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REPORT: The 2025 State of Contracting
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Contract Intelligence for Media

Digitally Transform Artist, Distribution, Merchandising, and Workforce Agreements With the Icertis Platform

Optimize spending and growth and manage risk by connecting data and processes to gain insights into commitments, royalties, and payments associated with content acquisition, digital rights management, production, vendors, distribution, marketing, and merchandising across global businesses.

The Reality

Technology-driven content creation platforms challenge media companies to reimagine every business process.

Technology-driven content creation, distribution and consumption platforms, and ever-evolving consumer behavior challenge media companies to reimagine every business process, including contract management.

The creative industry must differentiate its offerings and delight customers during significant and accelerating digital transformation to address this changing landscape. Media organizations are tested to keep pace with change and manage risk associated with contractual commitments due to substantial variability in artist deals, digital rights, distribution network complexity, and myriad consumer options.

The Solution

Make informed decisions quickly with comprehensive contract insights.

Icertis Contract Intelligence is the foundation of digital transformation for media companies to optimize spending on talent, content acquisition, and production. It also can help accelerate revenue and margin growth via distribution and rights management. Harnessing the value of contract data is a critical building block for the creative industry’s success in integrating business systems across the organization, delivering on artist, vendor, and customer experience expectations, and – crucially – protecting the business against cost overruns, leakage, missed obligations, and risks.

Case Study

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann Deploys Icertis Platform for Future-Proof Contract Management Solution

Bertelsmann chooses the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform as its enterprise-wide contract management solution.

Bertelsmann Group IT Sourcing was able to deploy ICI rapidly thanks to the solution’s cloud architecture and agile project approach. Ulf Meyer, Senior Director of Contract Lifecycle Management, Group IT Sourcing, says that Icertis has delivered all the functionality promised during the selection process.

Read the Customer Story

The Benefits

Optimize spending, ensure compliance, and automate and connect Media operations enterprise-wide.

  • Analyze performance

    Analyze artist and participant performance against contractual obligations.

  • Standardize contracts

    Standardize and integrate with a single platform to create, negotiate, and approve all contracts across artists, participants, suppliers, partners, distributors, and customers.

  • Accelerate contract lifecycle

    Accelerate contract processes with intelligent contract setup, guided negotiations, and automated workflows.

  • Integrate with buy and sell-side systems

    Improve CX across enterprise systems and processes with deep, out-of-the-box integrations with buy and sell-side transactional systems, e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Workday: 160+ open API endpoints.

  • Improve vendor relationships

    Improve vendor relationships with complete visibility into artist and participant contracts and workflow automation for effective vendor management.

  • Risk management

    Protect against risk by standardizing and automating contract processes across the business, ensuring artists' and participants' performance against contract intent.

  • AI-powered insights

    Unlock insights with powerful AI to discover data and analyze contracts across the enterprise.

  • Grow revenue

    Grow revenue by acting on insights from content distribution, digital rights, merchandising, placement, and advertising.

  • Control spend

    Optimize spending through the auto-discovery of deliverables, royalties, payment terms, and advances and streamlined rental and location agreements.

  • Forecast liabilities and manage accruals

    Forecast liabilities and manage accruals by linking contract royalty insights to payment calculations.

  • Improve contract compliance

    Improve compliance through integration with downstream systems for payout calculations creating an audit trail for clear traceability and reconciliation.

Use Cases

Put contract intelligence to work for the creative industry 

Realize transformation goals and drive business performance.

  • Manage risk with data insights

    Harness the power of contract data and AI for visibility into obligations and liabilities that underpin Media business continuity, financial performance, and reputation. Scale and optimize every step of the contract management process for proactive monitoring and enterprise-wide risk management.

  • Fuel business performance with faster contract management

    Scale and optimize every step of the contract lifecycle to ensure faster contract management by closing deals more quickly and optimizing spending. Execute procurement and finance processes promptly and in compliance for consistent revenue lifecycle management from source to pay. 

  • Connect media operations with unified CLM 

    Connect functional areas with a contract intelligence platform as the connective tissue between functional areas, breaking down silos, reducing friction, and democratizing the data in contracts for shared visibility into contracts and profitability.

  • Transform contract management processes with automation and AI

    Automate and standardize end-to-end contract processes from contract creation to negotiations to reporting with AI-powered contract intelligence to improve artist, vendor, and distribution partner relationship management, reduce enterprise risk, and unlock contract insights.

  • Manage international engagements

    Globally manage rights contracts in different languages, and royalty flows from various distribution channels.

  • Leverage generative AI

    Accelerate the contract review process by 40% while reducing risk using generative AI to compare contract language to a company’s predefined risk parameters based on the contract type.

The Icertis Platform

Achieve Business Agility with Contract Intelligence

Transforming contracts into structured, connected, and on-demand data is just the beginning. Discover the power of intelligent contract creation, automation, and insights to realize the full intent and maximize the value of every contract, clause, and obligation across the enterprise.

Explore the Platform