How Analytics is Changing the Game for Media and Broadcasting

In the world of DVR’s, advanced set-top boxes, and the easy availability of on-demand content on the internet, media and broadcasting company have their work cut out for them to understand how well their content corresponds to customer demand. Information silos, legacy infrastructures, and changing business models act as major hurdles that media and broadcasting companies need to cross to convince their advertisers that the advertising charges are rational. Along with this, the rise of social networks is also adding to the complexity of how content is being curated and shared. According to a report by report in Fortune, “about 85% of Twitter users who are active on Twitter during prime-time say that they tweet about TV content they are watching”. This report also shows that in the U.S alone there were close to a billion T.V related Tweets, 90% of which came from a mobile device. As every social media user becomes a content curator, distribution platforms are looking to deepen their social integration to increase their reach, deliver the next big hit and hold the interest to the audience long enough to generate profits. Media and broadcasting companies today need real-time operational intelligence with deeper insights into their consumer behaviors and sales and profit trends. The good news is that despite the growing business complexity, today there is enough data that can be easily mined to gain information and improve the odds of the programming bets and serve the audience better.

With no shortage of data, the main challenge facing this industry today is the effective integration of digital data with traditional data sources to create new and relevant insights.

This needs taking a systematic approach towards analytics to

• get a 360-degree view of the customer and assess how distribution windows impact ad-value and content
• gain real-time visibility into the ad inventory,
• understand customer preferences to offer targeted ads
• increase information transparency

In this blog, we take a look at how media and broadcasting companies can leverage analytics to not only connect with their audience better and ensure better profitability.

Improve Advertising Outcomes

Today, brand advertisers are under greater scrutiny to prove the value of their marketing investments. According to a CMO survey, 61% of marketing heads feel pressure from the C-Suite to justify their marketing spends. Leveraging traditional research methodologies such as focus groups and surveys do not provide the deep insights that marketing heads need today. By using external data points, broadcasters and advertisers can uncover brand affinities by mining online and social data to optimise their offline and online investments. By leveraging analytics, media and broadcasting companies, through data–driven recommendations, can quantify and predict advertising outcomes and act as partners to brands and help them achieve their advertising goals.

Improve Understanding of Customer Needs

Data analytics helps media and broadcasting companies gain real-time insights into the success or failure of their products and promotion effectiveness. Netflix effectively used data analytics to make its show The House of Cards a runaway success. They used data to make content suggestions and create content that their viewers would like to see. The Weather Channel too leveraged analytics to rebrand itself to The Weather Company and create new products. Media and broadcasting companies can not only gauge the effectiveness of their shows with analytics but also gain real-time understanding of the effectiveness of their campaigns. Instead of waiting for weeks after launching a campaign, these companies can use advanced data analytics and BI solutions to see how the audience perceives the ads and in the case of a negative reaction (the cost of which can run into millions) take remedial action immediately.

Analytics can also be utilised for channel analysis to assess to understand the type of customers the channel reaches, the profitability of each channel, and the impact of technology across the channels etc. It can be used to effectively comprehend the demographic characteristics of the customers, identify underserved market segments and fine-tune forecasting and planning with the help of multidimensional analysis applications. By effectively analysing consumer trends with the offerings, media and broadcasting companies can also identify the right time to retire content assets and/or unprofitable delivery channels.

Leveraging Greater Delivery Channels

The media and broadcasting industry is becoming increasingly competitive owing to the shift from a linear structure. Conventional living-room T.V viewing is being supplemented with mobile applications and web-based content. As we move to the age where ‘T.V Anywhere’ is the norm, media and broadcasting companies have to ensure that they leverage data from multiple sources to assess the reasons behind spikes and drops in audience size, measure the effectiveness of program content, understand user behaviors and activity patterns to evaluate advertising approaches and thus, serve the audience better.

There is a deluge of data that is generated through non-traditional channels for media and broadcasting industry such as online and social media. Given the volumes, it is impossible to process this data unless advanced analytics are employed. For example, the season premiere of X- Factor generated over 1.4 million comments, 13.374 comments per minute being the highest. Real-time assessment and analysis all these comments to identify opportunities and loopholes would be impossible to process manually by marketing analysts. However, with the help of powerful data analytics, media and broadcasting companies can not only process this data efficiently but use the insights generated from these data sources to drive value across their business functions and ensure that they are getting their money’s worth.