Vevo's Natasha Potashnik Talks Metadata and Streaming Monetization at Streaming Media 2025
In this interview from Streaming Media 2025, Vevo Head of Data, Research & Measurement Natasha Potashnik discusses the many uses of streaming metadata with Streaming Media Contributing Editor Timothy Fore-Siglin. Potashnik discusses her role in overseeing data research and measurement. tashnik highlights the business applications of metadata, particularly in ad targeting and monetization, through products like Vevo Evolve, which uses AI-driven contextual tags. She emphasizes the need for industry standardization in metadata definitions to facilitate better collaboration and efficiency.
What Metadata Means in Streaming and at Vevo
"You and I are probably among the few people who would geek out on metadata," Fore-Siglin quips. "But for the audience members who don't necessarily know what that is, can you describe in a nutshell what metadata is as it applies to streaming video?"
"For us, metadata is primarily attributed to a video, to an asset, let's say. And it's all of the pieces of information about that asset: artist genre, the song name, even the underlying ISRC code, et cetera," Potashnik explains "There are literally hundreds of those kinds of pieces of metadata that we tie to an asset. The data geek in me also thinks about metadata in the context of just data. When we receive data from providers and partners, metadata, for us, is, what are the attributes of each column in this data set? Where did it come from? When did it originate? How do I interpret it? Things like that."
"On the applied business side of the equation, what's the benefit of the metadata?" Fore-Siglin asks.
"There are lots of applications to metadata--everything from general housekeeping to organization to make sure that people are correctly interpreting fields and able to do analysis on content libraries, to ultimately monetization," Potashnik says. "Right now, with an increasing amount of spend being programmatic, buyers that are transacting through DSPs are expecting to see certain things pass through the bid requests. And those fields that they're expected to see are often tied to pieces of metadata that we have about our content. So even basic things, like I said, like genre or artist's name, increases the monetizability of that impression to pass that metadata through the bid stream."
AI-Driven Contextual Tagging and Vevo Evolve
"So on one hand, if there's ad spend, they want to have it tied up against particular pieces of metadata--genres, as you say. On the other hand, there's what's more popular in terms of content. And in the old days," Fore-Siglin reflects, "we literally thought about it as genre, like it's action, it's comedy, et cetera. But it's so much more these days in terms of being able to drive down. Can you give us a quick example of that type of thing?"
"We have an advanced advertising product at Vevo called Vevo Evolve," Potashnik says. "We have recently rolled out AI-driven contextual tags on all of our million-plus library of content. And so what that means is, for each video, we are figuring out, what are the themes in this video, what are the moods inherent in it? And then also what is literally present in the video. Is this a video that features families, pets, theme parks, what have you? And that's very useful for ad targeting because there are many contexts in which an advertiser wants to buy against that kind of group."
The Future of Metadata and Streaming
"So what do you see going forward?" Fore-Siglin asks. "It seems like we get fits and starts of metadata applicability. Two years out from now, where do you see the industry going with that? Is it even more granular, or is it things where we can say, 'Let's assess across multiple groupings of metadata and make decisions?'"
"I think it's more the latter, where there's opportunity," Potashnik replies. "Tdata science data nerd in me does love going granular and saying, 'We can go deeper with generative AI and pull out all of these deeper insights about content.' But I don't think the advertiser, the buyers are really ready for that yet. That's not how they're used to transacting, nor do they always need that level of complexity in their buying. Where I do think there's a big gap is standardization," she continues. "My definition of metadata will be different from other publishers', and sometimes we need to partner and we need to use the same language, whether it's about genre or it's about song names or video names. Those things we benefit a lot by having standards and how we define the metadata."
"In some ways it's not dissimilar to the way that in the pre-production and production phases of content, we went to things like Dublin Core to be able to describe how the metadata was consistent across that," Fore-Siglin says. "But standardization is one of the things we really need to try to push for in the industry so that we're all talking about the same thing when it comes to what the advertisers need."
"I totally agree," Potashnik says. "I talk about that a lot in panels. I also think, though, there's a big question mark around, who's going to own that? And who has the time to do that? Who's going to lead the charge? Time will tell."
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