• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, July 27, 2011

According to a new Accenture survey, 91% of senior executives of media and entertainment companies admit that they are not taking full advantage of customer data that can deliver customized content, leaving them ill-prepared to seize the revenue opportunities of today's digital technologies.

 And, a startling 95% of the executives surveyed indicated that they did not have strong digital customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities in place, though 58% say they are in the early stages of developing such capabilities.

 According to the Global Media & Entertainment High Performance Study, fewer than 10% of the executives indicated that their companies have a fully integrated view of their digital consumers.

 After five years of exhaustive surveys of this industry by Accenture, the latest survey shows that only 57% of the executives say their companies are making continued progress on the journey from analog to digital. In fact:

• Only 43% of the executives surveyed say their companies have digitized more than half their properties.
• A year ago, similar Accenture research found that 33% of the companies were transforming their businesses from analog to an integrated, file-based digital enterprise 

 Marco Vernocchi, Global Managing Director, Accenture, says "... most (companies) still need to form a holistic view of their digital consumer... revenue growth in this... multi-platform world is dependent on delivering personalized, consumer-driven content to individual consumers via the right platform... a change in focus from the mass-market audience to an audience of one requires a complex shift from mass media to mass technology... "

 The study found that 80% of those interviewed said the media and entertainment industry is still changing with more rapid change yet to come. As a result, 85% of the executives believe their business will continue to change significantly.

 55% of the executives interviewed indicated their companies had a clearly defined social networking strategy in place. 38% of the executives indicated they use social networking to gain customer intimacy while only 17% indicated that it is employed to gain sales. (According to Vernocchi, these findings may indicate that the key imperative for business growth is to establish a direct relationship with the consumer.)

 The study also showed that 42% of the executives expect advertising to be the primary source of revenue over the next two years, and 48% indicated that they might collaborate with their competitors within the next year or two. This is a much lower percentage than their counterparts in other industry segments:

• 77% publishing
• 65% portals
• 64% broadcasting 

 "Clearly, the industry has lots of work to do to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the digital distribution of content," concludes Vernocchi. 

For more information about the study, please visit Accenture here.