Jennifer Pirot, president of Pirot Media, isn’t here to pitch services—she’s here to get results. Representing a roster of content-rich clients like Magellan, Stadium and Craftsy, Pirot’s firm is focused on expanding distribution deals across every streaming platform imaginable. But her message at StreamTV is clear: launching a FAST channel is no longer enough. The real challenge—and opportunity—lies in performance strategy.
For Pirot, success means turning discovery into engagement. “We need to take a FAST viewer and turn them into a loyal audience member,” she says, whether that means migrating them to owned apps, social platforms or other touchpoints. But there’s no sugarcoating it—monetization remains a significant hurdle. Still, she sees promise in emerging ad tech, including contextual and performance-based advertising. Her call to action for the industry: don’t just optimize for reach; optimize for connection, retention and value. And yes—don’t be afraid to use AI to help you get there.
Jennifer Pirot:
Yeah. My name is Jennifer Pirot, and I'm the president of Pirot Media. We're a boutique consulting firm that focuses on content distribution and strategy.
Yeah, so interestingly, we're actually not showcasing our services here. What we're doing is meeting with every platform imaginable on behalf of the clients that we represent. So we have Magellan with documentaries and Stadium with sports and Craftsy with lifestyle, and the list goes on and on. But we're out here on behalf of our clients trying to find more distribution for their video content.
So we spend a lot of our time working on FAST, and I think our message is this has to be the year that we evolve FAST from launch strategy into performance strategy. So getting all the distribution deals has been awesome, but now we really need to double down on programming strategy, on marketing, and really trying to use FAST as a funnel to drive the broader business, so taking a FAST viewer and turning them into a loyal audience member, so where they'll discover my clients' content maybe on Samsung TV+, but then they're going to like it so much and they're going to want to learn more, they're going to engage with us on our socials or in our own app, et cetera. And that's what I want people to focus on this year.
The good and the bad of it, the bad of it is that monetization is still a real big problem in digital, especially for FAST. But the good news is I saw a lot about ad innovation here in terms of contextual advertising and performance-based advertising. And I think that if those things are real, if we could execute on those things, I think it could do a lot for FAST, because right now I think a lot of people are struggling. And then just one extra thing is just not being afraid to really lean into the AI and use it to help grow your distribution and your content production.