Growing Digital Revenues in the Media Industry

There’s no deny­ing the dis­rup­tion and sub­se­quent trans­for­ma­tion in dig­i­tal is affect­ing every Media Indus­try seg­ment glob­al­ly– from Pub­lish­ing to TV/Broadcast and MVPD’s. From busi­ness process, to con­sumer touch­points to go-to-mar­ket strate­gies, the dynam­ic shifts that con­tin­ue to unfold are forc­ing most busi­ness­es to go through some man­ner of re-exam­i­na­tion and re-inven­tion. This is no more appar­ent than in Media & Enter­tain­ment where the expe­ri­ence of sign­ing up for a sub­scrip­tion to a ser­vice, watch­ing TV or read­ing an arti­cle take on new life. Access and con­sump­tion take place on every fla­vor of mobile device while sit­ting in a park, rid­ing in a car or even “mul­ti-task­ing” view­ing at a live event.

For those com­pa­nies find­ing suc­cess in this new “every­thing, every­where” econ­o­my, there is a clear dif­fer­en­tia­tor. Stand-out con­sumer Expe­ri­ences that are com­pelling, per­son­al, use­ful and ubiq­ui­tous are dri­ving the the results of the most suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es. Those expe­ri­ences define brands in the eyes of con­sumers, but in a kind of twist, con­sumers are actu­al­ly defin­ing how com­pa­nies should make the expe­ri­ences com­pelling and per­son­al­ized for them. This per­son­al­iza­tion is dri­ving bet­ter con­ver­sion to sub­scrip­tion ser­vices, bet­ter cus­tomer care and improved flow in the “path to purchase”.

At Adobe Sum­mit in Lon­don ear­li­er this month, we heard a bit about how this is com­ing to pass from our cus­tomer Vir­gin Media along with our part­ner Deloitte Dig­i­tal and from our own Adobe Dig­i­tal Index giv­ing col­or to where we’re headed.

At Vir­gin Media UK Christo­pher Cole­man is the Head of Mul­ti­chan­nel Sales. As their busi­ness looked to scale up and grow its sub­scriber base, they found that 80% of their prospec­tive sub­scribers were begin­ning the process online, but only 20% of them were com­plet­ing it there. Most trans­ac­tions were hap­pen­ing over the phone or at retail shoppes. After dig­ging into this a bit, Vir­gin found that their sub­scribers weren’t aban­don­ing the online process out of frus­tra­tion rather, they pre­ferred speak­ing with a real per­son in the final stages. The frus­tra­tion that most prospects had how­ev­er, was that the effort placed in the explo­ration phase, in par­tic­u­lar the spe­cial offers that they might have seen from dig­i­tal or tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing chan­nels, were not trans­ferrable to phone or sales asso­ciates, essen­tial­ly requir­ing the cus­tomer to start the whole process over.

At a strate­gic lev­el, the solu­tion need­ed to focus on pro­vid­ing the cus­tomer the type of expe­ri­ence they pre­ferred, which in turn would dri­ve high­er con­ver­sion to sub­scrip­tion. In part­ner­ship with Deloitte Dig­i­tal, Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er and Cam­paign pro­vid­ed the glue to arm tele­sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives with the pro­mo­tions those cus­tomers received to effec­tive­ly pick up where dig­i­tal left off, thus cre­at­ing three hall­marks of a great expe­ri­ence – one that is per­son­al, use­ful and ubiquitous.

But once con­sumers are bought into the promise of a great expe­ri­ence, how do we deliv­er on that and cre­ate some­thing com­pelling that keeps them for the long run? To address this, Dan­ny Ledger of Deloitte Dig­i­tal spoke about cre­at­ing the new Over the Top expe­ri­ence with Prime­time for OTT called Stream­Mix. Effec­tive­ly it is an end to end ser­vice for direct to con­sumer pro­gram­ming, Deloitte and Adobe, with inte­gra­tions into Zuo­ra and Sales­force, can pro­vide a seam­less ser­vice that allows con­sumers to sub­scribe, engage, and man­age their view­ing habits whilst pro­vid­ing cus­tomer ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties that make it easy for view­ers to self-serve or work with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive with any ques­tions about con­tent or billing. Much in the same way Vir­gin tack­led the issue of con­nect­ing the vir­tu­al and phys­i­cal worlds of acqui­si­tion, Stream­Mix keeps the expe­ri­ence con­nect­ed so that con­sumers can con­tin­u­ous­ly enjoy their view­ing with min­i­mal interruption.

Final­ly, Tama­ra Gaffney from Adobe Dig­i­tal Index, took a look at some of the trends and data shap­ing how expe­ri­ences for Media & Enter­tain­ment will evolve over the next few years.

• Mobile on track to eclipse desk­top in M&E, and in some places (US top 20%) already has
• TV Every­where adop­tion in the US is at 17%, or 1 in 5 of cable sub­scribers. Chi­na debuted OTT ser­vices at the same rate. The expec­ta­tion is that EMEA will see a sim­i­lar, if not larg­er, ini­tial adop­tion rate.
• Tablet adop­tion is flat, dri­ven by larg­er smart­phone form factors
• Flex­i­ble dis­plays may fur­ther erode tablet and make phones a pri­ma­ry video engage­ment plat­form (3–5 years)
• Engage­ment decay for apps is a con­tin­u­ing issue. Most apps see 50% of the orig­i­nal install base churn out after 50 opens
  • One of the biggest bar­ri­ers to con­tin­ued, sub­scriber authen­ti­cat­ed video view­ing is the need to log in each time. Tama­ra expects bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion will become stan­dard for any apps that have a chance of being successful.

As we think about some key take­aways from this ses­sion, we learned that com­bin­ing the best con­sumer expe­ri­ence, mar­ket­ing & pro­mo­tions data to enable bet­ter con­ver­sions, togeth­er with lead­ing inte­grat­ed tech­nolo­gies, dri­ve com­pelling results for the busi­ness and the consumer.

[This entry is a recap of top­ics dis­cussed at the Media & Enter­tain­ment Super­s­es­sion at Adobe Sum­mit 2016 in Lon­don, UK. [A full record­ing of the ses­sion can be found <u>here.]</u>](http://summit.adobe.com/emea/sessions/summit-online/online-login/)