They say the pandemic isn’t just changing our world, it’s accelerating the trends already happening to our lives and work. Most notably for many businesses - particularly retail and media - it is pushing digital transformation into hyperspeed.
But acceleration doesn’t work alone, it’s often accompanied by disruption. Sometimes one goes first, sometimes the other, but either way we are forced to deal with both at the same time.
In the last year and certainly moving forward, we must embrace the kind of disruption that entrepreneurs have been using to create new products and services while carving out new markets for themselves.
A good place to start - reducing friction. Just like businesses have done during the pandemic, companies can look for ways to make things easier, make processes smoother, remove barriers, and create a seamless path from introduction to adoption to ongoing use.
Take something as simple as Papa John’s introduction of porch delivery. It’s a natural adaptation, designed to create social distance, but once you try it, you might wonder why you’d want to do it any other way. Add the ability to tip in the online payment process - something not everyone does - and somehow friction has been squeezed from an already smooth transaction.
There are many examples of services that have simplified the process flourishing lately - the accelerated use of credit card’s “tap to pay” feature, the increased adoption of telemedicine, the extension of online learning to fitness and other categories, and more.
Time for self-service advertising
As we progress to a new future state, all businesses should ask the simple question, "how can we reduce friction for our customers?” which can lead to ideas, improvements, and innovations.
For media companies to reduce friction, I’d love to see more adopt, improve, and optimize self-service tools for buying advertising.
Google and Facebook have, of course, mastered self-service. Along with superior data and insights as well as massive audiences, the ease with which a business of any size can plan and place media has been central to their dominance.
One would think traditional print, as well as heavily digital publishers, would have widely adopted self-service platforms already. If they had, they could have been continually improving and refining them to be leaders today. Most of the high-profile examples, however, are national media or broadcast.
Companies like Comcast’s Effectv and Hulu have launched self-service platforms for TV. They are also leveraging superior audience data - in Effectv’s case, Comcast’s 20+ million set-top boxes - to automate TV schedules and delivery across their networks and OTT offerings.
In the digital news space, Vox Media has recently launched Concert Ad Manager, a self-service platform to access their Concert and Concert Local networks, including established print brands and local news sites.
In contrast, print and online publishers have a lower barrier to create and deploy ad creative than TV and radio. And while digital advertising units can be purchased for most publishers sites, it’s almost always through third-party networks that sell to the lowest bidder and take a cut of the revenue.
If a local publisher had its own platform, it would not only reduce sales costs but match the quality of its higher-value audiences with the revenue they get for access to it. Add in continual innovation around ad platforms, and they could again gain their share of local advertising, earning it back from Google and Facebook.