The State of Customer Engagement for Media and Entertainment Brands

Behind every hit program, every wildly popular streaming service, and every viral article or news clip, you'll find creative customer engagement teams developing the kinds of customer engagement strategies that keep viewers, readers, and listeners coming back for more of their favorite content.

To uncover the secrets of successful customer engagement teams within the media and entertainment landscape and beyond, each year we conduct a world-wide analysis on the state of customer engagement as part of our 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER). Let’s take a look at the most important insights from our research when it comes to brands in the media and entertainment space.

How Media and Entertainment Brands Rank on the Braze Customer Engagement Index

We created the Braze Customer Engagement Index to give organizations across industry verticals and regions a framework for evaluating their customer engagement efforts compared to the competition and businesses all over the world. In the 2022 CER, we used this index to assess the customer engagement maturity of media and entertainment brands and to pinpoint what they're doing right and where there's room for improvement. Here's what we found out.

About the Levels

The good news: The majority (55%) of media and entertainment organizations have mid- to advanced-level customer engagement programs in place. The not-so-great news: This falls short of what financial services brands, QSR and delivery brands, and retail and ecommerce brands have achieved—namely, having 71%, 72%, and 74% of brands in those verticals at the Accelerate (middle) or Ace (advanced) levels, respectively.

The bottom line: Compared to the other industries we studied, media and entertainment brands have the highest share of companies at the beginner level and the lowest share of companies showcasing advanced levels of customer engagement maturity.

Key Media and Entertainment Customer Engagement Statistics

Media and entertainment brands are serious about investing in technology designed to help improve customer relationships, according to the market research survey we commissioned of 1,500 marketing executives. Our findings include:

• 84% of media and entertainment companies plan to increase their marketing budgets due to new privacy updates
• 62% of media and entertainment brands have leveraged mobile-first solutions for 6+ years
• 41% of media and entertainment brands use a single customer engagement platform to manage cross-channel customer engagement campaigns
• The top 3 areas where media and entertainment brands plan to invest their marketing efforts
  • 41% say they plan to invest in customer analytics
  • 40% say they plan to invest in customer engagement
  • 40% say they plan to invest in mobile marketing/optimization apps

Top Customer Engagement Strengths for Media and Entertainment Brands

To see what sets Ace media and entertainment brands apart from the rest when it comes to customer engagement, we took a look at their top differentiators. Here's what we found they have in common and how that's helping them yield customer engagement gains.

#1: Teamwork

Compared with media and entertainment brands that are just getting started on their customer engagement efforts, leaders within the industry are more likely to:

• Conduct campaign testing and customer journey testing
• Use campaign permissioning to support effective team collaboration
• Offer customer engagement training for their employees

This focus on testing/optimization and team-related initiatives makes it possible for these brands to reduce operational silos and to continuously improve their customer engagement efforts over time based on the real-world results they see from their campaigns.

#2: Technology

Ace media and entertainment brands are able to achieve success by:

• Using three or more channels as part of their cross-channel customer engagement strategy
• Personalizing customer messaging right at the moment of send time
• Investing in marketing automation platforms to instantly optimize campaign performance

This combination is a powerful one. By centering automated, personalized, cross-channel messaging campaigns, Ace media and entertainment brands can provide customers with more timely and relevant experiences on the channels that they prefer, supporting strong marketing results over time.

#3: Results

Making the most of their people and tools has its payoffs for media and entertainment brands. Ace companies in the industry see a 3.2X increase in engagement (sessions per user) and a 2.2X uplift in average user lifetime.

Top Customer Engagement Opportunities for Media and Entertainment Brands

While there are plenty of strong performers in the section, our research into customer engagement in the media and entertainment vertical also found three key areas of improvement that can drive real value.

#4: Improving Data Ingestion

Data ingestion is mission critical for players in this industry as their services are nearly always being viewed across multiple devices, including via OTT channels, mobile, and web. However, we found that only 39% of brands in the sector have established single customer profiles, something that's necessary for delivering more valuable, seamless customer experiences. By ensuring that you have a single, holistic view of each customer’s behavior and preferences, you can avoid unsatisfactory experiences and serve up messages that speak to each individual.

#5: Getting Better at Personalization

Media and entertainment brands have an unusual problem: They tend to have a significant number of users who come back and engage on a daily basis. And while in many ways that’s a good problem to have, it does put a lot of pressure on these companies to serve up super-timely, relevant content, since these users will be hyper-aware of repetitive experiences. To ensure relevancy, media and entertainment brands need to be able to personalize experiences in the moment based on real-time behavior, something that requires a marketing stack built on real-time streaming data.

#6: Increasing Experimentation

It’s not enough to just send campaigns to your users—to make the most of the messages you send, you need to assess the impact of each one and use that information to optimize your customer engagement efforts going forward. The truth is, testing efforts are essential for driving customer lifetime, retention, and frequency of engagement. To succeed in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive environment, media and entertainment brands need to take testing seriously and be consistent about how they’re doing it.

About the 2022 Braze Global Customer Engagement Review

The findings shared here and in the full 2022 report draw on the following three data sources:

• A market research study of 1,500 marketing executives at the VP level or higher from across 14 global markets, representing B2C companies with $10 million or more in annual revenue
• An analysis of data from over 5.4 billion global users from the Braze customer engagement platform, which powers experiences between consumers and 1,000+ brands across 50+ countries
• 1-1 interviews with top brands to get in-depth insights about their customer engagement efforts

How Braze Helps Media and Entertainment Brands

Braze and our Braze Alloys Partners have teamed up with NBCUniversal's streaming platform Peacock to develop a powerful customer lifecycle campaign that encourages engagement at every stage of the customer journey and, as a result, customer viewing activity and win-backs are taking off.

Read the full 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review to learn more about this case study and to see the complete findings on the state of customer engagement for media and entertainment brands and organizations across industries and all over the world.