What Does It Really Mean To Be A Growth-Focused Ads Business?

It doesn’t matter what kind of company you’re talking about. From media to retail, from e-commerce to telecom, any CEO will tell you that they want their businesses to be focused on growth. To be looking ahead, to be unlocking new revenue opportunities. And to be building stronger and more robust businesses each quarter.

But what does this really mean?

At Voiro, we work closely with India’s largest advertising businesses in the OTT and e-commerce sectors. These businesses have, over the years, scaled themselves from zero to a dominant part of the Indian ads industry. From our vantage point, we’ve had the opportunity to watch these organisations evolve, and to try and understand what makes them truly growth-focused businesses.

  1. Growth-focused businesses are always looking for the next opportunity. They’re never satisfied with what they have, or with what they can see. They’re always on the hunt for the next new revenue stream, launching a new ad format, or rolling out a new pricing innovation. They’re agile and flexible, able to run several experiments in parallel, all in an effort to answer a simple question: what next?
  2. Growth-focused businesses extract all the value they can. They don’t tolerate inefficiency, whether in the form of revenue leakage due to underdelivery, sales lost to quicker competitors, or time wasted by two teams not on the same page. The best businesses are always looking to identify inefficiencies caused by suboptimal teams, processes or behaviours, and are ruthless in stamping them out.
  3. Growth-focused businesses know how to make sense of their data. These days, almost anything said about data is a cliché. Nearly all sectors today are built on vast quantities of data, and this is truer still of digital marketing and advertising. Despite this dependence, it is only those few businesses at the top that truly understand their data and invest in technologies that keep their data in shape. These businesses don’t just own volumes of data, but actually put it to work. By organising data, making it usable, and ensuring that it is available to all their teams, the best businesses drive themselves to ever greater heights.
  4. Growth-focused businesses minimise chaos. They don’t accept it as ‘coming with the territory’, but rather do everything they can to keep things clean, organised, and disciplined. From keeping processes simple to making sure that everyone runs off the same goals, measurement and data, the best ads businesses recognise that chaos has a cost and focus on getting rid of it.
  5. Growth-focused businesses are truly collaborative. They build seamless workflows between their monetisation teams; from sales to operations to finance. They make sure that their teams are all on the same page and invest in building visibility. They understand the cost of being disconnected and value transparency above all else.

None of this is hard to understand, and nearly all of it is common sense. But it’s also easier said than done. Media businesses invest time and money, often significantly, in making sure that they’ve checked off all these boxes. And yet, several struggle to get there, or fail along the way.

These are hard problems to solve.

At Voiro, we’ve spent the last 8 years working with the largest media businesses. Despite their nuances, these businesses are all trying to solve the same problems: being more focused on growth. We’ve grown with these organisations and our product has evolved to help them along the way. If you’re running a media business and are trying to solve these challenges, we’d love to talk to you.

Read more about our product here, or click here to talk to us.