As media publishers, your ability to adapt and innovate is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge and engaging with an increasingly tech-savvy audience.

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a driving force, reshaping industries across the globe, and the media sector is no exception. By harnessing the capabilities of AI, media companies gain the potential to revolutionise their processes, maximise efficiency, and deliver user-centric content that resonates deeply with their audience.

This guide is crafted with media publishers in mind, catering to media houses of all sizes and genres. Whether you are an established media giant or a small content-producing team, executives, audience managers, marketers, editors and technologists alike will find valuable insights in this guide as we break down complex AI concepts into easily digestible information that can be applied practically.

What is the greatest AI blocker in media?

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a driving force, reshaping industries across the globe, and the media sector is no exception. By harnessing the capabilities of AI, media companies gain the potential to revolutionise their processes, maximise efficiency, and deliver user-centric content that resonates deeply with their audience.

But before it can be explained how AI can be useful to companies regardless of their size or break down its elements that professionals such as audience managers, digital marketers, editors and data scientists can use it must be understood why AI hasn’t been adopted uniformly across the industry.

In a study conducted by FT Strategies, it was clear that 57% of the respondents lacked the adequate strategy. Although a large percentage also cited “resource draught” such as lack of technology, talent and cost as other challenges. If we look closely into the reasons sighted by publishing companies at large, it became clear that:

• Building any technological solution costs more than the annual revenue for 95% of the publishers
• Lack of real world data to test or training algorithms to construct a working prototype
• Besides the difficulty in identifying the right team to construct a prototype, the ROI on such an endeavour is not in sight.

In light of the recent events around GPT and AI in general, everyone in the industry want to either adopt this 'fascinating' tech or debate it. But there seems to be a 'cold start problem'.

Bridged Media has devised a simple three-step playbook on how to kick-off your AI strategy. Follow the steps below and industry professionals will find the 'AI-fog' clearing.

Three-step AI strategy playbook for media

1) Identify your use case

Before you are ready to research solutions, first understand what problem you want to solve. Look for a use case that addresses the bottleneck you want to resolve. In order to identify the use case, you must first learn about the technologies that currently applied when creating a right prototype for your business

AI technologies relevant to the media sector:

Machine Learning: The application of AI algorithms that enable systems to learn and from data and identify patterns. Media publishers use ML to analyze audience behaviour, optimize content distribution, and personalized recommendations, enhancing engagement and delivering tailored content.

Generative AI: Using advanced algorithms to autonomously create content such as articles, videos, and visuals. By leveraging Generative AI, publishers streamline content creation, produce automated news updates, and enrich storytelling with captivating visuals, expanding creative capabilities and content delivery.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): This focuses on AI techniques that understand and interpret human language. Media companies deploy NLP to analyse sentiment, translate content, and manage user-generated comments, ensuring effective content moderation, personalized experiences, and multilingual content delivery.

2) Evaluate your build versus buy decision

Below are key factors to consider before coming to a conclusion:

Assess In-House Resources: Evaluate your organisation's existing technical expertise and resources. Building AI capabilities requires skilled data scientists, engineers, and domain experts. Determine if you have the required talent to develop and maintain the AI solution.

Cost Analysis: Compare the costs associated with building an AI solution in-house versus purchasing a pre-built solution. Consider factors such as development costs, ongoing maintenance, infrastructure, training, and opportunity costs. For example companies such as the NY Times have spent millions to build this in-house.

Time-to-Market: Determine the urgency of deploying AI capabilities. Building a solution from scratch can be time-consuming, while buying a ready-made solution can expedite implementation. Always go for providers that provide an easy way to test (Pilot) what you need.

Scalability: Evaluate the scalability of both options. Will the chosen solution accommodate growing demands and changes in the future? Would the solution be able to handle more users? Can the solution be implemented across all infrastructure?

Technical Complexity: Assess the complexity of the AI capabilities and the customization and flexibility you might need. Building complex AI models might require a significant investment in time and expertise. What are the different components that you need to design. Typically, you would need to design an Frontend, backend and business layer

3) Pilot - Measure - Reiterate

You must think about your pilot as your first step towards reaping your fruits. Make sure you take care of the following:

Goal Definition: Defining clear objectives for the pilot you are planning to run is key to measuring the performance of the activities that provide value to the business. Goals can be around improving content engagement (time spent, bounce rate), enhancing personalisation (% return customers, Retention rate) or increasing conversions (Conversion rate, emails collected)

Scope: Determine the scope of the pilot to avoid a data redundancy. This can be done in various ways for example around segment of audience or content structure. A focused scope helps in accurate assessment and optimises resource allocation

Implementation: Work closely with your technical team and any vendor’s technical to ensure a smooth deployment. Make sure you have a clear data strategy, a clean tech stack and clear security guidelines

User Training: If applicable, train your team members on how to use the new AI-enabled features. This ensures that the solution is used effectively during the pilot

Selecting KPIs: This is the most important part of the pilot. You should select the KPIs you want to track. Based on your goal and use case, they could be engagement metrics (time spent, bounce rate, etc.), conversion metrics (CTR, subscription growth, etc.) or data metrics (emails collected, User segmentation data, etc.)

How to measure success?

Make sure you know how to do the following (you can ask any vendors how they can help you with this as well):

Baseline Measurement: Before launching the pilot, establish baseline values for the selected KPIs using historical data. This provides a reference point for evaluating the pilot's impact

Real-time Tracking: Use analytics tools to monitor KPIs in real-time during the pilot

Comparative Analysis: Compare the performance of AI-enabled content with non-AI content to gauge the effectiveness of the pilot.

Start your AI journey

Congratulations! You are now equipped to launch a pilot and have taken an important step in your AI journey!

Now in order to improve the performance of your pilot and key KPIs, ensure you perform interactive improvements where the feedback and data is able to answer the questions and results you sought out before you started the process. Once satisfied with the results and the gaps in the results, Pilot - Measure - Reiterate - Repeat!

Bridged Media provides a ready to use AI solution for media publishers to improve content monetisation, audience engagement and progressive data collection. They are offering a free strategy session for Press Gazette readers. Book a call now if you are interested

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