Media success can be defined as getting the right content to the right user—on-demand, via the user’s preferred device, with the best user experience possible. More fundamentally, though, success is defined by revenue, including advertising, licensing fees, and subscription fees.
In order to maximize revenue, today’s media and entertainment companies must focus on three key areas:
- Innovation around product, content, and user experience
- An omnichannel approach that drives unified—and enhanced—customer relationships
- Mobile and video as the centerpiece of new offerings
What is required to execute on these imperatives?
Innovation demands agility
Successful media organizations must quickly meet customer demands via new and innovative offerings. This requires collaboration between product, development, and operations teams, all adhering to global, business-centric KPIs and analytics. It also requires the ability to quickly deploy quality software. From an application and infrastructure perspective, media and entertainment companies are increasingly turning to the cloud and agile development techniques to more quickly create and deploy applications and optimize their infrastructure.
Omnichannel requires top-notch brand and user experiences
For media brands, it is crucial that users have similar brand experiences when consuming content via traditional web, mobile web, or native mobile channels. This daunting technical challenge is often addressed with website and app redesigns employing Single-Page Applications (SPA) technologies using frameworks like AngularJS and Backbone.JS, responsive web design, and hybrid mobile applications. On the backend, cloud-based microservices architectures help nimbly support multiple digital channels.
The availability, performance, usability, and enjoyment of a website or mobile app determines whether a media company gains new customers, whether existing customers consume more content, and whether users share that content via social media. Marketing organizations have long employed sophisticated user engagement and audience development analytics. Too often, however, that data is not shared with product, development, and operations teams. User experience data must be used across teams to successfully drive innovation in customer experience.
Mobile and video need monitoring
As user experience becomes the key competitive differentiator, media companies must have content that is highly available, can be delivered to customers on demand, and performs well across all digital channels, with an increasing emphasis on mobile.
Users increasingly access the web via mobile devices, and video is becoming the dominant content format. Successful media companies must understand the dynamics and performance of mobile users as well as the availability, quality, and performance of video.