the content landscape more vast and varied than ever, it’s crucial to know which opportunities are worth chasing—and which are likely to get lost in the weeds.
This isn’t a black box or a final verdict—it’s a support system. Content IQ surfaces the data that matters most to brand decision-makers and gives teams the tools to advocate internally for the content opportunities that best match their objectives. Whether weighing the potential of a buzzy new series, assessing fit with your brand’s target demos, or evaluating production access, Content IQ’s four key pillars help brands back up their instincts with insight—and turn hunches into action.
1. BUZZ-ABILITY SCORE
Buzz is our answer to the unpredictable twists and turns of content visibility. The Buzz-Ability Score predicts how much attention a new show or film is likely to receive, based on years of viewership data and proprietary forecasting methods. It projects where a piece of content will land on its respective platform—such as being in the top 15% on Paramount+.
We build these forecasts using four years of entertainment viewership data, combined with insights from trusted partners like Nielsen and Luminate. Our methodology accounts for a variety of entertainment-specific factors: distribution strategies, genre, director/producer performance, and even comparisons to similar titles.
We also factor in Talent Scoring—because let’s be honest, the cast matters. A major actor or talent can make or break the perfect entertainment opportunity. Could you imagine Anyone But You without Sydney Sweeney or Glen Powell? We use historical performance data and predictive modeling to calculate how much draw the cast will bring to the content—and a brand’s product.
2. DEMO SCORE
Next comes our Demo Score, which calculates whether a piece of content will actually hit a brand’s target audience. It reflects how well the content is likely to reach a brand’s intended demo, benchmarked against a comparable dataset of other TV or film titles. We use years of demographic data across every major vertical to score each opportunity.
And here’s where it gets specific: let’s say a piece of content is projected to have 15% reach among 18–34-year-olds. How does a brand know whether that is high or low compared to other opportunities? The Demo Score gives you that context—telling you exactly what percentile that puts the title in (e.g., the 50th percentile). It’s not just about raw percentages; it’s about how that reach stacks up against everything else out there. For example, women 18-34 are projected to make up 22% of the audience for season 2 of Netflix’s Nobody Wants This. But is that a high percentage relative to other shows? Our Demo Score puts those numbers into context, placing the show in the 70th percentile for this highly valued audience. This lets us confidently say: “Yes, this content is likely to reach your target audience—and here’s how it compares to the rest of the market.”
3. SOCIAL LANDSCAPE SCORE
Our Social Landscape Score evaluates the fit between a brand’s social media audience and that of the content or talent featured in the content. Using data from trusted partners like StatSocial, we analyze follower overlap, engagement behavior, and shared interests across platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Rather than focusing solely on follower count, this score digs deeper—prioritizing psychographics over demographics to assess whether a brand and a piece of content truly connect on a values and interest level. If there’s a high similarity score, it’s a strong signal that the audiences are not only aligned but potentially already overlapping. In other words, the brand’s target audience is likely to become a fan of the content—or is already an existing fan. This is particularly valuable when evaluating higher cost opportunities for a brand. When evaluating the newest season of Project Runway on Bravo, for example, an auto brand scored 93% on similarity with Project Runway’s social audience indicating that the show was a worthwhile investment for reaching that brand’s audience in a new way.
We use a similarity index that ranks from 0 to 1, where a score closer to 1 indicates a higher degree of audience alignment. It’s a smarter, more nuanced way to evaluate content partnerships—because high follower counts don’t matter if audiences aren’t speaking the same cultural language. What does matter is shared passion, mutual relevance, and the potential for real engagement.
4. OPPORTUNITY ALIGNMENT
Last—but arguably most critical—is Opportunity Alignment. This is where data meets storytelling. It’s not enough for a piece of content to be buzzy or demographically aligned—there must be a moment that makes sense for a brand. One of the main sets featured in the Paramount+ show Tulsa King is a bar, for example, making it a great fit for a spirits brand looking to create meaningful moments with lead characters. Our alignment score evaluates the existing opportunities within the content: is there a scene, a storyline, or a character that naturally creates space for a brand to shine? In the case of Tulsa King, it scored a 0.75/1.0 for spirits.
We look at narrative themes, tone, and character arcs to ensure the entertainment opportunity feels organic—and ultimately drives real impact.
The Full Picture
These four pillars—Buzz-Ability, Demo Score, Social Landscape, and Opportunity Alignment—are what we believe lead to smart, culturally relevant, and high-performing entertainment opportunities.
Content IQ is flexible by design. It can be weighted and customized based on what a brand values most—whether that’s audience fit, cultural momentum, or measurable integration. It brings speed without sacrificing strategy, giving brands the clarity to act decisively and the confidence that their investment is rooted in relevance. Whether managing a single hero product or an entire portfolio, Content IQ adapts to each brand’s unique priorities. And we’re not just talking about theory—we’re using it. At BENlabs, Content IQ has become an essential part of how we guide partners through content decisions.
“The Content IQ score helps justify content recommendations and takes the subjectivity out of the review process. It shows that BENlabs understands our brands by scoring an opportunity specifically to the brand brief and allows me to say that a certain opportunity makes sense for a certain brand based on data-driven reasons. It has also been helpful when evaluating pricing against an opportunity because the score contextualizes meaningful impressions for each opportunity.”
— Jennie Webb, Group Media & Communications Director, Proximo Spirits
From global spirits brands to emerging players, Content IQ has already proven valuable in shaping internal conversations—giving marketers the tools to advocate for the right opportunities with stakeholders who need more than gut feel.
While Content IQ serves as a brand’s map through the front end of the content jungle, we’ve also built a measurement tool called Cultural Relevancy Index that helps brands measure cultural traction post-integration. Because in this landscape, it’s not just about finding the right opportunities—it’s about standing out once a brand gets there.
This article was written by Rachel Econ, Content Curation Manager at BENlabs.
