IBC Trend 1: Growth, not cost cutting is the recipe for AI success  #IBC25

Steve Ahern reports from the IBC Conference & Exhibition in Amsterdam.

The rain cleared and a rainbow appeared above the conference complex in Amsterdam at the beginning of the first IBC conference day.

So I went in search of the gold at the end of that rainbow. I found some.

My top trend today is: Using Ai to grow your business

Using Ai to cut costs is so last year!

In the past 18 months since Ai tools emerged, the business focus has first been on using them to cut costs. That has been only marginally successful.

Media business leaders I have spoken to at IBC so far have told me they used Ai to cut costs, but that had limited success.

While costs were cut, so was the level of service and professional interaction inside and outside the business. Good results were achieved in simple production processes such as editing, content cleanup and indexing, but the complexity of using multiple Ai tools for more complex tasks was felt to not yet be up to scratch. Results were also achieved in direct sales ad prospecting and pitching, but not yet at an agency level. Trust in the tools was an issue when using higher level functionality according to one IBC technical paper.

The focus has now turned to using Ai tools for business growth.

We all know the commercial reality of media businesses in the 2020s. There are more competitors and international digital media businesses have steadily cut slices off broadcast media advertising revenue. Over the past few years, in response to this, broadcast media businesses have cut costs to reflect the new business reality, but just cutting without growth is a recipe for further decline.

The other side of the business equation is chasing growth. This year at IBC, the focus has turned to using Ai for business growth, rather than cost cutting.

Simon Farnsworth, the Chief Technology Officer at ITV UK, talked about the growth philosophy at his company.

“We don’t focus on cost cutting, we focus on growth,” he told delegates in an opening conference session.

He said ITV leadership pretty quickly shifted to this priority after talking with staff and clients. It was better for the broadcast company’s reputation and also opened up new conversations. “As soon as we started asking teams to think about how they could use Ai to grow what they offered in their part of the business, they lost the fear of Ai and started to think about it in ways that could drive growth.”

ITV has so far found that it can improve internal productivity and efficiency and also offer more revenue related options to clients. Teams are empowered to work across silos and embrace their technology colleagues with a view to doing more, better and faster, or offering new products for clients and stakeholders.

“Experiment quickly, fail fast, learn fast, try something else.”

Several areas of growth and/or efficiency he discussed include:

Better social media content

“Ai is producing huge amounts of advertising content. Socials and YouTube are now being flooded with average ad content and it will only increase.”

Farnsworth has no doubt there are uses for Ai in content production, but he sees the human element as being essential in the initial creation process.

“The difference for human produced content is that it will be different from what’s fully created with Ai.”  Success does not come from either-or, it comes from using both. Once teams have the idea and the approach, they use Ai for ideation and visualisation otothe original concept forward.

More product offerings

Using Ai to multiply the amount of original content and to offer it in many languages and treatments has unlocked growth that ITV would never have taken in the past, because the costs were too high. Ai can now translate and modify content to offer multiple languages to different parts of the world or to minority segments of the mainstream audience.

“Multilanguage streams on YouTube is revenue we never would have had. It is niche consumption, but deeply important for those consumers,” he said.

Improved marketing

ITV’s marketing department has experienced a “1000% increase in marketing productivity,” with quicker production of marketing collateral such as posters and social media graphics and improved search functionality of content by using “semantic search, that allows consumers to interact with content searching at a deeper level.”

“We didn’t save money by sacking people. We made more money by making them more productive.”

“Ai products are pretty generic, but the more you work to link them into the internal business processes, the deeper benefits you get.

“The skill set doesn’t exist yet for someone who understands both Generative Ai and also understands each internal business processes. So build it internally yourself,” said Farnsworth.

In another session, Evan Schapiro championed multimedia creators for giving an insight to broadcast media companies into navigating the new media business environment.

“Creators are the new superstars… Passion and fandom are the tools of their success. Cultivate your company’s fandom,” he said quoting success stories from audio and video creators who have driven their podcasts and vodcasts to commercial success.

“The power will shift back to broadcasters if they embrace the creator philosophy,” he said.

Related article:

IBC Trend 2: Car screens to get smaller, voice control improving #IBC25

Steve Ahern is the publisher of this trade journal and the CEO of the training company AMT Pty Ltd.