Transforming Operations in the Media Sector

By Michael Vullings, Head of Customer Experience Transformation, News Corp

Michael Vullings, Head of Customer Experience Transformation, News Corp

Innovation in digital marketing means advertisers, marketers, and small business owners alike are faced with the increasingly complex task of choosing the best option to match their marketing needs and objectives. However, finding efficient and effective methods for advertising and marketing can be difficult, as choices from an ever-expanding set of options can be hard to evaluate, and may lead to very different results.

Media operators are responding to a more complex market landscape by offering clients complete end-to-end marketing solutions, with leading media operators having already established a wide range of integrated products and services; this can span marketing strategy, cross-platform media sales, content production, and client campaign services. These operators also make extensive use of data and insights in providing client solutions.

To deliver outstanding marketing solutions, leading media operators rely heavily on effective orchestration: organising their operations to have all the right elements and people in place, working together to get results; in this context, ‘lean factory’ concepts and agile principles provide useful approaches. For example, lean service design concepts can reduce waste and enhance service quality throughout the ideation-to-fulfillment process.

To realise the full potential of end-to-end marketing solutions for clients, media operators are transforming their operations in three ways.

1. Optimising and streamlining processes

Delivering robust marketing solutions requires people and tasks to be combined to form optimal processes. Business Process Management and Straight Through Processing can be applied to drive significant improvements in media operations, however recent advances in robotic process automation also provides ample opportunity for automating routine back-office tasks through existing user interfaces.

2. Enhancing structures and management practices

Choosing the right organisational structure and reporting lines can facilitate or hinder the delivery of integrated solutions. As different functional areas must come together to provide a complete client solution, media operators will re-evaluate their organisational design and how teams are grouped and linked, how they are managed, and how performance targets are set and measured.

3. Embedding a client-centric culture

Maintaining high levels of client satisfaction requires a strong service culture which permeates all aspects of the client journey. This requires a clear articulation of shared values, the establishment of formal mechanisms such as rewards and incentive schemes, and role-modeling, where leaders demonstrably place a high value on putting the needs of the customer first.

Operational Excellence is fast becoming a major source of advantage in media and marketing. Leading media companies are adapting their operating models and processes, and re-platforming core systems to deal with a major step-change in the complexity of solutions delivery. Also important is aligning the organisational structure, and instilling new mindsets and behaviours, so traditional business silos are broken down and new integrated and agile ways of working can be adopted. While transforming media operations is a significant investment of time and resources, many media operators are getting this right and those who succeed can expect a dramatic improvement in the speed, quality, and cost of their operations.