Driven by rapid change in operations, strategic and operational agility are now a priority for media organisations. Between production and delivery, a finite window of opportunity exists to turn content into revenue.
Driven by rapid and ongoing changes in media operations, strategic and operational agility have become core objectives for organisations across the industry. From production and acquisition to delivery and audience engagement, there is a finite window of opportunity to turn content into revenue.
Eric Carson, Managing Director – Americas at Mediagenix, notes that shifting audience demands, inefficient workflows and legacy systems that prevent consistent use of content metadata can each prevent responsiveness and adaptability necessary for a media organisation to remain competitive and deliver bottom-line success.
The central industry challenge for media organisations is that, while the need for automating workflows and integrating systems is clear, achieving this level of technology-led transformation is proving elusive.
Eric said, “Indeed, recent industry research undertaken at the Mediagenix M-Connect 2024 event in May indicated that over half (55%) of media organisations struggle to integrate these requirements effectively. More specifically, two-thirds (67%) of media companies lack structured automation strategies, while only 4% have fully integrated approaches across these areas, underlining the ongoing challenge of delivering automation and system integration.
Stages of Agility
"Digging a little deeper reveals an industry in which organisations are at very different stages of the agility journey. For example, nearly a fifth (17%) are at the early stage of improving data, automation and connectivity sporadically, without a structured approach. A further 38% have taken a further step toward data-driven decision-making by automating tasks and processes, and connecting or integrating systems. This group tends to embrace individual projects, but may still lack a cohesive strategy.
"Almost a third (28%) are focusing on improving a specific set of core processes and systems. They are, however, selective in areas they are addressing and may miss improvement opportunities, as they are not aware of what is possible.
"The innovator group – also the smallest at 13% – is represented by organisations that have clearly defined integrated strategies to implement best practices across broad areas of their media organisations, which demands a clear understanding of why and where they need to improve and how to organise themselves accordingly."
Falling Through the Cracks
Many organisations are familiar with the problems caused by fragmented media workflows, where departments work in silos and rely heavily on legacy manual processes and the use of spreadsheets and emails to communicate. For example, strategic planning, production and delivery often operate independently, leading to duplication of effort, miscommunication and errors.
Disconnected workflows, where content is created without a clear understanding of audience needs or platform requirements, also emerge, leading to delays and inefficiencies. In turn, key processes such as approvals, data sharing and task handovers are slowed by an inherent lack of agility.
"Another major challenge that lack of agility may cause is inefficient content discovery and utilisation. As content libraries expand exponentially, the ability to quickly locate, repurpose and leverage existing and new assets is critical for reducing costs and maximising content ROI," said Eric.
"In practical terms, many media organisations still struggle with outdated or incomplete metadata, making it difficult to find and repurpose content. Teams tasked with curating content waste time sifting through repositories, leading to delays in scheduling and distribution. As a result, valuable content goes underutilised or expires without being aired at all, especially in large, unstructured libraries.
"These challenges are seriously exacerbated by increasing competition and audience fragmentation. In many cases, manual workflows are too slow and resource-intensive to meet these challenges head-on. Nevertheless, steps such as scheduling tasks, particularly critical for FAST channels or multi-platform OTT distribution, still require significant manual input, increasing costs and the risk of errors. Key processes such as audience rating predictions, metadata enrichment and localisation are generally handled manually as well, and without automation, organisations struggle to adapt to dynamic audience behaviours and deliver content to the right platforms at the right time."
Turning the Tide
The list of agility barriers goes on, but Eric sees demand growing for ways to turn the tide and put media organisations in a much stronger position to adapt and thrive.
"An important foundation for this objective is efficiently connecting processes across the content lifecycle," he said. "For example, directly integrating workflows ensures that teams across strategic planning, scheduling operations and audience engagement are aligned, while a shared source-of-truth for title metadata and rights/availability windows can break down silos and make collaboration and decision-making more efficient.
"A single source-of-truth ensures that everyone’s work is fully informed by accurate, real-time data, which doesn’t just improve process efficiency but also brings insights – for example, which titles can be deliverd to this region, for use in a specific channel, in a specific time frame."
He also remarked that using analytics across the content lifecycle can have a huge impact on operations by shifting the emphasis from reactive to proactive with data-driven decision-making. In this context, media organisations can tailor their content strategies by optimising scheduling, budgeting and accurately predicting ratings. "AI/ML models designed to recommend content from within your service catalogue to consumers leads to deeper engagement and lower churn. All of these combine to increase ROI," he said.
"For any ambitious media organisation, the ability to scale effectively can make a huge difference when taking advantage of new opportunities or audience trends. In this situation, automation helps eliminate a range of manual, time-consuming tasks that can limit innovation and prevent resources from being allocated to growth opportunities. Automation frees teams to focus on strategic priorities instead of task management."
Adding Up Advantages
The benefits of embracing workflow integration, a shared source-of-truth and data-driven decision-making processes includes accelerating time to market, for example, by curating content to launch new FAST channels in a matter of minutes. Another advantage is achieving deeper audience engagement with a broader set of a provider’s content, identified using enhanced content discoverability and recommendation techniques. Utilising purpose-built collaboration, ratings prediction and budgeting tools between strategic planning, finance and scheduling operations may also result in consistent, profitable audience experiences.
Eric said, "Bringing all these capabilities together is now becoming more practical, with modern cloud-based solutions bridging the gap between objectives and transformative impact. Over the next few years, those organisations who join the best practice innovators will be ideally placed to succeed as the media industry continues to evolve." www.mediagenix.tv
