Why the next generation of streaming marketers will help shape the entire customer experience.
"The most interesting shift in marketing isn't how we reach audiences. It's how much more we can understand about them once they arrive."
Marketing Is Moving Closer to the Business
For a long time, the role of marketing was relatively easy to define. We created demand, built brands, generated leads, acquired customers and handed those customers to the rest of the business. In streaming, that often meant attracting someone to a service, convincing them to subscribe or download an app, and then moving on to the next campaign.
I don't think that definition works anymore.
Streaming has created something marketers in many other industries would envy: a direct, continuous relationship with the customer. We don't simply know that someone responded to a campaign. We can potentially understand what happened next, what they chose to watch, what they ignored, how frequently they returned, what kept them engaged and when their relationship with the service began to weaken.
That creates an opportunity for marketing that is much bigger than acquisition.
For the first time, marketing can become part of a continuous feedback loop between what a company promises to an audience and what that audience actually experiences. The campaign is no longer the end product of marketing. It becomes the beginning of a much longer conversation.
I believe that changes what it means to be a marketer in streaming.
The Customer Doesn't See Our Departments
One of the strange things about modern businesses is how differently companies organise themselves from the way customers experience them.
Inside a streaming company, marketing, product, content, advertising, customer experience and commercial teams may operate as distinct functions. They have different objectives, different systems and often different definitions of success.
The viewer sees none of that. They see one brand.
The advertisement that persuades someone to try a service, the content they discover when they arrive, the recommendation they receive on their second visit, the email encouraging them to return and the experience that eventually convinces them to stay or leave are all part of the same relationship.
Yet we often make decisions about those moments independently.
Marketing may optimise a campaign around a particular programme without knowing whether viewers attracted by that message actually discover enough relevant content to stay. A product team may redesign content discovery without visibility into which audiences marketing is bringing into the service. A content team may make programming decisions based on overall viewing figures without understanding which titles are particularly important to newly acquired or at-risk audiences.
Each team can make a perfectly rational decision and still produce a disconnected customer experience.
I think this is where marketing has an opportunity to play a much broader role.
Not by taking ownership away from product, content or commercial teams, but by helping connect the audience perspective across all of them.
From Segments to Understanding
Marketing has always tried to understand audiences. We build personas, create segments and analyse demographic and behavioural signals to decide who we should reach and what we should say to them.
Streaming gives us the opportunity to go much further.
A viewer isn't simply a demographic profile or an acquisition source. Their behaviour continuously tells us something about their needs and interests. What they search for, what they finish, what they abandon, what they return to and how their habits change over time can create a much richer picture of the relationship.
That matters because audiences rarely behave as neatly as our marketing segments suggest.
Two viewers of the same age, in the same market, acquired through the same campaign may develop completely different relationships with a service. One may become a passionate sports viewer who returns several times a week. Another may discover a drama series, watch it intensively and then disappear. A third may spend very little time watching but remain a highly valuable subscriber for years.
From an acquisition perspective, those viewers may initially look identical. From an audience perspective, they are anything but.
I believe the next evolution of marketing will come from understanding those differences and using them to make better decisions throughout the customer lifecycle.
That is a shift from segmentation towards intelligence.
The Experience Has Become Part of Marketing
This also challenges another traditional assumption: that marketing happens primarily outside the product.
In a subscription or ad-supported streaming business, some of the most important marketing moments happen after someone has already arrived.
The first content recommendation is marketing. The way a service introduces a new series is marketing. The message encouraging someone to return after several days away is marketing.
The experience of discovering something unexpectedly relevant can strengthen the relationship with a brand more effectively than another paid advertisement ever could.
This doesn't mean every product decision belongs to the marketing department. It means the boundaries between marketing, product and customer experience are becoming less useful when we think about audience growth.
Acquiring a customer and keeping a customer are increasingly connected disciplines.
The promise we make before someone arrives has to match the experience we provide afterwards. If it doesn't, no amount of campaign optimisation will create loyalty.
For marketing leaders, I think this requires a different mindset. We need to be as curious about what happens inside the experience as we are about what happens in the media plan.
First-Party Data Changes the Conversation
This becomes even more important as the wider advertising ecosystem changes.
For years, digital marketing grew around the ability to reach increasingly precise audiences through third-party platforms. Marketers became extraordinarily sophisticated at finding people elsewhere on the internet.
Streaming businesses have something potentially more powerful: direct relationships with their own audiences.
First-party data can tell us not simply who responded to a message, but how that relationship developed afterwards. When combined responsibly with viewing behaviour, content preferences, engagement and commercial signals, it creates an opportunity to understand audiences in ways that external advertising platforms cannot.
I believe this will increasingly become a strategic advantage.
The question for marketers will therefore shift from How much audience data can we collect? to How intelligently can we use the relationships we already have?
That means using insight to improve relevance rather than simply increase targeting. It means recognising when different audiences need different experiences. And it means sharing those insights beyond marketing so they can inform content, product, advertising and commercial decisions.
The value of first-party data isn't the data itself. It's what the organisation learns from it.
Marketing as the Voice of Audience Value
This is where I believe the role of marketing becomes much more interesting.
Marketing has traditionally been the function closest to the market. We study customers, competitors, culture and behaviour. We translate those insights into positioning, campaigns and growth strategies.
In streaming, we now have an opportunity to bring that understanding much deeper into the organisation.
Imagine marketing being able to explain not only which audiences are responding to a campaign, but what those audiences subsequently care about. Imagine content teams understanding which programming strengthens the relationship with particular audience groups. Imagine product teams seeing where newly acquired viewers struggle to discover something relevant. Imagine commercial teams understanding how different audience behaviours translate into different forms of value.
At that point, marketing is doing much more than generating demand. It is helping the organisation understand its customers.
That, to me, is a far more strategic role.
At 24i, our conversations with broadcasters, media companies and streaming services increasingly reinforce this idea. The opportunity isn't simply to create another dashboard or another marketing metric. It is to connect audience understanding across the organisation so that decisions about acquisition, content, experience, engagement and monetisation can inform one another.
The companies that do this well will not treat audience insight as something owned by one department. They will make it part of how the entire business thinks.
The Next Generation of Marketing
I don't believe the future of streaming marketing will be defined by a new channel, a new advertising format or another optimisation tool. Those things will continue to evolve, but the more fundamental change is happening inside the organisation.
Marketing is moving from the edge of the customer experience towards the centre of it.
Our responsibility is expanding from attracting audiences to understanding them, from launching campaigns to learning from behaviour, and from communicating the brand promise to helping ensure the experience actually delivers it.
That doesn't make marketing responsible for everything. It makes audience understanding everyone's responsibility, and gives marketing an important role in connecting it.
The marketers who thrive in this environment will still need to be great storytellers, brand builders and growth leaders. But they will also need to become translators: connecting customer behaviour with product decisions, content strategy and commercial priorities.
Because the most valuable thing marketing can bring to a streaming business may no longer be another campaign.
It may be a deeper understanding of the audience the entire business is trying to serve.
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