The IABM has created a model of the industry that is based on creative, operational, economic and technical activities and maps how a piece of content gets from creator to consumer, writes IABM Chief Executive Peter White. 

Our industry has changed dramatically since IABM produced its first Global Market Valuation and Strategy Report (GMVR) in 2006.

Back then, our industry was very much about discrete products (and some services) that fulfilled a specific requirement. To discover what you needed, you simply looked at the right category and made a choice among all the offerings available – based on how closely the specifications of each product matched your requirements.

Peter white

IABM Chief Executive: Peter White

The GMVR and its underlying structure – also used in all IABM’s industry analysis and reporting – gave you all the data you needed.

Today the industry has moved on almost unrecognisably and this year it reached a point where IABM decided that the old industry model was no longer useful. We therefore set about researching and constructing a new model which would not only reflect the way the industry is today, but also accommodate future developments and changes.

This would underpin all future editions of the GMVR, and also all future IABM business intelligence – as well as opening up new opportunities for better connecting technology buyers and sellers.

The result of that project is the new IABM BaM Content Chain: from Creator to Consumer. The BaM Content Chain moves away from an inward-focused, product-centric view of the broadcast and media business, to one based on the creative, operational, economic and technical activities supporting the content supply chain: mapping how a piece of content gets from creator to consumer.

The BaM Content Chain describes the industry in the same way that broadcast and media companies themselves think, using the same terminology. It embraces the huge transformation in the industry since 2006 – away from a hardware-based, linear world, to a multi-platform environment, software, virtualisation and cloud. It recognises that running an OTT platform or creating short-form content for brand marketing on social media is part of the same industry as running a traditional broadcast network.

Why should this matter to you? Because we all now have a way of describing our fast-moving industry that everyone can work with and, crucially, a model that enables technology buyers to quickly and easily identify products, services and solutions appropriate to their individual requirements.

The BaM Content Chain is not just airy-fairy theory; it provides an actionable model for businesses in the real world by providing three essential economic benefits:

1. Building a common understanding between suppliers and users of the creative, technical and economic activities in the broadcast and media industry. This enables innovation to be tracked and understood, and creates a blueprint for building a modern content supply chain – optimising workflows and operations to deliver content from creator to consumer efficiently across multiple formats and platforms.

2. Underpinning the valuation of the addressable market for technology products and services. This is both from the top-down, where each link in the Content Chain maps to a typical buying organisation – the model helps track where money is being spent today and forecast where it will be spent in future; it also works from the bottom-up, tracking the revenues of technology and service providers within each part of the chain.

3. Enabling discovery of technology solutions and services by broadcast and media companies, demonstrating clearly which products fit which niche. This makes it easy for broadcast and media companies to identify products, vendors and innovation that can help solve a problem in their content supply chain. It also allows vendors to position their products in context, using the same terminology as buyers, supporting product catalogues and trade show directories.

Since we launched the BaM Content Chain earlier this year, it has been widely welcomed by the industry as a whole – indeed, IABM is currently in discussion with a number of major organisations on its adoption as the new industry standard model.

Last month, we showed the first practical fruits of the new BaM Content Chain with the launch of the IABM Shop Window on our website, where many hundreds of companies have already placed their products and services in front of the technology buying community. They are classified so they can be easily found and assessed against the requirements of modern media organisations with their increasingly ‘factory’ approach to content creation, production, management, publishing, monetisation and consumption across the common threads of connectivity, storage and support at every stage.

In conclusion, the BaM Content Chain will change the way we look at our industry forever. There has been a fundamental transformation throughout the industry from a ‘push’ model to one where the consumer can now ‘pull’ just the content they want, wherever and whenever they want it.

The BaM Content Chain puts consumers at the heart of its model and defines the industry ecosystem around delivering what they require. It is the way forward, and if you have not already either visited the IABM Shop Window to find products and services using the BaM model, or indeed, listed yours on there if you are a vendor, then I urge you to do so now. It will make all our lives easier and more productive.