Winning the content wars: What digital content providers need to do

The way we consume information, media and entertainment (IME) has been radically reshaped by digital. We now watch the news, check live stock prices, catch up on our favorite TV programs, complete online learning courses – and many other activities – all on demand, on the move, on our tablets, phones, laptops or wearables. All of this is 'content', and content providers – traditionally TV networks, film studios, publishers and the like – will have to restructure their businesses to keep up with what we predict will be a period of even greater change over the next four to five years.

By now, most IME companies have invested to some degree in digital content ecosystems. These are the end-to-end processes of organising, creating, managing and publishing content, plus all the channels and apps that consumers use to access that content. Traditional IME players are being especially challenged by social media giants such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and technology titans such as Amazon, Apple and Google, which now dominate every corner of the IME space. The winners will be experts at using customers' digital footprints, or Code Halos, to deepen insights, improve consumer experiences, and enrich learning.

We believe that current IME segments will morph into three "mega-segments" in the next five years:

• News and Information providers will become information / insight providers.
  
  
• Entertainment/broadcast/music companies will together form the segment of entertainment experience providers.
  
  
• Educational publishers including educational institutions, providers of assessment and training, will transition to become educational outcome providers

Traditional IME business models – which have stayed the same for decades - have been shaken to the core by digital, although many companies have invested significantly in digital content ecosystems, and acquired start-ups, to target "digital-native" consumers.

For example, social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat – not satisfied with connecting virtually everyone on the planet – now want to be the window to the universe of content. As of November 2015, Facebook users consumed eight billion videos per day – doubling in just seven months from four billion in April 2015. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are now the primary news sources for many. These companies are continuing to make massive investments in content creation, distribution and consumption.

Facebook, for example, recently launched a free, social, news-gathering tool, Signal, to help journalists find stories and sources. Facebook and LinkedIn have created publishing platforms to take control of content delivery's '"ast mile" – the final leg of the delivery mechanism to end-users. Facebook and LinkedIn also plan to enter the education and training markets. Periscope, Twitter's live broadcast app, has the potential to impact many IME segments, including news, music, publishing and sport.

Away from social media, other companies are getting in on the action. Apple has been in discussions with major broadcast networks to gain access to their content for Apple TV. Apple is even said to be considering the acquisition of Time Warner in order to obtain exclusive access to its content. These deals could go a long way in making many consumers "cut the cord" with cable for good. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, made this bold declaration during an Apple TV event in 2015: "We believe the future of TV is apps."

Apple and Google now have unprecedented control over content publishers. Amazon has become an entertainment company in its own right through its Amazon Prime service. Netflix and the US online TV streaming service Hulu provide thousands of shows on demand. Spotify and Apple Music are fighting to be the music platform of choice. Even the action camera manufacturer GoPro wants to become a media company; professional athletes wearing the company's cameras will film themselves as they compete live, from their perspective.

In the near-term, the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook will control, to a great extent, how people access and consume content. While some existing IME companies are expected to create their own platforms, many will simply feed content to various platforms through plug-and-play, "content-as-a-service" (CaaS) models. At the same time, they'll use advanced analytics to drive hyper-personalization and targeted advertising.

If news and information companies want to charge a fee, they have to constantly add value, improving and refining the content they gather, organize and produce – since whatever they offer today will soon be available for free from another provider.

By distilling insight and making meaning from the huge amount of digital data that now surrounds people, processes and devices – what we refer to as Code Halo™ thinking – these companies can deepen their insights and deliver more personalized, contextually-relevant content to their customers.

Case in point: A leading information services company provides its customers with data on stock and commodity prices, corporate lawsuits and so on, delivered as reports, alerts and journals. As more of this content becomes publicly available for free, the company can use predictive analytics – combining many streams of input and customers' Code Halos – to give targeted insights, such as a 'buy' or 'sell' recommendation for commodity trading.

In the near term, news and information services are most likely to be delivered through social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and, presumably, new players); digital assistants (Google Now and Siri, for example); and data marketplaces (such as Microsoft Azure Marketplace). Hence, players in this segment need to ensure that they learn about their customers each time they click, so they can deliver a personalized and seamless service.

In a traditional entertainment ecosystem, content creators don't directly interface with their customers; their products are delivered through third parties such as cinemas, retailers, streaming providers and TV broadcasters. The "last-mile" customer experience is not in their hands, so they can't fine-tune the content they provide, nor get real-time feedback on consumers' behavior and experiences.

Today, customer loyalty is mainly dependent on the channel that delivers the customer experience. Understandably, many players are anxious to launch their own streaming environments and replicate the success of U.S. video-on-demand services HBO GO and Showtime Anytime. This trend is expected to continue.

That said, entertainment companies will continue to rely on third-party platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and Facebook to deliver their content. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality will help them deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience. But businesses in this segment will need to adapt to ultra-high definition (UHD) resolutions such as 4K and 8K, and optimize content for delivery to mobile devices and app ecosystems.

Outcomes Educational publishers have typically provided content such as textbooks, video, audio files, images and interactive e-learning courses etc. Over the past several years, their work has intersected with the work of educational service providers, including universities and assessment providers.

As a next step, educational content providers are expected to shift their focus – moving from providing specific output (educational content, testing, certification, degree) to helping learners achieve their desired educational outcome, such as gaining expertise in a particular field, or getting hired for a suitable job.

There are many opportunities for educational content providers to use Code Halo™-based guidance to personalize financial aid, loans or scholarship options; they can create lessons, assessments and expert interventions based on the platform and learning mechanism of choice (web-based, instructor-led, or a mix). They can also offer individually tailored recommendations for additional courses or certifications based on the learner's academic performance, professional interests and job market, for example. Finally they can match skillsets required by hiring firms to a candidate's aptitude and knowledge.

This can be achieved in two ways: by creating platforms that students can engage with throughout their learning lifecycle, or by putting targeted content onto other commonly used learning platforms. The keys to success involve breaking legacy learning content into very small components and tracking outcome-oriented metrics at each stage. Some leading educational service providers have already started measuring the effectiveness of each and every element of their content value chain and learning interventions based on learner outcomes.

If content enterprises are to survive the next few years, they must assess both the current state of their business and their readiness for transformation. They must ask themselves some fundamental questions about their content ecosystems in 12 areas related to quality and delivery. If your company has many product lines or business units, you should do this for each one.

Quality

1. Uniqueness. Is the content you deliver similar to what your customers can get for free on the Web? How is the content at the end of your value chain different from the content at the beginning? Is there true added value (such as new intellectual property, advanced analytics and personalization), or just format conversion and assembly?

2. Outcome orientation. What objective is a customer trying to achieve by consuming your content? Will they make a business decision? Be entertained? Learn a new skill? How many additional steps must the customer take after consuming your content in order to reach that objective? To what extent are you involved in that process?

3. Discoverability. To what extent is your organization's metadata tagged to make it easily searchable? How many manual steps do you need to perform in order to locate a typical piece of legacy content? Is your content discoverable across product lines and business units?

4. Reusability. Is the legacy content in your organization easy to reuse across product and business lines? Do you have workflows or approval processes in place for various groups within the company to reuse content? Is the reuse of content governed by organization-wide rights and royalties management?

5. Accuracy. How much does your organization work to improve the accuracy of its content? What are the main causes of inaccurate content? Have you ever had to recall and correct content once it has been delivered to the customer?

6. Metrics. Are you measuring whether the content you generate delivers the outcome the customer expects? How has your company modified its legacy metrics to address the introduction of digital products and services?

Delivery

7. Personalization. Have you customized your content according to the customer's Code Halo - including demographics, professional background, social network, immediate needs, previous buying behavior, location, time, language? If not, why not?

8. Immediacy. Is the lead time for moving a piece of content across your company's value chain longer or shorter than your key competitors? Has it decreased in the last three to five years? What's stopping you from improving?

9. Platform exposure. How many platforms is your content currently exposed to? For example, is it on YouTube, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, and proprietary platforms? Do you expect that number to increase in the next three to five years?

10. Platform control. How much control do you have over the platforms or channels through which your customers consume your content? Are you able to use advanced analytics to understand their behavior through these platforms? How often do customers prefer content from competitors?

11. Ease of use. How seamless is your content transition from one consumption platform to another? What is the lead time, or the extent of manual intervention needed, to enable the transition? Is a customer able to intuitively navigate your content on the platform of their choice?

12. Assembly. Has the level of detail of the content you deliver changed in the last three to five years? How easily can your company assemble and disassemble content based on the needs of the customer? Do your monetization models generate reasonable revenues for each level of content assembly?

As you answer these 12 questions, you can give yourself a rating of high, medium or low for each one. Be aware that you may not want to score 'high' every time. Depending on the business imperatives of your organization or business segment, you can determine the relative weight of each question in your organization.

Once this is done, you can employ our statistical model, the Cognizant Content Maturity Matrix, to help you plot the current state of your content ecosystem, and identify targets for the future.

The model divides into 4 'quadrants' (Legacy, Instantaneous, Ubiquitous, Exclusive) depending on how mature your content ecosystem is, and where you are in the process of becoming a market-leader or game-changer.

The model also makes recommendations on how to proceed, depending on where you are.

Perhaps the thing that made you stand out yesterday - your USP, your differentiator – is a quality possessed by everyone today. It's become generic, a commodity. The only way to survive is to continuously re-evaluate your strategy and update your content ecosystems accordingly.

Whether your company aims to be a content provider, feeding content to public platforms, or a platform operator with complete control of content and delivery, the way you organize, manage and publish content will probably need to be transformed to align with the business vision.

With this in mind, you should analyze your company's content ecosystem from a holistic standpoint. This might require breaking down the creation and delivery processes and packaging the individual pieces into adaptable, agile services that can offer a competitive advantage in the future IME landscape.

To comply with today's "digital first" mandate, where consumers want to use a network-enabled device to access all their content, news, entertainment and information, IME companies should consider:

• content automation
  
• content reusability
  
• vendor consolidation
  
• technology optimization
  
• geographical consolidation
  
• process redesign
  

The insights gathered can then be used to formulate a new target operating model that can turn your content value chain into a nimble, modular and scalable entity, well equipped to compete, profit and even lead in the digital era.

About the Authors:

Ashish Chawla is the Global Head of Cognizant ContentWorks, overseeing Cognizant's content transformation business, which helps information services, media and entertainment companies realize better returns from their content.

Shubham Choudhury is a Senior Manager and Consulting Lead for Cognizant ContentWorks.

For a more detailed analysis, see our white paper, "A Brave New World of Connected Media" .