Emerging from lockdown: learn to fish

In volatile markets, being conditioned for change is an advantage.

Media-owners and brands owning the conversation with their most engaged audiences, have the option to operate agile diversified business models on demand, operating with speed, quality, and value.

The destination hasn’t changed, but volatility has accelerated the timetable, exposing dependencies, and made writing off legacy balance sheet investments a possibility that may have been a barrier in the past.

Media-owners operating subscription models appear to have sustained Lockdown effects well, whilst many brands understandably went into temporary blackout, but what’s around the corner? It’s time to learn to fish.

What are the key components to remaining adaptable to the threats and opportunities of volatility? Here’s are the key components in our experience:

1. Own the conversation
   Acquiring real time first-party data from the most engaged audiences, progressively leads to understanding audience behaviour. Operating diversified business models on demand offers an advantage that can revalue crucial media-brand partnerships overnight.
2. Audience structure
   Coordinating legacy mass market reach of paid social platforms, with brand controlled social networks, communities, and a new genre of simple community apps. Combining these entities with business models including tactical paid social revenue opportunities, with new models are essential.
3. Audience discovery and categorisation
   Enabling audience discovery and accessibility, segmentation, allowing validated audiences to create communities themselves to uncover entirely new segments is simple, but as we discovered, highly effective.
4. Business model
   It’s essential that any entity, right down to an individual content item, can have its own diversified business model including all subscription models, advertising including programmatic, content, affinity, audience marketing etc, safeguarded data, and integration with eCommerce storefronts.
5. Service mix
   Any audience entity must have the range of multimedia, instant messaging, and interactive video, and an evolving list of formats and combinations on demand. Eg. Subscription social including interactive chat with favoured columnists, Integrated brand social into OTT streaming video, Content marketing integration with eCommerce, are all options to meet the objectives of each audience.
6. Content
   It has to be simple to integrate content, internal and external data, and live TV with community-based services. We are currently evaluating group voice discussions. It’s a quick win to socialising existing online content to start acquiring first-party data and generating revenues.
7. Safeguards
   Validated brands and audiences are key to lower the cloak of anonymity with distributed entity-based AI-assisted moderation, with clear take-down policies and escalation, that will become more important with brand safety, and to counter the online abuse that everyone dislikes.
8. Regulation
   Media-owners and brands will have to adapt to creeping regulation that started with data: GDPR/CCPA, the eCommerce directive, with content expected to follow, and in the last few days, the challenge to liability protections in the US (not treated as a publisher) that will evolve the social landscape.
9. Personalised campaign management
   Real-time profiling is the core of achieving business objectives that may be categorised as acquisition, engagement, conversion, retention, and advocacy using such techniques as A|B testing, lookalike audiences, contextual and behavioural campaigns. It’s fundamental that this must be free for brands to interact with their own audiences, that they control.
10. Analytics and predictive
    Real-time first party data transparency provides reporting for each function, analytics and predictions, social listening, with transparent access to download real-time event-level data.

Audience interaction is evolving and is ubiquitous. Every media-owner and brand has been forced to review their response during Lockdown. Agile diversified business models on demand are the tool to respond to volatility, where precision can compete with volume.

If you haven’t mastered it already, it’s time to learn to fish.

GlobalDrum service operations team.