Emerging new media such as digital formats and online media have lured audiences to migrate, making them powerful competitors for traditional media such as print, radio, TV, yellow pages and even outdoor ads. But not everybody has moved onto the web. Audiences still await morning newspapers, publications, entertainment programs on television etc. But whether you are in Advertising, Broadcasting, Publishing or Gaming, now Digitalization will change the way you do the business along with growth of new Distribution Channels, rising Operational Costs, need for innovation, Technology Enhancements, and Industry Convergence! New opportunities for unlimited growth and profit have posed significant challenges to business houses to effectively manage surplus data.

The information age has utterly transformed the media industry. Traditional markets have been shattered, and competition for the fragments is ruthless. To gain share, media companies must develop a wider range of offerings tailored to specific audiences, while keeping strict control of costs. That’s why 1KEY Business Intelligence features industry specific capabilities for the media industry. This fully integrated solution delivers fast, accurate information on market segments, customer behavior, and performance of every product in your portfolio, enabling you to make strategic decisions that are accurate, on time, and profitable.

Few industries have been as deeply affected by the information revolution as the media business. The rise of Web technology, digitization, online publishing, and other new channels has toppled old hierarchies, unleashing new opportunities, new competitors, new alliances, and new business models. The days of the massive, monolithic audiences are over. Traditional markets have been splintered into hundreds of highly specialized, highly competitive niches. Consumers and advertisers have become harder to please, and they are increasingly willing to change channels if not satisfied.

In this tough and fast-paced business environment, even a single missed opportunity or ill-considered investment can be costly. To succeed, you and your decision makers need fast, accurate answers about every aspect of your enterprise and market. What kinds of products do your customers want? How effective are your outlets for advertisers? How profitable are your individual offerings? How much revenue is each sales agent generating? And how do your numbers compare with your competitors’?

The increasing cost pressure in traditional media companies and the risks associated with new, unproven business models in digital media make the ability to analyze business and audience data of critical importance to this industry. 1KEY Business Intelligence solutions can provide your employees with immediate and convenient access to data and insights to confidently make informed decisions in the fast-paced environment that characterizes the media industry.

The Challenge:

One of the major challenges facing organizations in the media industry today was the need to maintain and integrate an increasing number of systems within their environment. There will never be a single system that supports all of the processes media businesses require, and their challenge is to select, develop and integrate an increasing number of packages. The ability to share information across the organization is still a big benefit for media. The critical value of an organization’s data is becoming widely acknowledged within the media industry.

The statement “the only thing constant is change” has never been truer for media corporations. The rapidly changing media business landscape, particularly with the explosion of new or acquired channels to manage, means that strategic decisions based on gut, intuition or “the way we have always done things”, is simply not good enough for a media enterprise to stay competitive let alone survive in a fast moving world. Obtaining corporate-wide media analytics that supports informed decision making is challenging to achieve given the complexities of a media business and the numerous and diverse operational systems that manage them (operational silos). Strategic information requested by executives and investors often takes hours, days or weeks to obtain from these operational silos and can easily disrupt other day to day priorities and productivity as a result. Often by the time a strategic request for information has been prioritized and delivered by an IT department, countless other issues, questions and opportunities have arisen, leaving the first request out-of-date and stale. Within a media corporation, capitalizing on an opportunity or preventing a problem is often time sensitive with only a narrow window to make a decision and take action. In today’s media world, there is an intense need for speed in spotting positive or negative anomalous trends. Without the ability for media executives to have timely access to business answers based on business analytical facts, a media enterprise cannot be responsive to changing needs or market forces. Smart executives, innovators and leaders within media enterprises recognize that the survival and the long term success depend on powerful, flexible and accessible analytics. They know these tools are fundamental (not optional) for strategic decision making, their ability to respond to change, and to take advantage of the opportunities that change presents.

Do you face these challenges?

• Which is my most profitable brand?
• How do I reuse my existing systems to support business operations?
• What are the buying patterns of my customers?
• Which one of my distribution channels is most profitable for me?
• What is the revenue trend of my business processes in the next quarter?
• What will be the impact of a new distribution channel to my revenue?
• Which are my most and least profitable customer segments?
• How can I predict trends in churn in my viewership?
• Which is the most profitable time slot for my new program in the scheduling grid?
• How can I effectively analyze test campaign results?

Squeezing out meaningful information across varied sources of data is difficult task in itself. Moreover to answer the above questions, Media companies need is a simple, cost effective solution that brings disparate information into a single viewpoint.

The Market Drivers: Is it probable that five years from now the media corporations deemed most successful will have major revenue streams derived from delivery methods that have not even been invented yet? If recent history is any measure, the answer is a resounding YES. More change has occurred in the past five (5) years in media than over the past fifty (50) years, and this change is challenging all media executives who are trying to manage the realities of:

• Stagnant or declining traditional linear spot revenue as it shifts to other mediums
• Media institutional knowledge drain though retirement, attrition and layoffs
• Ownership changes and the demands of activist investors and financial institutions
• The digital & high definition TV revolutions
• Proliferation of new content distribution channels (Internet, cell phone, PPV…)
• IPTV, website advertising revenue, website content streaming
• Highly targeted advertising and interactive advertising
• On-demand entertainment (VOD)
• Convergence between Internet TV and traditional broadcasting
• e-Books
• Many flavors of social networking (as a content distribution medium)
• Younger generation content viewing (consumption) habits
• Consumer generated news
• Offshore work force processes and management challenges
• Acquisitions, mergers and spin-offs
• Advertising agency demands for real-time and effectiveness performance reporting

1KEY Business Intelligence (BI) capitalizes on the gold mine of rich transactional data previously locked within the walled silos of operational systems and they do so with an entirely new class and generation of purpose-built tools.

The Benefits:

The BI-Employee Connection: Media BI connects knowledge workers (based on individual data security permissions) to the complete and single version of corporate-wide enterprise data. The tradition in Media is to have highly separated departmental responsibilities such as Sales, Traffic, Programming, Master Control, Research, yet each of these business units can greatly benefit from access to relevant data, within the other areas, that impact their strategic decisions. BI makes it easy to get answers to questions and to drill down on those answers. With BI, the data is also secured and individual access to data is tightly controlled. One example of cross departmental value would be to compare the amount spent on a program to the sales revenue it generated. Knowing how profitable any specific program is gives a big picture view to all involved. It provides insights that are actionable and knowledge to support informed decisions. When BI is embedded into everyday business activities, each individual can contributes to driving business success and acting responsibly on the results of analysis.

Aligned Strategic Goals and Employee Actions using Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): KPIs are critical success factors that indicate an organization’s overall success, health and viability and they should be endorsed and adopted across the corporation. With BI, KPIs can be created and easily distributed to those that contribute to their achievement. KPIs can be constantly viewed at the employee desktops or on the road though a web browser (with appropriate security) and monitored by executives. Employee actions are aligned to corporate objectives when they can easily monitor how the results of their work efforts support overall business success factors. Without measurement there can be no informed decision making. When you share measurement across an organization, informed and aligned decisions follow.

Preserving Media Institutional Knowledge: By creating an easy environment for staff to publish their personal or departmental analysis in a corporate BI portal you preserve the individual’s knowledge as a formal part of the business assets. Other staff can share the value of analysis and calculations and more importantly, this knowledge will not be lost in the event that the contributor leaves the company. BI encourages collaboration and best practice sharing. In many media corporations there is a changing of the guard, with retiring executives and new faces taking on new roles. Now is the time to capture the collective wisdom of those that have decades of experience and to preserve it. Business Intelligence facilitates this process by encouraging the publishing of personal spreadsheets as BI warehouse calculations and subsequently allowing others to access it though a corporate BI portal.

Better Decision Making: Countless decisions are made every day within a media enterprise. When information is easy and fast to access, as it is with BI, it will be used as the base for decisions. Decisions based on facts result in informed decisions. Informed, fact-based decisions throughout a corporation result in higher productivity, satisfied clients and higher stakeholder value.

24/7 Access to Accurate Information: When you want facts to base a decision on, waiting 10 minutes is usually not good enough. Waiting hours or days is totally unacceptable. BI provides corporate-wide media information when you need it, wherever you are.

Enhances Transactional System Performance: BI relieves the pressure from media transactional systems that need to handle the daily operational needs of the organization. When executives continue to push for more reports from these systems, it is typically at the expense of transaction response times and degraded work flow performance. Since a BI solution sits over the top of all media operational systems and simply extracts the transactions into a separate data warehouse it has no material impact on these transactional systems. It moves the reporting pressure to where it is best served, within the BI system.

Corporate Wide Analysis Views: Media corporations have multiple business systems each with their own data storage areas. In large media organizations it is not unusual for stations, channels or regions to have totally separate systems serving essentially the same function (Traffic, Programs, Research, etc.). These silos of data make corporate-wide reporting time consuming, manual and sometimes impossible. With BI, all transactional data is consolidated into a single data warehouse resulting in a unified repository and a complete consolidated picture of the media data. The only way to achieve BI – complete and comprehensive insights into the business – is through consolidating this disparate data into a single central repository.

Cost-Effective IT Development and fewer IT requests: When employees and executives are empowered and more self-sufficient in attaining the information they need to do their job, IT has fewer demands and can spend time operating more strategically. Equally, for those that still need IT to provide assistance with reporting, with BI deployed, the IT department can create reports in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take without a media data warehouse and BI system. The result is a low total cost of ownership and a more productive IT staff.

Single Version of the Truth: A data warehouse is inextricably linked to any BI solution and is the single, consolidated repository for all your corporate data. Instead of ever arguing over who has the most accurate data, precious time is spent making decisions. Your media BI infrastructure ensures a single accurate version of the truth both from a fact and a formula perspective. When everyone sources their facts from the BI repository and calculations are agreed corporate formulae, there is no basis for argument, and time is spent taking action.

Conversion Facilitation: BI can be a facilitator for operational systems conversions. Media corporations are still in the process of going through operational system conversions and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Providing that your BI data warehouse is established prior to these conversions, the process proceeds seamlessly with uninterrupted executive reporting during the transition. Consolidated analysis is easily attainable with a BI system as long as the data from each system is transformed into the central data warehouse prior to the transition. The data warehouse can also implement the relationships for master data management (MDM) easing the transition, all while not interrupting the data viewed by executives and employees.

Improved Shareholder Value: Improved timely information to make informed decisions results in an agile corporation that is competitive and profitable. All of which accrues to shareholder value.

Media enterprises can exploit business intelligence for sustainable competitive advantage, leveraging detailed customer transaction data.

Increase revenue by improving
• The ability to leverage customer data to understand buying and calling patterns
• Insight into the success of new products, features, and services
• Visibility of the most profitable customers
• Targeted promotions and marketing campaigns
• Market share in converged industry sectors

Decrease costs by
• Reducing customer churn
• Effectively managing data in mergers and acquisitions
• Reducing or eliminating incompatible data marts and data warehouses
•Aggregating, summarizing, and analyzing critical data quickly

Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

Below are six (6) examples of media corporation specific KPIs. However, we will first start with a definition. KPIs are the critical success factors that indicate an organization’s overall success, health and viability. Each KPI must have the following attributes:

• They must be measurable
• Have a goal
• Be distributable throughout the relevant division levels and staff
• Have a graphical indicator of status compared to the goal
• Have a trend indicator

For a KPI to be of value there must be a way to accurately define and measure it. In media corporations, measurement can only be accomplished through a data warehouse that captures detail media transactions. Then, with a sophisticated and modern Business Intelligence system over the data warehouse, it is possible to present actionable analysis from this data in real-time. KPI analysis is provided using formulae that accurately and consistently defines each KPI, often a result from “crunching” billions of transactions that are presented in sub-second response time.

Examples of popular Media specific KPIs are described below:

Past Revenue – This KPI is the gross revenue for the last 3 fiscal calendar months compared to the same months of last year expressed as a percentage. The KPI Goal can be set to a value such as 112% (or any goal that is the corporate objective). The trend is against the KPI of one month before.

Future Revenue – This KPI is the gross revenue for the next 3 months of the fiscal calendar compared to the pacing position on the same day last fiscal year for the corresponding 3 months expressed as a percentage. The KPI Goal can be set to a value such as 115% (or any corporate objective goal). The trend is against the KPI of one month before.

Business Activity – This KPI is the gross revenue booked during the last 4 weeks compared to the corresponding 4 weeks of the last fiscal year expressed as a percentage. The KPI Goal can be set to a value such as 112%. The trend is against the KPI of one week before.

Future Average rate – This KPI is the average 30 second equivalent spot rate for the next 3 months compared to the corresponding 3 months of last year expressed as a percentage. The KPI goal can be set to a percentage such as 115%. The trend is against the KPI for last month.

Past CPT – This KPI is the average cost per thousand (CPT) for the past 3 months compared to the corresponding 3 months of last year expressed as a percentage. The KPI goal can be set to a percentage such as 112%. The trend is against the KPI for last month.

Forecast Revenue – This KPI is the forecast revenue for the next 3 months based upon the current bookings plus the unsold availability times the average rate achieved. It is compared to the goal of the final invoiced revenue for the corresponding period last year. The trend is against the current forecast of the 3 month period one month earlier compared to the corresponding period last year.

Print KPIs:
• Process Efficiency by stages
• Environment-friendly KPIs
• Subscriber to news-stand ratio across geography
• Effective Frequency by Advertiser Type
• CPI/CPM

KPIs for Online Media:

• Average Margin and Revenue per Visit
• Visitors segmented by visit frequency spend
• Technology-wise counts and revenue
• New visitor return ratio
Broken request ratio (stream)

Entertainment KPIs:
• Segment by time spent
• Bundling insights & predictions
• AMPV, ARPV & LTV
• Count/Revenue by Psychographics
• Surveys & Popularity Chart
• Real Money Sign-up
• Unique Active Player

Advertising KPIs:
• CPI / CPM
• Effective Frequency
• Incremental Recall Efficiency
• ROI
• Content-Product correlation

KPIs for Cable and Video:
• Program-product correlation for Effectiveness
• Average Margin & revenue across slots
• Rating across slots
• Share across slots

Media Industry Scenarios
1KEY Business Intelligence enables improved decision making by providing an integrated solution to reduce time and effort required for decision makers to find, access, analyze and gain insight into business information. In the media industry, there are a number of scenarios where business intelligence can have a real impact on the performance of your business.

Customer Segmentation Correlation: Disconnected internal and external data sources prevent meaningful correlation between data sets and segmenting customers according to their characteristics and behaviors – all of which would be most useful for better serving these customers from an editorial content perspective and better targeting customers from an advertising perspective. With 1KEY Business Intelligence solution from MAIA Intelligence, a meaningful correlation of customer segmentation data can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing campaigns and increases the value of the advertising space to advertisers.

Customer Campaigns & Retention: Winning new customers is expensive, so marketing campaigns need close monitoring to maximize effectiveness. Equally proactive measures are needed to maintain subscription revenues. 1KEY BI connects to multiple ERP systems, CRM systems, and subscription databases to provide insight into campaign metrics, expiring subscriptions, renewal rates, and new wins.

Process Management: Managing complex production processes in the media industry, which may involve 1000s of individual tasks and a multitude of deliverables, is difficult without an integrated view on the status of the overall content management process, with the capability to drill down into the status of each individual task. With 1KEY’s Business Intelligence platform media companies can track even the most complex production processes, extracting data from different sources and combining them into one cohesive overview about the process status. This way, costly last-minute fixes and costly deadline overruns can be avoided.

Audience Ratings: Attracting audiences is at the core of each media company’s value proposition, so keeping track of audience ratings and understanding how editorial and advertising content impacts audience ratings and market shares is crucial for media companies. With 1KEY Business Intelligence solution, audience ratings provided by external sources can easily and effectively be combined with existing program schedules and content timelines, so that program planners can improve their scheduling based on the insights gained from analyzing the correlations between these factors.

License Management: To effectively monetize their content, media companies need to keep track of their licenses and make sure they actually use their exhibition rights before the expiry. By mapping licensing, genre information and ratings onto program schedules, the need to acquire new licenses for content of certain genres can be identified well in advance, & expiring “unused” licenses can be avoided.

Ad Bookings: An important source of revenue for media companies is selling advertising space or airtime. Keeping track of ad bookings and how they relate to the latest programming or editorial schedule, and the type of content is important for media companies. 1KEY Business Intelligence tool allow media companies to analyze the correlations between these parameters, gain insight into how they affect each other, and improve profitability by building a more attractive advertising platform.

What 1KEY BI can do for you?

Print
• Manage and predict churn in subscription
• Analyze survey results
• Predict revenue trends for next quarter / year
• Find out effectiveness of distribution channel
• Collect and analyze production related data per stage – from Editing through Distribution
• Predict and guide definitive information for raw materials

Online Media
• Track online customer behavior pattern
• Web analytics and reports for improving business proposition
• Online peak traffic information
• Most viewed pages / topics
• Analyze customer feedback

Cable and Video
• Analysis and charts to help you attract advertisers
• Decide on popular segments based on TRP ratings
•  Capture most sought after program based on advertisers’ preference
• Track ad revenue based on programs aired at different time slots
• Find out impact of competitor’s latest addition to your existing channels

Entertainment
• Provide tools and techniques for customer segmentation to enable you to target growing markets for cross-merchandising
• Provide key stakeholders with relevant, accurate and actionable data
• Find out profitable customers in a given geography and suggest actions to counter decline in profitability
• Track music that is being downloaded most frequently
• Track region wise sales for media files you’ve invested in
• Most profitable gaming brand in your portfolio
• Track multiple transactions per game per table / machine

Advertising
• Measure marketing campaign effectiveness and post-campaign analysis
• Control and help derive optimal strategies for distribution channels
• Compare and analyze the best technique: cost per thousand targeted impressions or flat rates

1KEY BI solution addresses the unique dynamics and management challenges faced by companies in the media and publishing sector.   1KEY BI helps improve management of both traditional and online sales and marketing, allowing them to track current performance and forecast trends.  1KEY BI contributes to these accomplishments in one or more of the following ways:

• Fast access to sales results through next-day delivery for informed decisions.
• Enhanced competitiveness with the ability to benchmark performance against other regions and organizations.
• High-impact marketing campaigns enhanced by comprehensive feedback and improved forecasting ability.
• Reduced operating costs by identifying potential for greater efficiency across the organization.
• Provided greater visibility into supply chain performance, to ensure optimal inventory levels

Employees can leverage 1KEY BI’s self-service reporting, analytics and performance dashboards to obtain structured data, as well as in-depth research on the all aspects of Media’s business.  1KEY BI eliminates the burden on IT, empowering the information worker to find the insight they need to make sound and informed decisions.

The result – employees can now access detailed sales data from around the world, which was previously not possible, and they are also able to run sophisticated self-service reports that provide granularity and a near real-time view into sales performance, ultimately helping these users make informed decisions that drive the results of the business.  In addition to sales data, Media companies can measure marketing and promotion effectiveness and monitor corporate performance and results.

1KEY BI not only converts raw data into intelligent information, but also allows business users to access the right information at the right time and able to transform it into smart decisions. Media companies with its business processes based on such intelligent information can disrupt its competitor’s moves, strategize a sustainable competitive edge, tap into new customer bases, retain existing customer bases, increase operational efficiencies and be better prepared for the future.

Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence, View Points & Perspective

Related Posts

• BI for Hospitality
• Features of Graphical Analysis
• Financial Technologies deploys 1KEY Business Intelligence (BI) software
• KPI for Retail
• KPI for IT Department