One positive side effect of this sea change: Media brands now have access to unprecedented levels of customer data.
Marketing teams can now understand exactly what media their customers are consuming and precisely how they interact with content. This unlocks enormous opportunities to use personalization to drive acquisition, engagement, and retention.
Brands that can translate these insights into actionable campaigns gain a significant advantage. But to fulfill this potential, marketers need to evolve how they leverage their customer data platforms (CDPs) and shift from the traditional focus of collecting and standardizing data to AI-powered intelligent activation.
In this article, we’ll explore how marketers can use a modern CDP to unify complex datasets across platforms, power cross-channel campaigns based on real-time interactions, and deliver personalized experiences that drive subscriptions and reduce churn.
Consumer data challenges in media
As media brands pursue hyper-personalization, they face a thorny challenge: ingesting data from multiple platforms, unifying it across a complex stack of back-end tools, and turning real-time insights into actionable marketing campaigns. As if this wasn’t challenging enough, marketers also need to maintain compliance with constantly evolving regulations and privacy standards at every step.
Cross-platform complexity
Consumers engage with media brands across multiple platforms, including web, mobile apps, and OTT. The behavioral data generated by each customer across each platform first needs to be collected and standardized, creating a clear picture of the customer’s engagement. For example, a viewer might open an email promo about a new series on their laptop at work, click on a social ad during their afternoon commute, start the first episode on their mobile app, and finish it on their smart TV later that evening. This level of complexity demands sophisticated identity resolution to connect behaviors across devices and build comprehensive customer profiles.
Without this unified view, marketers can’t accurately identify their most valuable subscribers or use viewing preferences to create meaningful segments for targeted engagement.
Real-time requirements
When media and entertainment organizations rely on data teams to manually query, build, and deliver audience segments, marketers miss timely opportunities to engage customers. Marketing teams need to combine real-time viewing behavior with authoritative, source-of-truth subscription status data from billing systems to ensure campaigns target the right users with the correct messaging.
For example, when a trial user finishes binging a series, the window for engaging them with relevant content recommendations and upgrade offers is measured in minutes—not days. Without automated processes that connect viewing behavior with accurate subscription information, these opportunities to convert to paid subscriptions are lost.
Privacy-friendly orchestration
Facilitating personalized campaigns across third-party platforms while maintaining privacy compliance is no small feat. Marketers must balance segmentation and targeting with regulations like VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act), which limits how viewing behavior can be shared.
If marketers don’t have the right data governance and audience management controls in place, they can’t confidently send data downstream to ad partners, hindering their ability to personalize campaigns across channels.
The core benefits CDP 2.0 brings to media
With a next-generation CDP 2.0, media brands can deliver hyper-personalized content across all screens and channels—driving subscriptions, reducing churn, and staying in compliance.
Unified data management
Brands need to track detailed media consumption, far beyond simple metrics like video starts. Modern CDPs can capture granular engagement data (such as play duration, pause patterns, completion rates, and ad viewing) across platforms. These signals can be incorporated into advanced identity resolution to connect behaviors and create comprehensive customer profiles.
This kind of unified data management helps brands to not only better understand their customers, but deliver a more consistent and customized experience across platforms.
Real-time activation and automation
Rather than depending on external teams and manual processes, marketers can rely on CDP 2.0 to create and activate audience lists in real time. Segments are automatically updated based on content engagement, viewing behavior, and subscription status.
With real-time activation, teams can respond instantly to engagement opportunities, such as sending new episode notifications to past viewers or using on-site personalization to customize an offer.
Intelligent campaign activation
Modern CDPs harness AI and ML to automatically power targeted campaigns, making it possible for teams to achieve personalized engagement at scale. Advanced models and workflows analyze past behavior, predict future outcomes, and dynamically update audiences in real-time to engage customers across channels.
This automation allows marketers to achieve crucial business goals more efficiently. For example, teams can set up always-on win-back campaigns that instantly identify lapsed subscribers, trigger personalized re-engagement across channels, and customize offers to optimize conversions—eliminating manual audience management entirely.
How media brands implement CDP 2.0
Here are a few ways media brands can leverage CDP 2.0 to acquire and retain customers, inspired by Rokt mParticle customer initiatives.
Streaming service’s intelligent churn prevention
A streaming service can leverage its CDP’s predictive ML and real-time data activation to power a churn prevention program, using AI-based decisioning to intervene during the cancellation workflow.
When a subscriber initiates the cancellation process through their account settings, the service can leverage on-page personalization to customize the experience. Based on the subscriber's viewing history and ML-generated risk factors, the system might display a special renewal offer, showcase upcoming content from their favorite series, or highlight unwatched content that matches their preferences. This real-time personalization helps reduce churn by reconnecting subscribers with content they value or presenting them with targeted retention offers.
Publishing group’s portfolio-level automation
A multi-brand publishing organization could apply automated segmentation across its portfolio to improve performance.
Rather than depending on static, manual audience lists that quickly become outdated, their modern CDP can self-update audience segments based on real-time engagement data. This could enable marketers to share insights, identify opportunities for cross-brand engagement, optimize marketing resources, and evaluate performance metrics across the entire portfolio.
Implementation considerations for media
To drive meaningful results when implementing CDP 2.0, media brands should account for several key considerations:
- Data privacy requirements: Set up data forwarding rules, user access controls, and protocols around video consumption data to ensure regulatory compliance without compromising on identity resolution.
- Integration with existing analytics: Partner with internal data science and AI teams to understand how existing capabilities will be complemented, not replaced, by CDP 2.0. Ensure transparent access to data and models, especially when connecting to customer experience platforms and content management systems.
- Success metrics and measurement: Consider both global metrics for overall performance and platform-specific KPIs that reflect different environments. These can include subscriber acquisition and retention rates, campaign performance and efficiency, cross-platform engagement metrics, and content consumption patterns.
The future of media with CDP 2.0
Media brands have an incredible breadth and depth of customer data at their fingertips and an enormous opportunity to power hyper-personalization and impact key business goals. But cross-platform complexity, real-time requirements, and the regulatory landscape prevent many teams from leveraging their data’s full potential.
With CDP 2.0, media brands can address these challenges head-on. Advanced identity resolution helps unify customer data across devices and platforms, while AI and ML capabilities power real-time decisioning and intelligent activation. From automated content discovery to predictive audience modeling, these technologies will enable increasingly sophisticated personalization that drives acquisition, retention, and lifetime value.
In an incredibly crowded landscape, media leaders can’t afford to wait. Organizations that move quickly to implement intelligent customer data activation will gain a competitive edge. Those that don’t risk being left behind.
Ready to learn how your organization can accelerate its journey? Connect with our team to explore how Rokt mParticle can help your media brand activate your customer data at scale.
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