In this first part of a two part publication, Steve Sydee takes a look at developments in digital technologies in media and entertainment over the last couple of years, to see where these might lead, and what implications and opportunities these may bring.

I was lucky enough to hear WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell speaking at Microsoft’s ‘Future Decoded’ event in London last December. He outlined his take on the global market, what the major trends would be for the next 5 years, and how he thought he could develop WPP to best leverage those trends. He outlined a summary of the pulse and plan for WPP which included the following:

• Fast Growth Markets currently 31% grow -> 40%-45%
• Digital 36% -> 40%-45%
• Data Investment management 25%

Clearly he has recognised the need for more internal agility, plus more understanding of internal and external data which can be analysed and used to drive action. But there is a very large focus on acquiring and developing more digital assets; how does this reflect in the rest of the advertising and media industry?

There has clearly been (and had to be) a major transformation in the way that advertising and media firms position, advertise and sell their products and services, but how well positioned are media firms to really leverage this rapidly evolving new world? Digital has caused a paradigm shift in most markets, but it is likely that this shift is bigger in media and entertainment than in any other.

According to the “Impact of Digital Transformation in the Media and Entertainment Sector”, a new report from Econsultancy and Adobe, virtually every media company exec they spoke with (nearly 200 across EMEA and the US), acknowledged that digital has disrupted their sector. This is hardly a great surprise; but more interestingly for me, a healthy 44% believe they are drivers of this revolution and are part of the leading pack creating the change. 44% all leading? Maybe there are too many drivers at the wheel?

Or is it just their perception that they are leading a revolution? Is there actually a movement for change at all? Well, there clearly is, but with all the advances in technology, and progression in the market, there really should be more (especially with all those ‘leaders’). A couple of longer-standing examples of successful digital change that spring to mind are The New York Times and London Financial Times creating paywalls around their digital assets - both becoming regular revenue generators faster and more successfully than most thought likely.

But those examples aside, how well placed is this view that their firms are leading the way, and what are the obstacles that need to be addressed in 2015 and beyond if your firm is to be a leader, or close follower, and not get left behind?

Well, the report identifies a number of areas; one I particularly like was the need to become much more experimental as well as agile – innovation is often the enabler, but is not easy if you are a large organisation, particularly when you have shareholders to appease. However, for the most part, the operational improvements needed remain around customer relationships, sweating your digital assets, marketing, and being able to measure performance against corporate and departmental KPIs.

I’ll be looking at this more, and giving some suggestions of what you could do in your own firm, in part 2 of this series next week – please look here for the document in early May.

Back to the Econsultancy/Adobe report. Some more detailed results of the survey are below.

How does your organisation regard the following challenges as it continues for second half of 2014 and into 2015?

It seems that there are many media and advertising firms with key challenges in vital areas, particularly in business insight and data analytics, and a lot of these challenges are systems-based obstacles. How can firms improve, and get the most out of, the systems needed to deliver customer insight and effective action?

The key is to identify these as business opportunities rather than IT challenges, i.e. customer insight initiatives must be driven and led by the business rather than an IT technical programme. The business needs to recognise the benefits of excellent insight, and drive the programme with support from IT.

Leading BI firms like IMGROUP have spent many years working with advertising and media business leaders to give them powerful, actionable BI/analytics, integrating large amounts of data across systems and processes, and so from IMGROUP’s point of view, this means focussing their clients’ understanding of consolidated data, and using good CRM systems to drive efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction.

The key learnings IMGROUP has taken from this include the following:

1. The industry is lagging some distance behind more driven market sectors such as financial services – within media and advertising firms, there is not a widespread educated view of what customer innovation and business intelligence can bring. The advantage of great customer insight, and how to achieve it, is not well understood.
2. More unfortunately, (perhaps as the report mentioned above signals) this lag in taking advantage of true insight is accompanied by many execs believing that they do understand what is happening and are doing something about it. This is great news for those few that do, as they are the innovators and will reap rapid rewards. But in my experience, too many firms are currently not innovating and will fall behind.
3. Instead, if they have any strategy at all, too many firms rely on IT to drive innovation and intelligence, and they frequently sweep up this subject with the label ‘big data’ - and big data is often seen as too hard, too expensive, and too long term to deliver benefit or even get underway.

I would agree that big data can be too hard, too expensive, and too long term; I would add that big data can also be completely inappropriate for many organisations. Instead of building a vast store that may answer any question as yet unthought of, what many media firms can actually benefit from is to understand the specific metrics they need to run and improve their business, and then put together a plan to use and act upon wide data from only the necessary sources. This much more focussed approach is not too hard, can be great value for money, and should take months rather than years to start bringing those benefits.

In part 2 of this series I’ll look at some of the steps media firms can take to prepare themselves for this path. Please have a look here for the document, in early May.

? Steve Sydee 2015

Steve Sydee, Media Business Development

Steve has been involved with data, CRM and Business Intelligence since the 90s, and has built and/or led multiple successful practices in large and small firms since then, becoming Microsoft Partner of the Year on three occasions. Much of that time has been in the media and publishing space, with clients including United Business Media, Incisive Media, Red Letter Days, Pearson Group, Thomson (now Cengage) Learning, The BBC, Channel Four and Teletext. As an independent consultant, in his role at IMGROUP Steve works primarily in developing customer propositions in Media using BI and CRM, to create intelligent systems which help their users make the best business decisions as effectively as possible.