The power of unified profiles for media and entertainment brands

In the viral Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” released earlier this year, consumers are warned of the data mining practices of some of the world’s biggest social media brands. But the film neglected the other side of the coin: A world where brands must scramble to deliver on ever-increasing customer demands and desires — in real time — or risk being left in a plume of dust created by its competitors’ success.

Research by Accenture shows that 91 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that recognize and remember them and provide relevant offers. Nowhere are customer expectations higher than in the media and entertainment industry. Consumers want content providers to meet them where they are, on any device, and point them to the best next experience for them. To do that with any kind of credibility, you need a lot of data about your customers — and it has to be the right data, used in the right ways.

For IT leaders, who are now expected to support the customer journey from start to finish, that creates a huge challenge. On the one hand, you feel pressure to help marketing and other customer-facing teams extract as much value as possible from your customer data — so they can show customers your brand “gets” them. On the other hand, you are responsible for keeping customer data secure and making sure it is used in appropriate, legally compliant ways.

Adobe Experience Platform, an open and extensible platform for managing customer experience data from any source, makes it possible to have the best of both worlds. For media and entertainment companies, that means you can unify, enrich, and activate customer data to deliver exactly the right piece of content at the right time. And you can do all that while protecting your customers’ privacy and staying well within the legal boundaries.

Data that speaks one language

When I talk to people at media and entertainment companies about Adobe Experience Platform, they love the core foundation, which is a data lake where you can bring together data from all the systems your company uses to deliver customer experiences. The platform has a unique architecture that lets you easily stitch together records from different systems to create a dynamic, unified profile for each customer. The Experience Data Model helps you convert data from different sources into a standard taxonomy.

Since the platform is API based, you can connect it to any of your marketing, advertising, analytics, and customer support systems — including call center, point-of-sale, and other offline systems — as well as external consent management systems. You can also enrich your customer profiles by adding second and third-party data to get a more complete view of each customer. The profiles are always changing as new information gets added, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for delivering real-time experiences to specific customer segments, or even to individual customers.

Predictive analytics that guide the customer journey

Media and entertainment leaders also get excited about the machine learning capabilities in Experience Platform, which you can use to design a predictive analytics program. Then when a customer interacts with your brand, perhaps by downloading your mobile app or consuming a piece of content on your streaming service, you can anticipate what that person might like to do next and deploy a timely message in the right channel.

Obviously, the only way to offer that kind of custom catering at scale is by using AI and automation. In the platform’s data science workspace, you can work with built-in algorithms, plug in third-party algorithms, or build your own. A lot of our media and entertainment customers are taking advantage of the native integration with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to deliver those highly tailored, AI-powered experiences.

For media and entertainment brands, another major benefit of having unified profiles is customer journey analytics. If you operate on a subscription model, you can follow a customer from their first interactions with your brand, when they are starting to show interest in your content, all the way through their first subscription renewal cycle. At each stage, your machine learning algorithms can tell you — based on that person’s behavior and the behavior of similar customers — what content and offers might work best to nudge the customer to subscribe, consume more content, and ultimately renew their subscription.

Governance tools that make compliance easy

IT leaders will always worry about security and compliance, and for good reasons. But with Experience Platform, built-in data governance features mean you can worry less — and spend less time figuring out how to comply with evolving data privacy laws. The Data Usage Labeling and Enforcement (DULE) framework helps you navigate major laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act, while also enforcing your company’s own internal policies. DULE includes an API-based framework called GDPR Central Service to automate compliance with EU policies.

To see how Adobe Experience Platform helps media and entertainment brands unify, activate, and govern customer data — without a lot of heavy lifting by IT — watch the video below.