The Media & Entertainment industries are in the front line of the digital revolution.
At it’s most basic level, digital transformation has been driven by changing user behaviour, alterations to the way that people interact with businesses and consume goods (or in this case, content). Subsequently, businesses have had to adapt the way they deliver content in order to retain and grow their audiences.
Media organisations are no longer able to simply rely on the breadth of their reach to appeal to the masses. Consumers are now spoilt for choice, able to choose what they consume, how they consume it and when.
Instead, personalisation is now the key to increased engagement, consumption and advocacy of content.
Creating a Value-Added Experience
Entertainment providers are having to find ways to add value to the user experience. Rather than providing the same blanket service to everyone, it is now crucial to deliver a differentiated and tailored experience to each customer.
This means pushing the right content to the right people at the right time – and thanks to the explosion in mobile devices, via the right channel.
Through in-depth understanding of user behaviour, preferences and consumption patterns, we can now predict and push the most appropriate and desirable content to specific users.
This change toward very customer-centric, demand-driven content delivery has left many businesses scratching their heads, looking for ways to derive actionable insights from the vast lakes of data that they have (often inadvertently) built up over time.
The Importance of Multiple Data Sources
Because consumers are engaging directly with content providers via digital mediums, most organisations in the Media & Entertainment industries are in the enviable position of having direct access to a vast wealth of user-specific data.
Information on clicks, views, shares, searches, length of engagement, ratings, devices used, location, media type, content metadata, etc, are all readily available thanks to the direct interaction with distribution platforms. While it is possible to derive useful insights from this structured data alone, even greater value can be found by combining it with additional sources.
Data from social media monitoring can be used to inform not just historical, but real-time understanding of user behaviour. Advanced consumer profiles can be built that help to enable on-the-fly adjustments of promoted media, allowing organisations to capitalise on trending topics across specific regions.
Even weather data can be leveraged to increase consumption, for example knowing that rainy days are likely to provide a captive audience that will engage with content for longer.
Analytics Use-Cases in Digital Media
The potential applications of advanced analytics within the Media & Entertainment industry are vast, in some respects limited only by the scale of the imagination. We’ve summarised some of the most popular use cases below that provide a great starting point for embarking on more detailed analytics projects.
Effective, Personalised Content Recommendations
Consumers are truly spoilt for choice when it comes to media programming. Quite simply, if they don’t like what’s in front of them, they will go somewhere else. Knowing and understanding your audience is crucial to success as it enables companies to supply users with the content they actually want, rather than what we think they want.
Targeted Content Generation
It’s not just the delivery of content that can be targeted through analytics. More and more frequently, analytics are leveraged early in the planning and creation phases to identify what types of content are likely to perform best. Knowing which actors, roles, directors, genres, etc consistently perform well can have a huge impact on successful decision making.
Better Ad Targeting
With so much revenue coming from advertising sources, improving click-throughs, conversions and subsequent ROI is increasingly important. By understanding customer interests, behaviour and actions across multiple data sources, users can be fed hyper-targeted ads that they are more likely to interact with.
Optimised Media Scheduling
While fixed schedules may be easier to plan, they do not provide any opportunity to capitalise on current or random events. By leveraging advanced analytics across multiple (and sometimes unexpected) data sources, schedules can be dynamically adapted in real-time to ensure the audience remains captivated for as long as possible.
Churn Prevention
Retaining customers and the predictive revenue they generate relies on understanding what motivates them, both to engage and to leave. Being able to identify potential deserters before they depart enables targeted prevention of churn, through personalised offers and/or improved services.
The Future Is Understanding
Intelligent adoption and use of analytics provides digital media companies with the edge that they need to stay ahead of the competition.
By providing a superior level of understanding of customer behaviour and operational performance, organisations can leverage this knowledge to make more considered and insightful decisions about strategic decisions for the future.
In an industry that is heavily subjected to the whims of its customers, analytics enable businesses to understand audiences at a level of granularity that was previously impossible, but offers vast potential for the future success of the industry.
To find out more about how Invenio can help to implement a bespoke analytics solution for your business, contact us anytime for an informal discussion.