Creative marketing
With the proliferation of streaming services and caution over if and when consumers will curtail their spending, it's all the more important to find ways to break through the clutter.
“You have to earn your place and people's lives every day, every minute of every day,” said Scott Donaton, senior VP of marketing at Hulu, during a discussion on how streamers are addressing marketing challenges.
“If you survey consumers about how many services they’re willing to pay for, the answer has been, still right now, is one more than I currently have,” Donaton added. “I think we're going to go into a marketplace where that's not going to be as true and you're going to have to really prove value. And in that way, the value proposition of the bundle is a fantastic one.”
After years of consumers demanding an a la carte model to TV, where they are not forced to pay for networks they don’t watch, it seems the tides are changing, with mega-media companies including Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney planning ways to package their various streamers together.
“I think it's been interesting for us just in terms of learning how our consumers are different, how their user behavior is different,” said Vikki Neil, executive VP and general manager, digital studios group, Warner Bros. Discovery. “And we've really been testing a lot if you think about the HBO Max profile and the Discovery+ profile.”
Jeff Shultz, chief strategy officer of streaming at Paramount, described the importance of diversity of engagement to the bundle experience—not just watching a lot of one thing but watching a lot of various things. For this to happen, the experience has to holistically be appealing to the consumer. “What a bundle does is it makes that engagement about the bundle rather than any element of the bundle,” Shultz said.