Building a media enterprise for the digital age

To thrive in the digital era, media companies will need to be leaner, nimbler and more open to working with ecosystem partners.

Partnerships have become much more important as the creation and distribution of content has fragmented across many different platforms.

To engage new audiences, media businesses will need to partner with consumers to co-create and crowdsource material. Alongside the move toward greater collaboration across the industry, digital transformation is pushing companies toward the industrialization of their content-creation workflows and the automation of their content distribution processes..

Partnerships and industrialization is one of three themes that we believe will be central to the digitization of the media and entertainment industry over the next decade. The other themes we examine are content fragmentation, and personalization and contextualization.

Engagement, co-creation and crowdsourcing

Consumers fall into two camps when consuming media: active and passive. Viewers tend to involve themselves actively in sitcoms or reality shows and even more so in live events and sports. With improved connectivity, data collection and analytics, content creators are now able to take advantage of this to harness their audience’s ideas when creating shows.

The ubiquity of social media and smartphones now gives content creators far greater power to create new storylines almost in real time.

Enabling audiences to interact with content creators has the potential to build more loyalty and engagement with the content, particularly if seamless second-screen support for an interactive, community-based experience can be designed.

The digital organization

Many of the titans of the media industry matured in the predigital age, as analog broadcasters, newspaper publishers or film studios. These companies have, in many cases, struggled to overhaul their processes, operations and structures to become enterprises designed for the digital age. The temptation for many firms has been to focus on the latest shiny new technology rather than the basics: wholesale digitization of content and processes and adapting their business for social and mobile. This is particularly important as users spend much more time on mobile rather than desktop versions of most popular social media sites (see Figure 1).

However, these basic steps are not enough, as a new breed of digitally native media organization has demonstrated. These enterprises are leaner, nimbler and better suited to keeping pace with the fast-changing preferences and habits of consumers.

Companies such as Vox Media and Vice Media provide some pointers to what we think the digital organization of the future will look like. The organization will have a centralized, data-driven infrastructure and management (cloud services, digitized catalog of content). Around this core there will be independent units that can move fast to create new products across different platforms or apps.

Digital organizations will have the perfect balance of art and science, with a mixture of creative roles (such as designers and editors) and data-oriented roles (such as engineers and data scientists).

Attracting and keeping the right talent will be crucial. Diversity, especially generational diversity, will be important, with creative teams needing to think and talk the language of digital natives.

Flexible, predictive, precise content creation

Data is becoming more important in almost every aspect of our lives, and the creation of films, news articles, music and TV shows is no exception. Perhaps the clearest example of this is content creators using predictive analytics to try to maximize their chances of creating successful content, as exemplified by film studios using the tools provided by Epagogix to reduce their investment risk when green-lighting movies. Epagogix uses analytics to help studios with decisions about which scripts to commission, how to improve the script and at what level to set the budget.³

This approach is likely to become more popular and widely used, drawing on data from many sources (such as social, behavioral or personal). The widespread use of predictive analytics raises the possibility that this method of content creation could become a victim of its own success. If it is widely used, there is a danger that the algorithms employed might tend toward creating a ‘sea of sameness’, with audiences bored by predictable story arcs and characterization. If companies choose to employ predictive analytics in content creation, they will need to be careful not to sideline completely human input, allowing creative staff to use their imagination and experience to create original and unique content.