Media & Entertainment: Strategy Consulting Projects
Update: 11.14.14
Course number: B8213 section 1
Schedule: Wednesday A-term, 4:00 PM to 7:15 PM
Room: Warren 415
Adjunct Associate Professor Ava Seave
Phone: 212 222 0025 (off campus office)
Office: Uris 315 (Greenwald’s office)
Office hours: By appointment
Email: as2486@columbia.edu
General Course Description
Prerequisite: One media course and/or one strategy course and/or professional experience at a media company. (If you are unsure, please contact the professor by email to discuss.)
In “Media & Entertainment: Strategy Consulting Projects,” the concepts and theories introduced in previous media and strategy courses will be applied in a practical way to problems brought to the class as projects from real companies and their managers.
The ultimate goal of this class is for students to have team experience in helping companies recognize and solve strategic media problems.
Among the techniques the students will work on

Industry mapping

SCP: Structure/Conduct/Performance analysis

Market sizing

Defining the goals of a project

Defining and understanding scope

Value propositions and Value curves

Mapping Business Systems
The six- week course will introduce techniques to perform strategy consulting for media companies and teach students how to apply these techniques to real projects from real companies. In the seventh week, the teams will present their findings to the sponsoring companies.
To master these skills, each week students will be given specific tools to work through each concept and will to apply these concepts in several ways:
 to case histories of well-known companies and industries
 to a newly written case about an evolving media SaaS company
 to the company project they have been assigned to
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The class is limited to 24 students. There will be four teams of six members each. Team work, and active participation in each and every class will be required. Check in meetings (physical or by phone) with sponsor companies are required each week. Collaboration is expected and encouraged throughout the course.
The textbook for this class is: Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media
Companies (Knee, Greenwald, Seave; Penguin 2009.) The class will be assigned several chapters to read each week, through Chapter 11. There may be additional articles assigned for each class.
The companies supplying projects this year are confirmed:

DaSilva + Phillips – an investment bank that specializes in media

Adore Me —a VC funded ecommerce company

NBCU, in the TV Everywhere group

Emarketer – A digital market research company specializing in digital media
Before the class begins

Pre class reading: Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 of The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies (Knee, Greenwald, Seave; Penguin 2009.)

Read the case Contently: Evolution of a Media Start-up
Classroom expectations

Attendance at first class is mandatory. Attendance to all classes is strongly encouraged, and is expected

Except for the first class, each class will consist of presentation to the professor (and one other team) of the week’s assignment, team work time and lecture/discussion of the next week’s assignment.
Starting in week 4, there will also be presentation of elements for the final deck.
Class Project

Students will be assigned projects by the professor based as much as possible on student preferences.

Project assignment mechanics: o Before class begins, I will send a detailed description of the class projects, students can prioritize your preferences, and I will try to honor them as much as possible. o Once assigned to a team, if a student would like to try to switch to another team, he/she has 24 hours to convince someone on the desired team to switch. However, no one is required to switch. o Only contact me after the switch is made to let me know. Do not involve me in any kind of discussion or negotiation.

The presentation to the company will consist of a presentation deck or memo plus any back up analysis and research that is appropriate
Grades
Grades will be based on class participation during the full class, collaboration during other groups’ weekly presentations, weekly completion of assignments that will be presented to the class and the final presentation (group, type A) to your company’s executives in the seventh/exam week. That deliverable for the presentation will consist of a presentation deck plus any back up analysis and research that is appropriate.
Class Dates
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Wednesday
Wednesday
Wednesday
January 28
February 4
February 11
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Class 4
Class 5
Class 6
Presentations
Wednesday
Wednesday
Wednesday
Scheduled at co.s or at school
February 18
February 25
March 4
March 5 through March 13
Descriptions of company projects from Spring semester, 2014 – all confirmed
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DaSilva + Phillips http://www.desilvaphillips.com/
Acquisition Strategies: Compare and Contrast
About DeSilva + Phillips
DeSilva+Phillips is a leading M&A advisor to the media, marketing, education and information services industries, advising on more than 260 transactions valued at over
$9 billion.
The Project
To help them understand two companies that have done lots of acquisitions in the media and tech space over their long histories, they would like the student team to compare the acquisition strategies of AOL and Yahoo in the past 3 years (2012 to 2014) and to help characterize their strategies and their successes and failures in bringing in new companies.
The project should answer these questions:

How do their acquisition strategies match or differ from their stated strategies?

How do their distributions of tech vs. content vs. fully operational businesses differ from each other?

Would these acquisitions make you believe these companies are headed in very similar or very different directions with their next acquisitions/in the future?

What were some outlier and core acquisitions for each and what do these seem to indicate about one company or the other?

Do these companies' acquisitions seem to be thriving in their new homes?
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Adore Me
“Disruptive Lingerie Brand” http://www.adoreme.com/
Social Media and Brand Positioning
About Adore Me

Adore me is a new brand of intimates disrupting the industry online. A comparison would be we are the “zara of lingerie”
 Women’s intimates is a huge $20bl market growing steadily at 2% yearly, with strong potential for cross sell and expansion
 18% of women’s intimates transactions happens online. Twice more than any other fashion vertical!

The lingerie space is open to new entrants and recent launches have been successful

Adore me disrupts the us lingerie landscape by offering affordable quality, addressing 90% of market demand

Adore me mobile share of sales went from 20% to 45% in 6 months! And growing…

Adore me is present across different social media to boost organic acquisition – zoom on
Youtube and Instagram
The Project
Adore Me needs to challenge and improve its social media presence and brand positioning.
Current situation

Brand positioning largely resulting from historic practices, more than well thought strategy

Historic challenge of the VIP membership understanding

Growing customer presence (650k Facebook fans, 1,8m emails collected, 150k core purchasers)
Questions about how to s upport Adore Me’s brand strategy across social channels should be fully answered for this project:
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NBCU
– TV Everywhere Team
New Distribution Platforms – can they bring in a younger and more engaged audience?
About the TV Everywhere team:
The TV Everywhere team at NBC Universal sits within Content Distribution at the corporate level and is charged with implementing a strategic plan to broaden the TV Everywhere consumer experience and expand audience awareness, adoption and engagement across the programmer’s portfolio of networks.
The group consists of three areas of focus – Strategy & Partnerships, Product & Consumer Experience and Consumer Marketing.
The Project
The emergence of connected devices and new distribution platforms presents an opportunity for TV networks and programmers to connect directly to their audiences. How can NBC Universal best use this opportunity to attract a younger and more engaged audience?
Students should consider:
1) Which devices/platforms have achieved scale or are projected to reach a large audience over the next few years?
2) What factors should NBC Universal consider in launching brands on to connected devices or on new platforms?
3) Is there an opportunity to reach a new audience that does not currently watch via traditional TV?
4) Are there product considerations or user features NBC Universal should take into account to appeal to a younger demo?
5) How are other large media companies attacking this question? What are some success stories amongst other brands?
6) Are there other interesting monetization opportunities on these new platforms (interactive ads, commerce
/ transactional)?
7) How can NBC Universal apply an ROI against it’s investment in these platforms?
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Emarketer
Universities: Growth segment or dead end?
http://www.emarketer.com/
About eMarketer eMarketer is a leading research firm, providing data, insights and perspectives for marketing for the digital world. They collect virtually every study related to their coverage areas from thousands of sources worldwide including other research firms, measurement companies, media and marketing agencies, academic institutions, governments, and many more. They also interview hundreds of the most successful and influential subject matter experts.
The company’s research helps marketers answer three essential questions: how consumers spend their time, how consumers spend their money, and what marketers are doing to reach them to help customers make decisions about strategies, tactics and budgets. They specialize in providing research about digital marketing channels such as mobile, social media, email, display, video and search, as well as media usage and demographic data, ecommerce insights, industry analysis and global metrics.
The Project eMarketer’s client acquisition strategy is driven by industry verticals. The number of companies and revenue potential in each vertical plays an important part in the decision to focus resources on a market segment. The lifetime value of customers in each vertical is also an important consideration, as many customers tend to purchase eMarketer at company after company throughout their careers. eMarketer wants to explore the “tobacco strategy” with university students—that is, find customers when they are young and keep them for life.
For this project, students will recommend how eMarketer can grow its (now small) university and college segment of customers.
Students should consider:
1) What is eMarketer’s current penetration in this segment? How did they get there?
2) What are the most successful research products in university and college libraries now? What do they have in common? How are they sold into these institutions? How long did it take them to get to where they are now?
3) Define the market(s) and their size.
4) What does eMarketer management think about the potential of this market segment?
5) Qualitatively, what do current university and college customers (librarians) and end users (students) say about eMarketer, as well as research about digital media and marketing?
6) Quantitatively, what is the usage of eMarketer in current university accounts? What does this tell you about recommending a growth strategy in this segment?
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