The Evolution of CMS in the Media and Entertainment Industry
This blog series was originally written in 2016 while I was at Acquia as their Director of Media and Entertainment. I plan to revisit it soon and discuss what’s changed in 4 years with regards to #CMS #WCM for the Media & Entertainment industry.
The Evolution of CMS in the Media and Entertainment Industry
Dries Buytaert some of you may know as the creator of the open source digital framework and CMS, Drupal. Dries is also the CTO of the company I work for, Acquia. Dries is quoted at the top of the piece here from a blog post he recently wrote about a global publisher and their efforts in pushing forward a media industry centric CMS platform. The platform is known as Thunder, and is offered by Hubert Burda Media, a pan European publisher with annual revenues in the billions. Thunder is meant to be an open CMS platform that any publisher can leverage or contribute to in terms of development and product roadmap.
Dries shows Thunder as an example of a CMS going against a trend in publishing, an industry where many media brands as Dries points out, “still focus their efforts on building proprietary, custom CMS platforms as a way to differentiate.”
Hearst’s multi million dollar MediaOs project and CondeNast’s CoPilot CMS are two examples of custom proprietary platforms that Dries mentions.
Dries’ quote at the top of this post, here again:
“I believe that publishers shouldn’t compete through CMS technology, but through strong content and brands”
I totally agree with Dries. But it’s important to understand why so many publishing giants like Hearst and CondeNast and new media brands like Buzzfeed and Vox arrived at the point where they are pushing their own platform development. I recently covered the evolution of media company CMS in a blog series for Acquia. So how did we get here?
2006–2009: Social CMS and Vendor Proliferation
This was a period where major media companies started investing in social media, especially following News Corporation’s 2005 purchase of MySpace for $500M. MySpace’s social graph was primarily youngsters and musicians and it didn’t really align with the social graph a media company wanted. So media companies looked to vendors to offer social features with a CMS: companies in this space included OneSite, Pluck, KickApps. I would have to break out my Outlook inbox from this period to remember all the vendor names. NBCUniversal even set up shop with a 100 person team in San Jose to build MyNBC, their own social network.
Now who would want to use a social network that only allowed you to connect and engage while on NBC sites? Facebook at this time was just being opened to the general population so there was not yet an über social platform that media brands could leverage to interact with their audiences. While NBC built, MTV bought — acquiring social platform Tagworld / Flux for a rumored $40 million. Flux’s technology team was in Russia and they added social features to the Viacom / MTV properties.
So imagine at this time, circa 2007–2008, instead of being able to use Facebook to socially engage around any piece of media brand content, you had to sign up to each media company’s own social network. You must have been a real fan to complete the registration form and get going.
Meanwhile during this period, there were radio and TV stations, magazines and newspapers found themselves without a digital strategy, almost 5–10 years since the internet became ubiquitous. For instance, I remember when I was the producer of The Wall Street Journal This Morning radio program in 2006 (a Dow Jones property) there was not yet a digital companion (e.g. website) for the daily broadcast.
A bunch of proprietary CMS vendors that focused on specific segments of the media industry popped up — for instance Worldnow focused on TV stations, TownBlox focused on local newspapers, InterTech focused on broadcast radio. These vendors knew their target companies business’ well and that they desperately needed digital help. And this is just in the U.S., abroad you could find a different set vendors addressing these media segments.
I detailed this movement towards media industry specific CMS players in the first part of my Evolution of Media CMS series:
Part 1: The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms — Introduction
2010–2013: Big Bets on Big Tech Vendors and Special Projects
Media conglomerates that had more money to invest looked to larger CMS vendors, like Adobe Systems. Adobe integrated a CMS solution, CQ5, into it’s larger web design and creative software offerings. Even Cisco, a company I worked at during the time, offered a multi-site CMS platform for media companies called Cisco Eos. Here was the pitch:
The challenge Cisco had with Eos was keeping up with the product feature requests of multiple customers across media segments (record labels, cable networks, movie studios). That’s why other media companies looked past giants like Adobe and Cisco and towards developing a platform internally to set their own product roadmap destiny. For instance at about 2008, through it’s special “Project Jupiter”, Disney Interactive aimed to unify it’s website portfolio under a common technology platform. In the second part of my Evolution of CMS series, I detailed media companies’s big bets made on at vendors during this period, and the custom in house built CMS projects other media companies created during this period:
I mentioned that circa 2008, if you wanted to engage with media branded content often your user experience was limited to participating in that media company’s own social network. By 2010, now media brands could integrate their digital content and platforms with Facebook. From 2010 on, the number of other digital media giants a media brand could integrate with multiplied. So now a media company could add Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and a score of other digital / social / video experiences into their digital properties (e.g. websites).
Audiences demanded Facebook integrations and media companies could not do without the additional fan engagement. By this point, that first wave of media company owned social CMS platforms, like MyNBC and Viacom’s Flux were no longer relevant to audiences. NBCUniversal looked to Drupal and building it’s own custom CMS platform on top of it, called NBCUPublisher. Viacom went with Adobe’s development platform Adobe Flex to build a custom CMS called Viacom ISIS. Beyond social media integrations, all of a sudden additional CMS platform integrations were needed to capture better audience analytics, deliver video advertising, to feed content to iOS and Android mobile apps, and other integrations for many many other reasons. Therefore, the technology complexity of a media company’s platform to deliver digital experiences (e.g. websites and apps) increased exponentially.
The third party CMS vendors addressing specific media segments like TV, newspapers, and radio stations could not keep up with the demand for these types of integrations and were the first to be impacted by the increasing media company technology complexity.
2013–2015: Media Industry Consolidation + Shifting World of Media Company CMS
I detailed how media segment specific CMS vendors faced these challenges with integration complexity over the next few parts of my blog series. On top of that, the very media segments these vendors addressed were undergoing incredible consolidation = less customers to serve.
Due to a multi year wave of media industry consolidation by 2015, the number of major U.S. newspaper groups, TV station holding groups, and major radio networks has really come down to 5 majors players in each segment.
Imagine also these companies have to figure out which CMS vendors they will go with in the end. I remember when I pitched Sinclair Broadcasting, they had 6 different CMS vendors maybe including Worldnow, Datasphere, Internet Broadcasting, Marketron, I forget specifically, but it was certainly 6 distinct vendors across 150+ TV stations. Sinclair got to that kind of vendor complexity due to almost $4 billion dollars in acquisitions of other TV station groups. In the next part of my series, I detailed the rapid consolidation of the local TV station holding companies and their very specific CMS vendors like Worldnow (now Frankly) and Lakana.
Part 3 — The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms: TV Market Consolidation
CMS vendors that addressed the radio industry — like InterTech and Triton Digital — also had difficulty keeping up with the integrations required of a modern media focused CMS platform. I reviewed how major U.S. radio groups Emmis and Entercom left these vendors and went to Drupal as a platform. Meanwhile companies like iHeartMedia and Cumulus, despite being under great financial pressure (they estimated $21 billion and $2.5 billion of debt respectively, have put technology development as priority. They are built and maintain custom CMS platforms for their individual radio stations and mobile apps (like iHeartRadio).
Part 4 — The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms: The Radio Industry
Newspaper companies are interesting because they need technology for both the production and distribution of a physical product, newsprint, and for digital — websites, mobile apps, etc. A select set of CMS vendors has aimed to address multi-channel publishing (newsprint and digital): companies like Atex Polopoly, NewsCycle Solutions, CCI Newsgate, Escenic. But as the newspaper industry consolidates, CMS vendors that address this industry experience an M&A spree as well ..
Part 5 — The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms: The Newspaper Industry
.. And these newspaper focused CMS vendors also have a hard time keeping up with digital media feature development and integrations. As newspapers look to better technology platforms to address their digital media business, they have been trying to determine if they build a single multi-channel CMS solution or if they keep two separate CMS vendors for print and digital. Some newspapers have completely cut their print business, like UK’s The Independent, which also ditched Escenic in favor of Drupal. I detailed the refocusing of the newspaper industry’s CMS priorities here:
Part 6 — The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms: Newspaper CMS Selection
2016 and Beyond: Current bets on Custom CMS and big risks
Many media conglomerates and giants like Comcast NBCUniversal, Time Warner (including Turner and Warner Bros Entertainment divisions), Hubert Burda Media, Warner Music Group, Time Inc and countless others have looked to implement open source CMS (Drupal) at scale and then from there customize. They have gone open source for the reasons mentioned throughout the post: the inability of 3rd party vendors to keep with the feature development and integrations needed to create a relevant digital experience demanded by audiences post 2010; and of course many vendors have folded during a period of intense media industry consolidation.
Meanwhile, other well known media names Hearst, Conde Nast, Vox Media, Buzzfeed, Cox Media Group, and New York Times are several years into building their own custom CMS platforms that are native only to their own media brands. These projects have been trumpeted as innovative and are often called the future of media — with CMS project code names like MediaOs, CoPilot, Chorus, Pound, Medley, Scoop.
But what happens to a custom CMS when a media company runs out of money to build it, loses its development staff, or merges with another company that has a different technology stack? For instance, Gannett Publishing just made a $815 million bid for Tribune Publishing. There’s no technology synergy between the two newspaper giants as they both have built in house, very custom CMS solutions. Gannett’s project known as Presto, while I’m still fishing to learn Tribune’s CMS name. In the last part of my Evolution of Media Company CMS, I gave a current state of the industry when it comes to custom CMS:
Part 7 — The Evolution of Media Company CMS Platforms: Big Bets on Custom CMS
Ok so that’s the entire series I wrote for Acquia that reviews the evolution of media company CMS selections from about 2006–2016 — ten years of quite a bit of technology development. I hope it explains how we got to this point where media brands are indeed competing on CMS technology.
Now that you have that background, I’ll be looking forward from here and you can keep up on media platform trends via my official corporate blog. I thought it was a good idea to take a look at how we got to this point, and to have a reference library on media company CMS.
Now I did promise to take a look at an important LinkedIn search hack, and what this Facebook “Brand Advertisers” thing is all about. But didn’t I write enough here and have too many other links for you to check out? So I’ll save those topics for Digital Media Inquisitor 004.
- Thanks for reading — Chuck Fishman
