MAIN INSIGHT 33
Adam Davies
MARKETING DIRECTOR
How do you define “Corporate Empathy” and what role does it play in marketing strategy?
Over the past almost three years now, we’ve blamed everything on COVID, even the way we buy and sell technology. I believe Covid just accelerated these processes, but we were going towards the digital path anyway. The lines of how we buy a facemask vs how we purchase CRM software are blurring since most of these processes are all digital now. Yet, I find it interesting how a B2B company markets their products to someone different than how an FMCG company markets its products to that same person. At the end of the day, we’re not robots so the opportunity to engage with people as people is there, and frankly, it’s what we should have already been doing. We need to understand that there is a human element in a sales and marketing strategy.
Corporate empathy comes in when we see our customers' problems and understand them as our own, which we then let dictate how we market to them. In our case, we really understand the problems a service provider’s marketing department is going to have when trying to sell their service and differentiate themselves from all the other streaming platforms out there. Therefore, how we communicate with them is authentic. I believe that bringing in our own experiences in marketing as consumers helps put ourselves in their shoes and differentiate good marketing from bad. The way someone is going to connect to the brand, and the experience, is important, so we must bring empathy and understanding of our customers in the way we communicate with them.
In what ways has your company changed its processes or buyer journeys due to digital acceleration? What effect has it had on the industry as a whole?
We’ve changed from being a high-touch consultative sales business to becoming a SASS business. With that, there have naturally been scaling issues and we’ve had to adapt our marketing strategy. The market is more dynamic than ever, with new streaming services being launched in new countries and markets all the time. Additionally, existing sectors such as gaming, are now being considered in the media realm, where they previously were not, which certainly opens up advertising opportunities around that. So we have more companies with lots of niche premium content that want to start distributing. A SASS platform makes this easier and quicker for them to start distributing advertising.
Covid had two major effects on our industry. It gave a massive acceleration to streaming services. While it took Netflix 10 years to get to 100 million subscribers, it took Disney something like 12 months. A lot of things that we've been talking about as they're going to be five years down the line, it became five months down the line, including in advertising. It also taught us the value of entertainment. This highlights some counterintuitive conclusions like the fact that when there is a global downturn such as a recession, people start watching more TV and therefore the perfect time to launch advertising. So it’s all about scoping and scaling the market appropriately.
The market is more dynamic than ever, with new streaming services being launched in new countries and markets all the time. Additionally, existing sectors such as gaming, are now being considered in the media realm, where they previously were not, which certainly opens up advertising opportunities around that.
The best engagement will come from marketing that uses solid intelligence capability that looks at the right kind of research and is constantly validating.
What role does data play in how enterprise sales solutions anticipate and choose their target audience selection?
We live in a world where you can get a lot more data about a lot more things; you can better understand the person you're talking to, the market they’re in, the trends they follow, the influences they have, etc. The best engagement will come from marketing that uses solid intelligence capability that looks at the right kind of research and is constantly validating. As a global business, we are able to obtain information from different geographies which allows us to identify and anticipate the areas in which our customers are facing challenges and ultimately, be there by the time they hit the problem. A good example is credential sharing. Three and a half years ago, we saw that this was going to be a problem in the industry. If streaming services can’t properly identify who is using their service, it becomes a lot harder to target the right content, including advertising. Look at Netflix. When they started cracking down on password sharing, it was really because they were planning to start advertising on the platform. If you can expect an issue or trend as a service provider, then you can expect an opportunity to grow. That's where our data and our advertising products come in.
Synamedia’s flexible incremental architecture provides a rapid, friction-free way to add, build and deploy cloud-based video services. With over 30 years of innovation, they are now the largest global provider of video solutions for service providers and content owners. Their award-winning portfolio also includes intelligence-led anti-piracy, advanced advertising, business analytics, broadband, and video network solutions and services.
