Media industry keeps moving forward in attempts to catch up with ever-changing and ever-complex demands of its target audience. While other media companies are trying to keep the integrity of its operations and hoping that it will somehow work out (like it did in the past, of course), more future-oriented media companies understand the necessity of transformation in meeting market demands.
Luckily for us, along with complexity of demands, the possibilities to catch up with them are also transforming, making the chase after the target audience less challenging. And in the core of every such solution is metadata.
Even though metadata is described as simple as "data about data", its impact on a media company can be life-changing if used properly. So, let's get down to business and uncover key reasons why metadata makes a difference in catching up with your audience.
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Automating and optimising your media supply chain
Managing an overwhelming amount of media assets is undoubtedly a complex and time consuming process. With all the wide variety of content, which has to be easily and timely found, distributed and edited, the risk of making errors is high. Eventually, your content workflow is jeopardised, which results in delays, extra work and waste of resources.That is where metadata comes in. With its help, a number of manual and predictable tasks like transcoding, tagging, distribution and file formatting can be easily automated. It is especially useful in the present state of the market, where consumer's increasing appetite for more content gives more pressure on media companies to increase and diversify their content output. At the same time, content has to be quickly ready to be timely distributed to different platforms with completely different formatting requirements.
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Making sure your content is discoverable
Most probably, you have experienced the struggle of infinite scrolling through Netflix library to find that "perfect match" for a chill evening. Your audience experiences it too. Not only Netflix, but any media centric platform with any type of content. Making that "perfect match" findable by your audience is where metadata makes a difference.In the age of highly personalised recommendations, a media company simply cannot afford their content to be lost in overabundance of content options. Therefore, descriptive metadata is essential for matching your content to an audience with the same interests. Consequently, qualitative metadata is crucial for that match to happen. Your content has to include highly detailed and relevant metadata to create as many "bullseyes" for your audience as possible. Even though quantity can play a big role for discoverability - irrelevant or vague descriptive metadata can harm the performance of your content as it fails to connect to the right people. That is why the key to success here is relevance.
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Generating insights about your audience and content
Needless to say, media consumption trends have experienced a complete revamp: rise of digital media, content democratisation, new competitors, increase in distribution channels, lower attention span, pressing demand for personalisation… New media landscape is a vast and complex place, but also full of new growth opportunities ready to be embraced.The best way to keep a close look into your audience is through metadata. Thanks to digital transformation, understanding deeper your audience behaviour and content performance has become fairly easy. Metadata can help media companies understand better how their audience is consuming content, including which formats, topics, and channels are most popular. More than that, metadata can provide insights into how exactly users are engaging with their content. By analysing this data, media companies can adjust their content strategy to better meet their audience's preferences for a more personalised experience.
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Helping to effectively monetize your content
Decreasing ad revenues on traditional media outlets have hurt many media companies. With the rise of digital media and the decline of traditional revenue streams, media companies have had to adapt their business models to remain profitable. However, it is not that easy. Modern media consumers are scattered across various platforms with different types of content. Therefore, media companies, which have done ad placement in the same way for decades, experience difficulty to effectively adapt to such a fragmented media landscape.On the bright side, thanks to digital technologies, effective content monetization in a new environment can be achieved way easier. Brands want to reach the right people in the right place. Fortunately for media companies, this can be easily done with the help of metadata. It is capable of providing actionable information about the behaviour and interests of your audience, which in turn helps effectively integrate more relevant ads for an appropriate audience and content.
Meeting consumers' demands has undoubtedly become more challenging. Nowadays, to produce successful content requires way more precision and speed, which is impossible to achieve if media companies stick to old ways of working. On the other side, use of metadata can give the upper hand in streamlining a media supply chain through automation; boosting your content discoverability; having access to detailed information about your audience and creating more monetization opportunities.