Everything old is, well, still old. The problem for traditional media outlets, whether networks, content creators/distributors or broadcasters, is the changing relationship with consumers. Hulu, Amazon and Netflix have proven that using data to drive decision making for content and recommendations is effective.
Companies that choose to ignore using data to drive engagement and therefore revenues will slowly fade away as their competitors get it right and consumers continue to gravitate to their intelligent use of data. Media and entertainment is a giant and growing category. PwC projects that by 2021 it will grow to $759 billion in revenues.
Blow up your silos: Traditional media has the problem of too much data, most of it still in silos. Marketing doesn’t share with research. Internal promotion and scheduling are more gut than science. Content is in its own world, and revenue – whether driven by ads or subscriptions – is the purview of finance. Many content creators, whether network or broadcaster, do not have a direct relationship with consumers. Blowing up the silos and bringing the data together allows for a whole field of new ways to engage customers, including through attribution, personalization and optimization.
Know your content: Adding comprehensive metadata to content allows you to understand the connection between audience views and engagement. Knowing the elements that drive audience reduces risk and drives economies without compromising creative. A few examples of insights from metadata are: understanding effective storylines from episode to episode/season to season, actor contribution to sentiment and mentions, and an understanding of how mood and emotional hooks affect behavior.
Connect to your audience: Tying audience listening to views is critical to understanding the efficacy of content in real time. Audience listening has become very sophisticated, and with the right tools you can holistically tie chatter at scale to audience. Predicting performance accurately becomes possible. Audience segmentation and on-target messaging to audience segments is essential. The combination of audience listening with or without historical ratings by genre can be used to determine new show success.
Grow your engagement: This is the key to driving more audience. It is no longer optional, because it has become part of the fabric of media and entertainment. If no one is talking about your content, it is a fail. Developing the knowledge of who viewers are, what they care about and how to connect with them is vital to sustainability. Comprehensive marketing with attribution to focus attention specifically on audience segments that are meaningful will become more and more critical to audience retention. Give the audience more of what it wants. Refine the message and share specific content to drive higher engagement. Higher engagement will draw more audience.
In summary: Massive change has come to media. OTT competitors are delivering on demand content in ever growing content libraries. Audiences consume media in an increasingly non-linear manner. This changes the relationship with the consumer to more than simple delivery: it makes a direct relationship essential. Freeing data from its silos to work together with content analysis, device data, linear data and audience engagement will deliver actionable insights to executives. Using data to drive decisions is the key to driving long term success where audiences and engagement become both predictable and sustainable.
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