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/)