The Many Challenges for Media Technology Departments

With all of the change and transformation taking place in the media industry today, we may tend to forget that there is one area of expertise that is under great pressure to get it done, get it right and get it within the budget as quickly as possible. That would be corporate technology departments who must find efficient, successful methods to build the systems that will drive the business and that, oh by the way, will not become obsolete just as it is completed. It is quite a feat!

This week I attended an off-the-record roundtable on this subject that included representatives from such companies as AMC, Charter, Disney, Google, Legends, NBCU, Nielsen, NY Times, NPD Group, Ogilvy, Scholastic, Vice and WarnerMedia. This event, sponsored by Eliassen Group and hosted by WarnerMedia, shed light on the challenges that technology departments face in building and off-loading measurement and sales systems. With the ever expanding range of data sets (that sometimes have to be normalized and cleansed) to addressable and programmatic advertising sales components (that need to be built into current sales, inventory and traffic systems) to the promises of groundbreaking custom media systems (that cross siloed internal departments), there is a lot that can go wrong or miscalculated. And let’s not forget the need to comply with ever-evolving privacy legislation.

Organizing and Managing Project Teams

How does a CTO start to herd all the cats in a major technology project cross company? To some, this was less of a challenge in smaller companies than in larger ones. “A small company is federated,” noted one attendee. For those in larger corporations, “small agile teams,” might be the way to start but there needs to be some type of centralized body or council so the governance doesn’t slip and a set of corporate standards to set general parameters and deliverables.

Collaboration tools can be an unexpected challenge. According to another participant, tools can vary within a company. “Some use Slack,” he noted, but other departments use other systems. “Some don’t use Hangout.” Picking the right collaboration tools is pivotal, noted another attendee, so that the technical tools “get normalized.” There is great value in being proactive by immediately training in any collaboration tool when on-boarding a project. Sometimes rejection exists simply because the person doesn’t know how to use it. One executive suggested incentivizing employees and offered the following example: In moving from Office, her company offered Amazon gift cards to those employees who made the change.

Privacy

In the discussion of privacy, the thought was that, as CCPA goes into effect and with GDPR, advertisers would have to go back to contextual advertising from more personalized targeting.

For one participant, the irony is that as the TV side of the market becomes more addressable, it is possible that digital may become more contextualized.

Most agreed that it was a “hard regulatory environment,” where CCPA is the first salvo but not the last. One executive added that there were different criteria depending on the legislation – opting in for GDPR or opting out for CCPA. Anecdotally, she noted that, “with GDPR there is some blindness to opt-in. Consumers in 40% to 50% of cases ignore it” which is, “similar to ad blindness,” although there is no feedback as of yet on CCPA. And with legislation going out state by state it is really an, “evolving story.”

For another attendee, the concern is “reputational risk,” where we need to ascertain exactly what is going out to the consumer. “Where have you pulled the personal information and what are you doing with it? What are the exceptions?” It all must be within scope. His company demands privacy on enterprise level but individual nets may manage risk in different way and is “operated in a siloed manner” because of all of the different businesses they own. For another company that offers subscription streaming services, the consumer can delete their data but then they do, they are unsubscribed.

Privacy legislation could impact recommendation engines. Services like Chrome will be phasing out of cookies. Both of these situations present their own challenges in tracking consumers. As a result, some participants believe that this will result in more of a move to subscriptions.

Direct to Consumer Model

Being content with the status quo is not an option nowadays. For one executive, “We’ve had such a stable model for such a long time, you didn’t need to change anything. It just worked.” Now, faced with strict functional silos and the need to think differently, change management has been a challenging process and their current informal structure will be forced to evolve.

For some, the impact of mergers, purchases and consolidations creates a much larger company that needs to focus on assembling the organization within an aggressive time line. Content Rights is also undergoing a shift. It used to be more profitable to “split rights and sell them off to different parties. But now there is a scramble to re-aggregate these rights.”

In a world of cord-cutting, is there a future for cable television? For many, the answer is yes by upgrading the network to offer higher speed for gaming and more experiential content with aggregation being a solution for brands and distribution. “It’s a fun time to be in the distribution business. I don’t see the cable companies going away. Where would you go,” one participant stated.

As viewers increasingly watch individual programs and may not be aware of the network it is on, branding will be more and more pivotal going forward. “There is always a market for high end production,” concluded an attendee … as long as the consumer knows where it originates.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com