OTT Insights: Building A Growth-Focused Advertising Business
OTT is one of the fastest growing areas of the Indian media sector today. Deloitte projects that the OTT advertising market will grow to $13-15 billion (or well in excess of Rs. 10,000 crore) over the coming decade. And while rapid growth is great, it also means that the digital advertising space is only going to get more chaotic. In addition to making larger and faster sales, OTT platforms have an operational task on their hands that will spiral out of control if they aren’t perfectly tuned to advertiser demands.
The core problem is this: as OTT ads businesses grow, they face the task of delivering billions of targeted impressions to millions of customers in real-time, all while keeping their teams lean, being agile and experimental, and ensuring that they extract the most value from their ad inventories. Here are a few challenges that the best growth-focused OTT businesses need to keep their eye on, all the time.
1. Effectively finding the right opportunities
Growth-focused OTT businesses are always looking for the next opportunity. They’re never satisfied with what they have, or with what they can see. They’re always on the hunt for the next new revenue stream, launching a new ad format, or rolling out a new pricing innovation. They’re agile and flexible, able to run several experiments in parallel, all in an effort to answer a simple question: what next?
2. Min-maxing their business
Growth-focused businesses extract all the value they can. They don’t tolerate inefficiency, whether in the form of revenue leakage due to underdelivery, sales lost to quicker competitors, or time wasted by two teams not on the same page. The best businesses are always looking to identify inefficiencies caused by suboptimal teams, processes or behaviours, and are ruthless in stamping them out.
3. Making sense of their data
Growth-focused businesses know how to make sense of their data. These days, almost anything said about data is a cliché. The OTT industry in particular handles vast quantities of data, and millions of concurrent users. Despite this dependence, it is only those few businesses at the top that truly understand their data and invest in technologies that keep their data in shape. These businesses don’t just own volumes of data, but actually put it to work. By organising data, making it usable, and ensuring that it is available to all their teams, the best businesses drive themselves to ever greater heights.
4. Minimising chaos
Growth-focused businesses minimise chaos. They don’t accept it as ‘coming with the territory’, but rather do everything they can to keep things clean, organised, and disciplined. From keeping processes simple to making sure that everyone runs off the same goals, measurement and data, the best ads businesses recognise that chaos has a cost and focus on getting rid of it.
5. Collaborating effectively within and across teams
Growth-focused businesses are truly collaborative. They build seamless workflows between their monetisation teams; from sales to operations to finance. They make sure that their teams are all on the same page and invest in building visibility. They understand the cost of being disconnected and value transparency above all else.
None of this is hard to understand, and nearly all of it is common sense. But it’s also easier said than done. Media businesses invest time and money, often significantly, in making sure that they’ve checked off all these boxes. And yet, several struggle to get there, or fail along the way.
Monetisation teams, and operations teams, in particular, have several problems to solve, and these 5 just begin to scratch the surface. But the bottom line is this: in a growing, hyper-competitive advertising economy, not all businesses will thrive. Being growth-focused is not a default state; it is something that these businesses have to pay specific attention to. And the payoff will be massive for those businesses and teams that do manage to solve these problems.
*The author is Kavita Shenoy, Founder & CEO, Voiro
