Strategizing Business Policy for the Digital World

By Clive Dickens, Chief Digital Officer, Seven West Media

Clive Dickens, Chief Digital Officer, Seven West Media

Storytelling Strategy Made Our Pillars Stronger

Our traditional content and audience business is built on three pillars, broadcast television, News Publishing, and Lifestyle magazine brands, which have been sources of consumer experience for a long time. When content gets forecasted on the television or printed in a paper or magazine, it still works. But the evolution of other media channels has posed a challenge for these three pillars. Advanced technologies have made available live streaming experiences, mobile experiences, and voice searching, which we have incorporated into our video products to connect brands to over 20 million Australians a month.

Utilizing these advanced technologies, we have focused our drive toward powerful storytelling which helps us improve customer engagement and create value for advertisers, partners and shareholders. We utilize the most engaging content to develop powerful stories and avoid solely having discussion on Broadcast Ratings, Print circulation and magazine subscriptions ensuring we better focus on Total Audience and Total Video across all channels of distribution. The story can range from B2B trade to the importance of blockchain, or revolve around machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Developing a company strategy in a digital rather than just a digital strategy forms the most essential role of a CEO, CTO, or CIO

To create impactful content for the storytelling, we also hire content creators in our business. To understand the consumers’ point of view, we conduct a lot of researches for our storytelling projects. Moreover, since we deal with the content of different kinds of products and we need to mitigate the risk part as well. We keep our business model intact, where we primarily focus on content distribution and monetiaztion. Being a leader in a content and technology business, it is very important to make sure that the strategy is backed by advanced technology to meet our customer needs and our consumer's expectation.

Introduction of AR Has Set the Benchmark

We grow value from engagement by offering the best in class CX experiences. Though we hold on to our traditional three pillars of broadcast, newsprint, and magazines, we are also focusing on live online streaming as the demand for it has increased in the last fast few years. This not only helps us to extend personalized experiences but by utilizing the leverage afforded by advancements in augmented reality in the future will allow us to keep our consumers one step ahead.

Words for Business Leaders

Developing a company strategy in an increasingly digital world rather than just digital strategy forms the most essential role of a CEO, CTO, or CIO. It is very important for the c-suite to better understand the origin and goal of their intended audience. But it is everybody's responsibility in a company to help a business in adopting transformation strategies so that companies can continually define and redefine their core purpose.

For the last three decades, has been inspiring innovative changes in the industry via his transformational thinking. Having developed his own website back in 1994, clive was very enthusiastic about the rapid growth of technology. He has witnessed how personalization and the demand for digital video content have drastically impacted user behavior over the years and explains the importance of strategizing business around storytelling. Being a part of seven west media, he has helped the company to create value and engagement from powerful storytelling on every screen