In Q2 2023, PARQOR will be focusing on three trends. This essay covers "'Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file. What are they building for their customers?”

To remind you, PARQOR identifies a few key trends each fiscal quarter that reveal the most important tensions and seismic shifts in the media marketplace. Must-read stories or market developments are not always obvious from press reports or research analysis, and often require a deeper dive. PARQOR’s analysis questions established ideas and common wisdom, reassesses the moving pieces, and reveals the potential in the media marketplace in 2023.

Last Thursday’s essay concluded that the PARQOR trend for Q3 2023 about media companies having millions of credit cards on file should be rewritten. Instead of asking “What are they building for their customers?”, perhaps the question should be, “How are they solving for delivering more relevant content and services to their customers?”

Media companies must now compete with a firehouse of content whose volume is expanding daily, and which is expanding in real-time because of advances in artificial intelligence (as Spotify is learning the hard way). It becomes harder to break through, making the return on investment into libraries both harder to accomplish and harder to justify pursuing with billions in spend.

But what does solving for relevance even mean? Why is it a solution?

Key Takeaway

It would seem having a broad portfolio of content may be the problem for media companies, and relevancy as a service cannot be a solution until the portfolio is refined to better reflect a valuable target customer.

Total words: 1,200

Total time reading: 5 minutes