Breaking the Conventions of the TV Industry: Launching a Digital Marketing Organization and Driving DX Strategy for the Era of "Individualized" Ratings — Chukyo TV Broadcasting Co., Ltd.

For more than half a century since going on air in 1969, Chukyo TV has delivered a wide range of hit content across the Chukyo broad-area region of Gifu, Aichi, and Mie prefectures. The Digital Marketing Group newly established in 2023 within the Media Strategy Division is engaged in the development and rollout of a forward-looking Digital Transformation (DX) strategy. enableX has provided marketing-consulting support from the early days of the group's launch. In this interview, we spoke with Mr. Munemiya Norika and Mr. Mano Hiroyuki of the Digital Marketing Group about the background to the group's launch, the initiatives currently underway, and the broader question of how TV-station marketing should evolve.

Could you tell us about your division's work?
Our Marketing Promotion Group is the division responsible for the marketing associated with the advertising and promotion of Chukyo TV's programming. Specifically, we run the full cycle of "how to research, how to execute, and how to validate outcomes" for the advertising and PR of programs, and we are charged with arriving at the optimal answer. Previously, a single division — the General Programming Department — handled everything from program planning through to promotion in an integrated manner; in order to strengthen marketing further, the group was spun out in June 2023.

Could you share the background to standing up the marketing division?
The state of marketing in the TV industry has shifted significantly with the evolution of digital-data utilization technology. As you know, the metric underlying everything at a TV station is the rating. In the past, when there was one TV per household sitting in the living room, every TV station was tracking household ratings — "which program is the whole family watching." Today, however, a wide range of devices exists — tablets, smartphones, and more. With the use of digital, it has become possible to visualize the data on "who is watching which program," and the metric has shifted from the conventional household rating to individual ratings — a per-person measure. Yet while this technological transformation is happening, TV stations lack the knowledge and skills around marketing. As our company committed to focusing on digital marketing, we established the Marketing Promotion Group as the division to lead that effort.

Could you share the background to considering the introduction of marketing consulting?
In the Marketing Promotion Group, our members come from various divisions in the company — sales, production, news, and others. As a result, at the point of inception we did not yet have sufficient marketing knowledge and skills, and we needed to advance with marketing professionals alongside us from the strategy-development stage. Hiring people with marketing expertise mid-career was one option, but we concluded that — over the medium to long term — it would work better for people who already understood our company's culture to newly acquire marketing skills. We therefore decided to engage a consulting firm with strong marketing capabilities. That said, the word "consulting" is extremely ambiguous, and we feel the degree of engagement differs entirely from one firm and one person to another. To take an extreme example, there are consulting services that do little more than offer highly abstract comments in each meeting. From our perspective on the client side, naturally the deeper the engagement the better — yet we sense that many firms fail to deliver on that. We believe it is meaningless if we cannot show "these are the outcomes we achieved by working with an external partner," and so in selecting a partner, we placed great weight on whether the firm would set a mission for each meeting and rise to it.

Could you tell us why you chose enableX as your partner?
In addition to the fact that Representative Yamazaki-san's stance aligned with the expectations we just described, the major deciding factor was enableX's track record across a wide range of industries beyond TV. The TV industry is highly idiosyncratic, and to those who know other industries, there are probably many things that seem odd. We ourselves, however, have grown accustomed to those conventions, and unless they are pointed out we cannot notice them. That is precisely why we wanted a partner who, deliberately not steeped in the conventions of the TV industry, would clearly point out where things were wrong. On the other hand, if the partner has no industry knowledge at all, considerable effort is required to align on the basic premises. In enableX's case, Representative Yamazaki-san came from Netflix and had deep knowledge around streaming — so the ideal of "reaching a degree of shared premises while still receiving advice from an outside-industry perspective" was realized. We also feel that the company being not too large in scale was very positive from a client's perspective. The larger a company becomes, the greater the possibility that someone with less experience will be assigned, and at times they do not reach the level required of an advisor. enableX is a lean, high-caliber firm, and we have the real sense that we are being supported by outstanding people — our satisfaction is very high.

Could you tell us about the engagement with enableX and the impact?
The first thing we worked on with enableX was the strategy development for the Marketing Promotion Group and the associated documentation. From the launch of the Marketing Promotion Group, we believed it was essential first to clearly define the direction the group should pursue. If the direction is not clear, as you run, the vector inevitably drifts little by little and you lose sight of the original goal. With enableX's collaboration, we organized our company's approach to marketing and the role expected of the Marketing Promotion Group, and we discussed how to build the foundations of our marketing function. On that basis, we set the current challenges and the goals to pursue, mapped out the marketing initiatives to execute, and developed the roadmap. We are currently in the phase of iterating execution along the roadmap we developed; in our weekly cadence, we ask enableX to lead the review of the previous week, to propose the next action plan, and to produce materials as needed. When we find ourselves at a crossroads in decision-making during discussions, we always return to the policy set early on. In this way, the strength we feel at enableX lies in their being involved from upstream strategy and then proposing and executing actions on that foundation. They also serve as a sounding-board partner for ideas, and there are many occasions when answers emerge in the course of conversation with enableX. What I personally appreciate is that they clearly call out points that are off as "off" and give advice accordingly. The partner profile we are looking for is not someone who affirms whatever the client says, but rather someone who points out where our thinking is naive. Left to ourselves, our view inevitably becomes short-term, so we are helped — and very satisfied — by enableX taking us back each time with "shall we reconfirm where the goal actually lies?"

We hear you use TVBridge Ads for the review of initiatives. Could you share the background to its introduction?
TVBridge Ads, offered by SMN Corporation — the marketing-technology company of the Sony Group — was a service enableX proposed when we consulted them on how to proceed with the effect validation of initiatives. It is a service that [enables quantitative judgment of whether digital ad delivery contributed to lifting the viewing share of TV programs]. While we treat ratings as a major metric, the determination of ratings involves many factors and the variables are very large, making accurate effect validation extremely difficult. For example, if a program on another station that happened to air in the same time slot is engaging, our ratings drop; conversely, if it is not, they rise. Even the weather that day — sunny or heavy rain — moves the numbers. As a result, it was difficult to speak of concrete impact from a single rating point, and reviewing initiatives was challenging. TVBridge Ads aggregates internet-connected TV viewing data from multiple leading domestic TV manufacturers, enabling the extraction of segments that viewed programs or commercials, ad delivery to specific segments, and measurement of the resulting behavior change. For example, suppose there is a food program for which we want to lift the rating. Leveraging TVBridge Ads, we can deliver ads to "people likely to be in front of the TV during the broadcast time slot." We are advancing discussions on what segments to target and what kind of value proposition resonates with that target, drawing on enableX's expertise. In this way, by combining the data obtained from TVBridge Ads with enableX's consulting, we have become able to formulate hypotheses for initiatives, conduct meaningful reviews, and extract insights that can inform the consideration of next initiatives. We feel that tools like this will become essential to marketing in the TV industry going forward.

Could you tell us about your expectations of enableX going forward?
Since enableX's consulting support began, we have iterated the PDCA cycle on multiple initiatives and have begun to see impact. We see the past six months as a period in which — under the theme of how to improve program ratings through marketing — we have organized the long-term and short-term challenges and learned the methodology while executing. However, what we are ultimately aiming for is not simply lifting ratings. Even if the rating of a single program rises by 0.1%, it does not transform the company. What should be discussed over the medium to long term is how to extend the knowledge that has accumulated within our Marketing Promotion Group throughout the company. Going forward, we would like enableX to walk with us on the question of how to apply what we have learned.

A message to companies considering enableX's marketing-consulting support.
enableX's marketing consulting — which supports everything from foundational strategy design and policy development through to actions such as ad-operations execution — will be a help to companies looking to learn marketing afresh from the ground up and to build it out.