There’s never been a more exciting time to be in the media and advertising industry. The global market is expected to grow by 22.5% to $763bn for 2021. The pandemic has accelerated the transition to digital formats driven by consumer habits. Despite the renewed optimism as the market rebounds, for many publishers, there’s cracks in the foundation. Many of these cracks only get exposed and addressed during the lean times, like a pandemic. The savviest publishers knew this and took action, roaring into growth mode faster than their competitors at 25% YoY from 2019 to 2020. Media companies must drive profitable growth or perish. Those that address the challenges in their control will outperform the market and thrive.
Publishers should analyse which of these challenges will have the greatest impact on the business.
- Do more with less: This is a common theme discussed in board meetings and mandates given to senior operators. How do we do more with the same or less resources? The days of hiring more resources to manage highly manual processes are over. Improving efficiency is a top priority for functional leaders.
- March towards Omnichannel: On the sell side of the market, media companies have had a rapid proliferation of products in their sales bag. 32% of publishers report offering 50-75 products and 31% offering 25-50. This trend is driven by a need to grow revenue, transition off legacy media products and grow share-of-wallet. Agencies are working with fewer partners who can provide more holistic, integrated marketing solutions. Over time, we predict agencies will consolidate their buying into omnichannel teams favouring media owners with omnichannel solutions.
- Retention & Churn: From 2019 to 2020, more than half of media publishers churned 45% of annual advertiser revenue while top performers retained 72%. In any other industry, these companies would go out of business. The digital publishers with the highest retention rates also had the highest growth rates from 2019-2020. We suspect this was also true for non-digital publishers.
- Yield Management: Increasing yield is about maximum price and sell thru rates. Yet for most, it’s difficult to get the data in time to act. Additionally, publishers struggle with campaign profitability eroding margins, COGS and EBITDA.
- Data Driven Decision Making: Managing by fact is a challenge. At the core is a garbage in, garbage out problem driven by low CRM adoption. Revenue leaders struggle to get basic information on pipeline and activity preventing higher value insights around revenue opportunity, churn warnings, etc. Managing by gut, is like a guessing game missing valuable growth opportunities.
Fortunately, media companies can take action on the issues today. Thriving publishers are solving these challenges by adopting a proper Revenue Management Strategy.
The digital publishers with the highest retention rates also had the highest growth rates from 2019-2020.
About us
Boostr’s mission is to enable publishers to drive profitable growth. Born out of first-hand experience leading sales operations at Yahoo, our founders decided to build the CRM, Order Management and Commissions products they wished they had. Boostr works with industry leaders across linear and non-linear media, direct and programmatic channels providing omnichannel solutions.
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This article was first published in the Publishing Partners Guide (PPG) 2022, which is published and distributed by InPublishing. You can register to receive InPublishing magazine here and view the digital edition of the PPG here.
