How can organisations in media adapt to the speed of change?

In today’s hyper-connected world, the media landscape is evolving at breakneck speed. New platforms, shifting consumer habits, and disruptive technologies are reshaping the way we create, distribute, and consume content. In fact, by 2027, the global streaming market is projected to hit $330 billion, growing at a rate of over 21% annually. For organisations in media, adapting to this rapid transformation isn’t just a strategy—it’s a survival skill.

At Redholt, where we specialise in recruitment within the streaming, media, and digital entertainment sectors, we know how critical it is for businesses to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re excited to bring you this edition of RedHolt Pulse and Play, where we explore not just the trends, but the actionable steps that can help media companies thrive in this constantly shifting environment. ??

For this issue, we’ve tapped into the expertise of Melissa Carr , Founder and Principal Consultant at Consulting Cube . With years of experience advising media companies on how to navigate the rapid pace of change, Melissa knows firsthand what it takes to remain competitive. According to a recent study, 78% of media leaders say they feel overwhelmed by the speed of innovation. But Melissa’s here to show us how to stay agile, flexible, and ready to seize new opportunities.

How can organisations in media not just survive, but thrive in this ever-accelerating landscape? We sat down with Melissa to get her take on the strategies and mindsets that can help businesses adapt, innovate, and lead.

Ready to learn how your organisation can keep up with the speed of change? Let’s dive into Melissa’s game-changing insights. ??

1. Building a flexible workforce is essential to fostering creativity and innovation, but what are the key elements of creating a continuous learning culture that drives both personal development and business success?

Many organisations talk about continuous learning, but it’s critical to ensuring we stay relevant, energised, and innovative. I see two key areas of opportunity:

1. Coaching and Mentoring
2. Time and Resources for Self-Development and Innovation

Coaching and Mentoring: Organisations like Rise and Cajigo are great examples of the confidence and growth mentoring can provide, particularly for women in technical fields. Through tailored coaching on personal branding, presentation skills, and mentoring, women have gained promotions, spoken at industry events, and built valuable networks. The ripple effect of such initiatives strengthens both individuals and their organisations.

While these programs target the gender gap, wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone had access to mentorship focused on personal development? Line managers play a role, but employees may not always feel comfortable discussing their goals with them. That’s where peer-to-peer mentoring can help. Internal mentoring programs like Google’s "Googler to Googler" initiative show the immense value of tapping into a company’s network. Special interest groups further help build cross-department connections, enhance business understanding, and boost organisational effectiveness.

Informal mentoring also plays a role, and freelancers shouldn’t be left behind. Personally, I love listening to and supporting industry colleagues and using my experience to help them meet their goals.

Time and Resources for Self-Development and Innovation: Coaching is key, but there’s also a need for structured development and space for experimentation. According to Ofcom’s 2023 report, 97% of large broadcasters encourage learning, but there’s a gap in understanding the quality and consistency of training across the industry. And among suppliers, training isn’t tracked at all.

With day-to-day pressures, many employees don’t have the time to sharpen their skills or innovate. However, technology is evolving quickly, and organisations need to ensure their teams keep pace. The tech giants have long invested in “innovation time,” and as the media and tech worlds converge, organisations must do the same.

Training can take many forms—from job shadowing to external workshops. When finances are tight, training budgets are often first to be cut, but the return on investment is critical for staying competitive. In-person training may not solve everything, but with varied learning styles and quick skills rollouts, investing in both internal and external development is essential to staying relevant in a fast-changing world.

2. How are business transformation and project delivery approaches changing to meet the need for speed?

In a highly volatile environment, business strategy and technology requirements can often change faster than you can deliver a project! A business transformation such as a business merger, outsourcing, location strategy, major technology or key value chain delivery partner change might require changes to organisation structures, facilities, technology and working practices. For a broadcaster, or other media industry organisation, trying to keep pace with changes in consumer demand and competitors, the ability to deliver quickly and to adapt in flight projects and programmes becomes a real and expensive challenge. Over the last two decades I’ve worked on major facilities and technology builds, outsourcing of key parts of the broadcast supply chain, business mergers, global load balancing and new service line creation among many other deliverables. Over the period, target delivery timelines have halved in many cases to meet strategic business objectives.

Overall technology delivery targets are most frequently met by reducing scope, but this does still leave significant technical debt and operational efficiency issues. The clean-up project to achieve the desired, operationally efficient end state, frequently takes as long, if not longer than the primary delivery project. Programmes primarily aimed at operational change need the tech delivery to be complete OR reduce expectations around the level of benefit that can be delivered, before business objectives shift again.

Technology suppliers, particularly software vendors, have really had to up their game to provide more of a partnership approach, running pilots, delivering software quickly and adapting to changing requirements. For strategic technology and services, picking suppliers who have the ability to become flexible, virtual extensions of your business, rather than those with a fixed price and inflexible scope could save money overall, if you get the cost control model right.

Where the primary objective is operational change delivery, stakeholder engagement and change management needs to be the focus. Consultation, business analysis, running experiments and getting feedback is essential. Engaging the right people in the project and letting them define the detail is more important than ever in making the right choices and ensuring engagement.

Project funding is always one of the most difficult challenges. Some businesses are firmly taking the approach of time boxing funding on projects, accepting that their priorities might change again imminently. I’m aware of a major broadcaster who won’t sign off any spend for more than a year at a time. This presents challenges for core infrastructure investment which may require significant investment for no imminent benefit. The shift in tech spend from capex to opex is also giving finance teams some challenges as they realise more volatility in their P&L.

To pull it all together, a solid transformation office / PMO, programme director and talented team managing dependency, risk and change management is absolutely fundamental to keeping control of projects and programmes. I spoke earlier about the benefits of connectedness between employees... We need those connected employees (and freelancers) to be able to see the bigger picture and predict impacts from the wider business environment as early as possible. We need them to have the confidence to speak out and act on concerns to ensure that projects and programmes maintain their business relevance.

3. Based on your experience working with media organizations, what are the most common challenges when delivering transformation programmes in a fast-moving industry?

The most common challenges I see are finance and the people side of organisational change.For major business transformations, particularly mergers and acquisitions, finance can be particularly difficult. Significant budgets need to be signed off, often with scant information, which then become law for the rest of the programme. Estimate accuracy is often poor, because access to key information at the point of decision making is limited. In an M&A scenario, it will be impossible to make contact with many of the key stakeholders with vital information.

Organisational data and detail may be lacking due to poor internal knowledge management, so the scale of physical and technical investment may be difficult to assess. Where people are affected, particularly due to TUPE, personal decision making about potential transfers is impossible to predict.Estimating procurement needs and project time estimates requires significant detail and often falls foul of the confidence fallacy, based on the knowledge and experience of those involved. There is a tendency to go into significant detail in areas where estimators have previous experience, but less well understood areas are estimated at a higher level - both of these approaches can lead to significant inaccuracy. Assumptions are listed and subject to change control, but are no protection if the overall business case is marginal and access to funds is restricted.

To mitigate as much of this as possible it’s best to work with experienced transformation leads, with good access to comparative information and to prepare a worst case scenario budget to test business case feasibility. The worst case scenario budget might be a multiple of the anticipated budget and could blow the business case, but it’s best to start with a dose of realism/ pessimism. Budget reviews will need to be iterative in all stages of the programme as more information becomes available and hard decisions, value engineering and compromises may be required.

Budget risk provisions need to be realistic and be capable of drawdown via a robust change process. In terms of finance mechanisms, the day to day release of funds needs to be timely to prevent additional costs due to decision delay. In an M&A situation, there is no going back, but in a business efficiency focused project, or new business development project there are still choices that can be made. Business priorities frequently change and sometimes, projects may even need to be stopped or refocused. The people side of organisational change needs significant focus. Change is usually seen as a threat, as everyone seeks certainty and a degree of control over their future, so a potential movement into a new scenario provokes stress responses.

As far as possible people need to engaged in developing plans for the future giving them some agency in terms of how that is shaped. It can be very difficult to do this in terms of top down structural reorganisation, but listening to the people and their concerns is imperative both in terms of buy in, but also in designing the right solution. There has been some great success in running organisational change pilots to work through the details and prove new ways of working. As the pace of change accelerates, change itself does become more normal, so if we do have tried and trusted mechanisms for change management, anxieties are reduced due to confidence in prior experience. One of the hardest things for any of us is letting go of practices that work, even when new ones are available, but this is key to transformation. Often the old options have to be removed to force adoption, once the new ways are fully proven.

4. In your consulting experience, what are some of the most successful uses of AI, that you have seen in media operations.

For media organisations, the biggest specific challenge I see for supply chain innovation is data management. Having a clear data strategy where data is generated once at the earliest point in the chain and then utilised for automation downstream is imperative but is a huge piece of work. ITV and Channel 4 are two organisations which are working hard in this right now, but it is an issue across the industry. Our systems and practices have grown piecemeal and organically over time, leading to incomplete, duplicated or contradictory data sets. Once we have a good data strategy and structure, one great use of AI tools is in video archive analysis helping to fill data gaps and deduplicate archives.

Conclusion:

As media organisations continue to face an accelerating pace of change, the ability to adapt swiftly is no longer optional—it's essential for survival. The insights shared by Melissa Carr provide a roadmap for how companies can stay agile, foster continuous learning, and navigate the complexities of transformation. From embracing mentoring and coaching to investing in self-development and innovation time, the strategies outlined highlight the importance of building a future-ready workforce that thrives in a fast-evolving landscape.

Moreover, the role of project delivery in maintaining business agility is more crucial than ever. Whether it's adapting to shifting consumer demands or managing the operational challenges of mergers, the key takeaway is that organisations must be both proactive and flexible. Strong leadership, effective change management, and a forward-thinking approach to technology partnerships will be fundamental in driving success in this dynamic industry.

At Redholt, we specialise in recruitment and consulting within the streaming, media, and digital entertainment sectors. Our deep industry expertise ensures we stay on the pulse of emerging trends and innovations, helping our clients navigate the complexities of this rapidly evolving space. We are passionate about partnering with companies that share our commitment to advancing the digital entertainment landscape.

If your organisation is looking to stay ahead of the curve, innovate, and seize new growth opportunities, let’s connect and explore how we can drive success together. ??

We look forward to working with you.

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