Media & Entertainment: Strategy Consulting Projects
Update: 7.7.14
Course number: B8213 section 1
Schedule: T/R - B-term, 2:45 PM to 4:45 PM
Room: Uris 306
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
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 media companies
recognize and solve strategic problems.
Among the techniques the students will work on
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Industry mapping
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SCP: Structure/Conduct/Performance analysis
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Market sizing
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How to defining the goals of a project
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Defining and understanding scope
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Value propositions and Value curves
Mapping Business Systems
The five- 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 sixth week, the
teams will present their findings to the sponsoring companies.
To master these skills, each week students will be given templates to help with particular concepts and
will apply these concepts in several ways:
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to case histories of well-known companies and industries
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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.) Please read the Intro – Chapter 11 (pages 1 to
201.) There may be additional articles assigned for each class.
The companies supplying projects this year are confirmed:
 DeSilva + Phillips that specializes in media
 Waywire.com, a video curation and distribution company
 Crowdability.com, a new media company that is covering crowdsourcing opportunities for
investors
 yourTango, a love and relationships media property
Before the class begins
 Pre class reading: Introduction and Chapters 1 through 5 of Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with
the World’s Leading Media Companies (Knee, Greenwald, Seave; Penguin 2009.)
 Read the new Contently: Evolution of a Media Start-up
Classroom expectations
 Attendance at first two classes is mandatory. Attendance to all classes is strongly encouraged, and is
is expected
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, weekly completion of assignments and the final presentation
(group, type A) to your company’s executives in the sixth/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
Class 4
Class 5
Class 6
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Tuesday
Thursday
Tuesday
Thursday
Tuesday
Thursday
July 8
July 10
July 15
July 17
July 22
July 24
Class 7
Class 8
Class 9
Class 10
Presentations
Tuesday
Thursday
Tuesday
Thursday
July 29
July 31
August 5
August 7
August 11 -14
Descriptions of company projects from Spring semester, 2014 – WILL BE POSTED AS THEY ARE
CONFIRMED…
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DeSilva + Phillips
Groupon Project
There is a trend in technology and media entrepreneurship to grow the number of users as quickly as
possible, and then focus on a monetization strategy only after establishing a sizable user base. Many of
these companies, including Facebook for example, succeeded in developing a monetization strategy that
also resulted in profits for the business. Others, like Twitter, have succeeded in growing revenues, but at
such great expense that the company is still not profitable.
Groupon was a trailblazer in the daily deals marketplace, and in the early days of the industry, there was
a massive land grab underway as all of the competing companies vied for the attention of local
businesses across the country. Groupon scaled its salesforce very quickly in order to be able to canvas a
larger share of the market than its competitors. The company grew so rapidly that after three short years
it was able to go public at a valuation of $12.76 billion - a value that at the time was second only to
Google's 2004 IPO. Now, more than two years later, the company has yet to become consistently
profitable, and its share price has declined roughly 70% since the lofty days immediately after going
public.
DeSilva + Phillips would like its team to review Groupon's public filings and any available research to
assess the primary challenge facing Groupon. We see a number of directions it could take in order to
transition to a more viable and profitable business model, including the following:
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Becoming a true eCommerce business, selling proprietary or affiliate products instead of
deals for local merchants
Transitioning into a data business, and attempting to leverage its vast email database
and local buying pattern information to be packaged for sale
Diversifying into local content marketing, automating a manual process for most local
businesses and reaching scale via tools and content marketing as opposed to flash
promotions via email
And many others...
Our question: What strategy should Groupon pursue, and then which company should it buy in order to
execute that strategy?
Columbia B-School Project For Crowdability:
Redefinition of Crowdability’s Customer
The typical financial newsletter buyer is a wealthy, conservative male between 50 and 65-years-old.
This consumer is interested in alternative investment ideas – from individual stock ideas to big macro bets
on the global economy.
That’s Crowdability’s current customer.
But equity crowdfunding – the emerging trend where everyday citizens invest small amounts into startups – creates a vast new set of potential customers for us.
This new customer is in his or her 20s or 30s, and is interested in funding exciting start-ups they can
relate to; companies in the tech and consumer internet space.
Given this sea change, Crowdability seeks to answer the following question:
How do we modify our business in order to cater to this demographic?
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What’s the product? How do we price it? How do we promote it?
We believe these questions can be answered by researching other information publishers that sell
premium products to this younger demographic – specifically, publishers focusing on finance, investing,
and entrepreneurship.
Ideally, we’d like to know:
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Format of their products
o What are they selling?
o How do they fulfill their products – digital, physical shipments, live events, etc.?
Product pricing
o One-time fee?
o Ongoing subscriptions?
Marketing channels (e.g., Facebook, display ads, Google PPC, etc.)
Marketing funnels
o Structure (e.g., free white paper > upsell to low-priced product > upsell to higher-priced
products, etc.)
o Creative (e.g., What types of headlines, themes and benefits appeal to this
demographic?)
Overall market and opportunity size
o How big are their current businesses?
o How big could we get if we adopted best practices for product and pricing?
Waywire Networks, Inc.
How does the company’s growth strategy take advantage of the market shift in the consumption of
online video, and how can the company optimize its revenue from this shift?
Waywire’s primary business focus was as an enterprise SaaS business that experienced modest but
steady growth for the last three years. After a successful acquisition the company recently changed its
name to Waywire Networks (from Magnify.net) and is shifting its focus to providing a network of high
quality curated channels, that will be advertising
supported.http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/magnify-waywire-turnover/
Businesses operating in this market have various commercial strategies from traditional pay-for-service
to video-on-demand offerings to advertising revenue shares. For this assignment, students will be
focusing on the video advertising market and how Waywire’s consumer facing strategy will increase its
overall share of the online advertising revenue market.
Students will need to explore how other media service company’s benefit from advertising revenue in
video. And recommend what Waywire should consider.
Fortunately, a number of the most interesting and relevant companies are public, emerging IPOs, or
have been acquired.
The target companies to study are:
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AdaptTV (purchased by AOL)
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Brightcove (public)
Maker Studios (purchased by Disney)
OpenX
Pubmatic (preparing for an IPO)
Rubicon Project
TubeMogul (filing for IPO)
YuMe (public)
AOL
You will be answering questions about these companies such as:
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What are the offerings?
What is the value proposition for these offerings to their customers?
What are some business cases for these companies’ clients (success stories)?
What is the volume?
Who (what segments) are the customers?
How do the deals work: Who supplies what? Who pays who? What are the margins?
How would Waywire partner with the target companies or should it build its own direct
sales operation.
In addition, you should understand the overall market:
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What do experts say about the future trends in ad tech?
What do experts say about the future trends of advertising via video?
And in the end, students will recommend a course of action for Waywire. They will present to executive
management a coherent commercial strategy and underlying data to support their recommendations.
YourTango
The YourTango CBS eCommerce Project
YOURTANGO BACKGROUND
YourTango is the #1 media company focused on love and relationships. Our mission is to help people
love their best and be at the center of this never-ending conversation. YourTango presents compelling,
thoughtful editorial that inspires, nurtures, informs, and entertains audiences across the globe.
We target educated, professional women 21-54 and attract nearly 13mm uvpm. In addition we have
content partnerships with sites such as HufPo, MSN, CafeMom, BuzzFeed, Fox News, and dozens of
others. We work with the foremost thought-leaders in the love and relationships space and various
Fortune 500 brands.
YourTango has created an interactive platform where our community of users, brands, and the world’s
leading relationship experts connect and engage where it matters most: the heart, making YourTango a
powerful partner to marketers. As we all know, emotions drive purchases!
In addition, YourTango:
• offers an excellent track record for executing branded content campaigns (for brands ranging from
Ford, Colgate and Harlequin to TiVo, Durex and Sony Pictures)
• has created a B2B marketing platform for relationship experts such that dating coaches, marriage
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•
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therapists, etc., showcase themselves. We have assembled 1,000+ of the "who's who" in this
space including luminaries like John Gray, who wrote "Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus"
features an extremely talented in-house video team that has produced 1,000+ HD videos such as this
hilarious Webby Honoree: Facebook Manners and You
our mission statement:
Love. It's the most important, powerful thing in the world. The root of happiness…and so
much more.
YourTango is the #1 media company focused on love and relationships. Our mission is to
help people love their best and be at the center of this never-ending conversation.
YourTango presents compelling, thoughtful editorial that inspires, nurtures, informs, and
entertains. We have created an interactive platform where our community of users,
brands, and the world’s leading relationship experts connect and engage where it matters
most: the heart. We strive to nestle the YourTango brand happily in hearts across the
globe.
We believe in the power of love and dedicate ourselves to it each and every day.
PROJECT
One of the expansion initiatives YourTango is in the early stages of thinking about is an eCommerce
initiative. We believe we’ll find success in emulating, and ideally in partnership with, the likes of
companies such as Hay House and Every Day Health, who have achieved an abundance of success
selling a variety of digital content products. Given that YourTango has a massive archive of ever-green
content (on topics that range from divorce to dating to sex to making a marriage last) as well as a spate of
relationship and self-help Experts, we have an abundance of content or access to additional content that
could be packaged and sold.
YourTango is interested in working with a talented group of business school students to determine how
best to go about establishing a robust eCommerce presence. We would expect the project to include:
- a competitive analysis (Aside from Hay House and Every Day Health, Oprah does something along
these lines through her OWN platform. Who else does this successfully? And could/should we do
something like what http://www.fitorbit.com/ does with personal trainers…but for our experts and
coaches?!)
- product recommendations…ie ebooks vs. live webinars vs. something else
- pricing recommendations
- overview of strategic considerations
- operation & staffing requirements
- launch road map, including time line and milestones
- marketing & promotion recommendations*** This is key: we have learned how key email marketing is to
hook in consumers and tee them up to buy.
- mobile component
- other considerations we have yet to think of!
Should this prove to be an attractive growth opportunity, we would expect the analysis you perform to be
indispensable in the planning and implementation of a YourTango eCommerce initiative. In other words,
this is a real, practical opportunity to plan an entirely new business that has a good chance of being
launched. You offer a potentially significant role in this process.
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