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Now, more than ever, traditional media like newspapers and magazines are under pressure to increase revenues and cut costs. Changing consumer behaviour and the rising tide of new media have fragmented traditional markets, making it increasingly difficult to win and retain customers. With pressure on circulation figures and advertising sales, media men are looking for new and better ways of generating business while maintaining their existing customer base. Similarly, on editorial front, there is a continuous challenge to move from just being print-centric to more of content-centric on account of huge shift in the way content is being consumed today. The content is increasingly getting more personalized, becoming collaborative and consumed on-demand across multiple channels.

IT in media has matured over a period of the last couple of years, and has come to play a significant role by moving up the value chain in almost all core processes in the set-up. IT is gradually being adopted as a strategic tool in top media organization, more so if they were to remain both competitive and maintain leadership positions in these changing times.

Best Practices
It may be worthwhile to note that there is no one end-to-end solution that covers the entire media landscape and its processes be it print, broadcast or Internet. It is even more dangerous to look for one monolithic solution lest you may get stuck with inefficient, sub-standard solution for some of your key business needs. Hence, one has to acquire and integrate best-of- breed solutions from different vendors who specialize in some of your key core processes. The key point to note here is that the solutions should be transparent and open, to allow seamless integration.

To facilitate the transformation necessary for scalable digital business models, all IT solutions would require to be built using open standards, Web services, XML interchange methods, and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which in turn, helps to create a systems environment that supports interoperability. This framework will help promote agility and extensibility in the fast moving, constantly changing environments that define todays global media companies.

Anup Mandal CIO, India Today Group

In order to build support for multi-channel publishing, one would require separating content planning, gathering and packaging from the other processes in the editorial and advertising value chain namely content enhancing and publishing, delivering or broadcasting. While the first set of processes may be managed centrally and in a media-neutral way, the second set of processes will depend on the specific output channel.

The content management system should therefore be capable of managing each publishing channel through direct control or by integrating other publishing tools, such as for Web or broadcast channels.

Business Benefits
IT has been delivering and adding value to media business by streamlining the key processes, making them more efficient, scalable and agile. Today solutions for enterprise resource planning, supplier relationship management, supply chain management, product life-cycle management and customer relationship management along with industry-specific solutions like ad-sales management, circulation sales, subscriptions and digital rights management provide strong support for core business processes in a media set-up.

Today, CRM solutions for media provide a comprehensive, real-time solution that manages all customer interactionsfrom marketing to sales to service. With complete customer lifecycle management, marketing can now maximize every customer interaction, optimize their marketing spend, and develop long-term, profitable customer relationships. In print media business where subscription sales (or pre-paid business) provide a very stable revenue stream, the right marketing strategy holds the key to successful business.

Through the CRM platform, marketers are able to identify and measure the success of their marketing activities, know what offers are most successful, anticipate customer needs and preferences, and identify potential opportunities. Not only this, marketing is also able to track competitions schemes and advertising promotions. CRM tools also facilitate content and cover analysis for providing valuable feedback to editorial on changing consumer tastes and preferences.

Thanks to the seamless end-to-end data flow, support for all Intellectual Property (IP) related processes have significantly helped media organizations to increase revenue from sales and licensing of all types of IP rights, and deliver accurate royalty accounting for both receipts and payments of royalties. Businesses can explore new revenue streams to target niche groups efficiently, realize opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, and develop new advertising and revenue-producing products.

Vendor Relationship
In an age where consolidation and acquisition/mergers are the norms of the day, and dynamics of the business, specifically in media & entertainment changing too rapidly, it is too risky to have a one-throat-to-choke approach for the vendor providing solutions for our business. Establishing multiple vendors for solutions makes more sense as long as solutions conform to an open standards framework (XML, Web services, SOA et al). Justification for standardization has been that integrating products from multiple vendors along with the data from multiple systems costs much more than standardizing on fewer vendors. Unfortunately, few of us in IT compare the potential costs of integration with the costs of dependency on one vendors product or solution. With fewer vendors in the IT portfolio, we may even limit our negotiating leverage; vendors wont budge on terms if they dont think they have competition.

Vendors attempting to make their foray in media must know that processes, standards, and the business dynamics of this sector are quite different from some of the other sectors like BFSI and telecom where IT is perhaps at a much-matured level. But all that change is happening in this sector and happening very fast. Media organizations are rapidly embracing IT and benchmarking itself against the best of industries on IT adoption to remain both competitive and be ready to take on challenges specifically from the new converging digital domain.

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