[WEBINAR RECAP] You Down With OTT?: Four Trends Impacting Marketing Media to Consumers

In this webinar, Jonathan Miranda and Candice Edwards from Salesforce joined Tim Mosa and Ryan McCambridge from Lev to discuss the trends of the media + entertainment industry, how they will impact consumers, and how it will change the way companies interact with viewers. 

Trends in Media + Entertainment

Communities > Content

A lot of media and entertainment companies are trying to figure out how to engage consumers in new ways.  They're spending a lot of money on high-end content to draw them in because of the perception that “content is king.” But there is a shift in the industry -- the consumer today is expecting that next level of engagement, and that means having a community built around the content. 

Powerhouses like YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and Twitch are platforms where the content is always changing, usually because of the users. The community is what draws people in, and technology is enabling that community in new and interesting ways. 

OTT Effects on Advertising

People are not engaging with advertising as much as they used to. To attain a high level of advertising engagement, advertisers now need to get down to a different level of understanding the customers.  Asking customers for psychographic information—habits, hobbies, spending habits and values—is how advertisers can better understand the customer. If you don’t know how to speak to them, they will go somewhere else. 

Who will win the streaming war?

Spoiler alert: there are no winners or losers. There’s a huge opportunity for a lot of companies in streaming, and winning is very different for all of them. The traditional studios still have to remain profitable, because they still have their direct to consumer business. They are trying to connect to people in a different way, and are fighting against the Apples and the Amazons that don’t need to be profitable from streaming.  

Entertaining is important, but from a company perspective,  it’s about serving the consumer. Companies have to understand consumer’s behavior and there's an “X” amount of dimensions in viewing habits and content that will really indicate and educate a company on how to do that. 

Key Tactics for the Industry

When thinking about the customer experience, it’s important to evaluate their engagement through the lense of the three R’s: recognition, reach, and relevance. We want to be able to know our audience and segment that audience to recognize who they are. We want to reach them through the proper channel that they want to receive information through. We also want to be able to provide relevant, meaningful content to those consumers. 

Community Engagement

Having a tech stack that drives and measures customer engagement is key. The Salesforce platform allows marketers and consultancies like Lev to implement customer data models or industry specific data models to uniquely identify the consumer across different touch points. Using Marketing Cloud as a messaging distribution engine along with other Marketing Cloud products and tools that will engage with consumers through paid, earned, and owned channels. 

Also, more and more consumers are interested in personalized messages. Younger demographics (like Millennials) will share information about themselves, in return of the promise of a personalized message. Salesforce allows for that bi-directional flow of information to exist. 

Subscription Protection

Subscription fatigue is real. On average there are 3.4 streaming services in the U.S. household and an industry-wide churn rate of 37%. The goal is to re-engage those subscribers and protect those subscriptions. 

Using Salesforce AI tools like Einstein Send Time Optimization is a way to identify the right time to send a message to a particular consumer segment. It’s also important to test content and content variability to see what particular copy or images are resonating and having the desired effect on the end consumer. Ultimately, it’s optimizing the impact of that messaging to prevent or reduce the churn, win back customers, and keep them engaged on the streaming platform. 

The future is bright, and the opportunity is bountiful right now in OTT. There will be infinite opportunities for content producers, programmers, and service providers to re-imagine entertainment experiences that are immersive, with integrative commerce components. Those same technology platforms can serve a much broader, wider audience. We can use technology to stay connected -- to stay entertained or to connect in a time that lacks a little bit of human touch.

If you would like to learn about more specific customer examples check out the full webinar, You Down With OTT?: Four Trends Impacting Marketing Media to Consumers.