If 2024 was a blur of mad activity, then 2025 is the year to get a grip. That means taking a much more structured and proactive approach to the way we do things: measuring stuff and doing things in a much more disciplined way.
Measuring stuff rigorously
Most businesses are drowning in a tsunami of data. Some of it essential; most of it is interesting, but not actionable; much of it utterly useless and confusing. Sorting out the metrics that fit the specific media brand is an ongoing challenge.
The killer metric for me is Lifetime Value (LTV). Most people say they understand it and use it to run their business, but very few actually do. There are six core dimensions:
- Customer LTV (CLTV) is the most common application: maximising the profit from a defined audience of users.
- Product LTV (PLTV): assessing the value and strength of individual brands and services.
- Promotional LTV (PromLTV): assessing channels and specific campaigns from the bottom up.
- Content / inventory LTV (ILTV): based on a clear understanding of what customers want and what value they put on the content, together with an assessment of what it costs both to create and deliver that content.
- Top-level company LTV (CoLTV): profitability across the portfolio of brands and products and services. This drives company EBITDA.
- Employee LTV (ELTV): using the same principles to ensure that the ‘people inventory’ is managed and maximised, for everyone’s benefit.
Executing things smartly
Nowhere is this more important than in revenue diversification, which is now an absolute given for every company. Yet here, efficient execution is critical:
- The bottom-line is the bottom-line. If an activity is never going to make money, then there must be other compelling, strategic reasons for doing it.
- Many companies’ to-do lists are simply too long and ambitious to do everything well: ruthless prioritisation is essential.
- Avoid knee-jerk ‘follow-our-competitors’ activities. Always ask what is the business case?
- Do not over-engineer. Start as quickly as possible, but start small. Be ready to tweak / kill-off at speed. And learn from everything – the good and the bad.
- Putting the wrong people in the wrong roles is a common error. Many diversification plays crash due to poor project management and sloppy implementation.
- Every company, even digital pure-plays, is in some kind of transition, and ‘extending the runway’ of legacy activities that still deliver revenue and profit is just as important as doing new things.
So, use LTV rigorously and you will have a much better understanding of the health and direction of your business. Then execute everything thoughtfully and in a disciplined way. This will all help to make 2025 more productive and more profitable than 2024.
This article was first published in the Publishing Partners Guide 2025, which was distributed with the January / February 2025 issue of InPublishing magazine. You can register to receive InPublishing magazine here.
