Articles by: "Heather Allerdice-Gerow, Media Industry Lead – 3Pillar Global"

How media companies can leverage AI wisely–for immediate benefit

November 6, 2023 Heather Allerdice-Gerow, Media Industry Lead – 3Pillar Global

The phrase “content is king” may sound cliche, but it has never felt more true across the media industry. The rise of generative AI has pushed the media industry to a crossroads, with many companies looking across a landscape where agencies are using AI for creative and content seed ideas.

Media companies, which own decades worth of content, need to decide not just if they want to use AI, but how they want to use it. There are advantages and risks in using different AI tools, and a misstep at this critical juncture could be costly for any media company’s long-term prospects.

Fortunately, there are ways to introduce AI for productivity improvements while also accounting for the various challenges associated with AI adoption.

The benefits of AI adoption

The media industry is full of challenges. Traditional newspapers and magazines are looking for new revenue opportunities amid declining ad revenue. Streaming services are trying to stem the tide of subscriber churn. And every single media company is competing for consumer attention and engagement in an era of unprecedented choice.

AI can help. Whether it’s buzzy generative AI or the more established predictive AI, there are applications that solve some of the media industries biggest challenges.

At a very basic level, AI can help with user personalization, creating unique experiences based on consumers’ interests, behaviors, connections, and other patterns. This can happen on a webpage, a streaming content library, or in an email newsletter. AI also has a firmly established track record with ad optimization, utilizing consumer behavior to match the best ads with the best prospective consumer on a website.

Then there’s the prospect of content creation, which is one of the capabilities getting the most attention right now. The ability to quickly produce small pieces of content, be it voiceover or an article summary, can be extremely helpful.

Protecting IP in the AI era

While those are all clear benefits, there are challenges as well – some obvious, some less-so. There are lots of off-the-shelf tools available, and brands can also pay to develop their own, which would live behind a firewall. Many media companies will look at the open-source platforms that are getting a lot of attention and think these are no-brainer choices, in part due to their recognition among consumers.

The availability and efficacy of these platforms may be appealing, but it is important to consider the danger in using open-source AI solutions. Many free platforms own the data, queries, and outputs, for every use of their platform. This extends to everything from articles, video voice over, animation, and images. Media companies that utilize these tools to build anything may run into ownership and licensing issues down the line, even if the original input was the media company’s own intellectual property.

Where to get started

To leverage and innovate with AI, media companies should first focus on cloud optimization and data cleanup. Since content IP is king for many media companies, the wise near-term solution is to focus on AI solutions that improve productivity while protecting IP. These solutions are available today, and offer a great deal of utility around productivity, automation, and, ultimately, cost savings.

One big area is search engine optimization (SEO). AI can aid with both external SEO (how pages appear in engines like Google) and internal SEO (how pages appear in on-site search). Any improvement to search across helps customers and internal teams, encouraging more traffic and deeper engagement.

There’s also digital asset management (DAM), which uses AI to index and leverage in-house content. DAM systems can ingest and index every media asset, including video, photos, written content, and audio, that has been published or that has never been shared with the public. The resulting index of these assets creates an amazing content discovery tool, allowing your team to leverage work that has already been produced.

Finally, there’s dynamic content optimization (DCO), a cutting-edge digital advertising technology that uses AI to optimize the best version of ad creative to an audience. Media companies can leverage DCO within their own advertising to ensure greater campaign performance.

Navigating AI’s future

There are certainly pitfalls with adopting any nascent technology, and AI is no different. However, there are easy ways to lean into AI with simple, safe use cases while determining the risk of more complex applications. SEO, DAM, and DCO are all instant productivity tools that can be put into place without running into issues of ownership. All of these provide help, something that no media company can afford to turn down right now.

Innovation | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

How media innovators leverage the product mindset

April 3, 2023 Heather Allerdice-Gerow, Media Industry Lead – 3Pillar Global

With the rapidly changing media landscape organizations must constantly evolve or die.

In a recent BCG study, only 35% of companies achieved their digital transformation objectives.

Where are you?

Companies in the media ecosystem, including publishers, broadcasters, streaming platforms, and ad-tech providers, are under ongoing pressure to keep pace with the speed of innovation and new market demands. Many are struggling to sustain their business, which may support millions of users, while still innovating to stay ahead of the next technology wave.

This task has been exacerbated by conflicting priorities of executives, value vs velocity, which leaves CPOs and CTOs in need of a desperate alignment to build an optimal foundation for an ecosystem of digital products.

You must build for outcomes

Fortunately, the path to solving these issues is achievable, albeit one that requires a fundamental change in thinking and execution. By taking a product mindset philosophy across the entire business, media leaders are able to design for outcomes such as: changing consumer behavior, making informed decisions, and growing top- and bottom-line revenue. This holistic approach for all stakeholders helps align priorities with outcomes to achieve results.

The product mindset helps define individual product launches and conflicting stakeholder priorities. When applied to the entire enterprise, it can help media companies adapt for the future while also still serving their current customer base.

How to achieve the product mindset

Defining the product mindset

The product mindset establishes a link between product principles and company characteristics. It provides a shared experience that connects people at every level of an organization and allows them to communicate and make data-driven decisions. Central to the product mindset are three core concepts:

Digital products must be self-funded.
Digital products need to be chosen by the customer.
Digital products are never done.

Thinking about products along these lines can help a company clear away some of the roadblocks and challenges of maintaining pace with media evolution. But putting them into practice can be a challenge. The following five steps can help make the product mindset the core philosophy across a media enterprise.

1. Define the vision

Every product needs to create and communicate a clear vision that addresses a market problem, and every company needs a vision for what it aims to do. Does every product unite under a single vision that the company wants to push forward? If a product doesn’t fit the vision, then CTOs, product leads, and even CEOs need to have the discipline to say “no” to a new idea.

2. Prioritize customer needs

User-informed products solve specific problems for specific target customers. The more a business knows about its target customer, the better it can define its overall business strategy and, specifically, its product strategy. This requires careful research into questions that may seem obvious, but aren’t asked often enough in the development process. Who is the customer? What are we solving? What’s the best design to achieve the goals? Solid research ensures companies solve the right problem in the right way.

To fuel this line of inquiry, media companies must develop a strong user feedback loop that tests assumptions early, often, and regularly, through the use of analytics, UX testing, and user surveys. These are repetitive, quick, and inexpensive methods that will point the way forward for product development and revenue opportunities.

3. Practice a lean and agile mindset

The goal of any organization is to practice its core values to the point that the process becomes invisible. The agile mindset requires predictable development and deployment processes. When all products have to unite under the umbrella of a single vision, serve a target customer, and are built on predictable processes, then everything starts moving like clockwork.

The lean build process operates similarly. Products are built in the smallest, fastest way possible, without being tied to specific commitments. That helps spot failures early, resulting in less time lost and fewer wasted resources as companies move to evolve.

4. Excel at change

The need for the product mindset is ultimately about the need to get really good at the constant change within the media industry. The companies that will define the future can quickly reinvent themselves based on how their users and market change.

When assessing a change, ask, “does the benefit generated from change outweigh the cost?” Again, everything should be based on data and serving the end users, not chasing shiny objects. The more an organization can justify the change to match the vision, the easier the change will be.

5. Employ strong, skilled, empowered teams

The best way to apply the product mindset across an enterprise is to build cross-functional teams that open the door to wide-scale innovation. Encourage smart failure, where ideas are tested well in advance. Sometimes the data shows that a product may be needed, but the development doesn’t quite match the need. That’s OK, as long as the red flag is raised early in the process. By empowering teams, media companies make it quick and easy to change, ensuring that they can maintain their current position while building for the future.

Navigating the future at the speed of change

Media is evolving at a breakneck pace, shifting because of changes in consumer and customer behavior and needs. Even with all of the disrupting factors at work, most enterprises should be able to maintain – if not grow–their audiences in the future.

Maintaining the product mindset will help media businesses find new revenue opportunities, but also excel at change in the future, ensuring that they are ready to embrace the next evolution of media.