Revenue Growth Programs for Media & Entertainment Companies

The top growth companies led innovation with highly specific buyer insights and applied innovative combinations of content, distribution, packaging, pricing and payment. They understood capture management, applied strategic pricing, delivered contextual offers, and used technology to create new offerings, bundles, promotions, pricing and discount models.

The companies with the highest new revenue streams invested 17-21% more funds into transformative innovation. By comparison, media companies with lower new revenue streams allocated more than 90% of their budget to incremental innovation, which is typically limited to improving existing products.

The innovation research found that shifting the innovation budget allocation toward more transformative innovation achieved annual revenue growth of 1.4 to 2.1 percentage points and EBIT margins by 1.9 to 2.9 percentage points.

Customer-segment and persona-based engagement, highly relevant and contextual offers, and cross-channel device agnostic accessibility were three factors used by the Best-in-Class to achieve the highest subscriber conversion rates. Applying technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), was extremely influential in delivering intelligent upsell, cross-sell and bundled offers that converted.

Using these best practices to advance from Median to Best-in-Class benchmarks increased subscriber acquisition rates by an average of 5.1 percent and lowered acquisition cost by an average of 4.3 percent.

The top performers maximized lifetime value of media subscribers using subscriber lifecycle management. They welcomed new subscribers with media rich onboarding, drove measured experiences with personalized subscriber journeys, delivered omni-channel customer engagement and rewarded subscribers with loyalty programs. They boosted ARPU with intelligent upsell and cross-sell recommendations.

These factors increased annual revenue growth from existing customers by an average of 2.6 to 3.3 percentage points and EBIT margins by 3.8 to 4.6 percentage points.

A relentless focus on subscriber retention was a hallmark among top performers. The data illustrated that most media and entertainment companies have adopted customer churn forecast reports. However, the Best-in-Class went a step further to advance from customer churn prediction to prevention. They used AI-powered predictive analytics technology to show not just which customers were at risk of defection, but why. Knowing why subscribers churn is more powerful than knowing which customers will churn as it allows companies to prevent customer attrition before it happens.

The data advised that improving subscriber churn from Median to Best-in-Class levels grew annual revenue by 3.9 to 5.8 percentage points and EBIT margins by 4.4. to 6.7 percentage points.