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Last Saturday my wife sent me on a challenge: buy some meat for a lunch with friends. Off I went without any detailed scope of work describing the animal, the required piece, weight, budget ie. all essential information for my quest to be a success and limit the odds of having to feed our guests with frozen pizzas purchased last minute at the nearby filling station.

Historically broadcast organisations have been predominantly regional. Local legislation including copyright and media chronology rules, the necessity to localise content in conjunction with traditional linear distribution method have maintained this status quo until recently. Even for the US based global media groups the domestic market represents an average of 80% of the total revenue.

One of the particularities of the broadcast industry is the importance of trade shows. An IABM study has shown that vendors were spending up to 70% of their marketing dollars on events and 50% on NAB and IBC alone but were hardly generating any new revenue generating leads. After exhibiting at over 100 tradeshows between NAB, IBC, Cabsat, Interbee, Broadcast Asia, CSTB, BVE, BIRTV,… I can really relate to that. So what especially smaller or new vendor can do to improve and measure the return on investment?

The broadcast industry often feels like a Pac-Man game with larger vendor swallowing smaller ones in the alleys of trade shows. The mix of company sizes with only very few above 100M€ and hundreds between 10 and 20M€ yearly revenue is favourable to such a consolidation.

In a competitive non-growing market with a limited number of potential customers and significant R&D spends vendors once they have reached the limits of their geographical and product niches often look at mergers to sustain growth. Alongside with the interest to acquire missing or emerging technologies one of the key drivers behind mergers is the wish to increase sales organisation productivity by expanding the product portfolio.

The elements of the business challenge for traditional media companies fighting for viewers eye balls‘ are clear thus scary: Increasing content costs by diminishing ad revenues and carriage fees, reduced public funding and aging audiences.