JT on EDM

The Conference Board recently announced strong growth in online content or content-on-demand. The press release can be summarized by this comment:

Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice

This, of course, creates both a challenge and an opportunity for those providing content. The challenge is that without a regular schedule they lose control of what their viewers watch – their viewers “touch that dial” whenever they want. Instead of being able to schedule content at times when the target audience is likely to be watching or to put related content together in the schedule they will have to find new ways to keep viewers engaged. The opportunity is that this new environment generates a huge amount of data about who is watching what where and when. This data can drive analytics that give new insight about what content is likely to appeal to which consumers. Combined with adaptive control, these analytics allow content recommendations that will keep consumers engaged and even introduce them to more of the “long tail” of content that is increasingly available. The effective management of this content recommendation decision is critical and only those content providers who do this well will thrive in a content-on-demand world.

One company working on this is ThinkAnalytics. I wrote about ThinkAnalytics before and you can find more information on their content recommendation engine on their site.