Ashley Swartz

SAN JUAN, PR – Like clockwork every year, predictions are made that addressable TV is nearing a tipping point and will soon become ubiquitous. But TV buyers and sellers are still coming up against significant headwinds that have slowed adoption. “There’s this dark side of addressable with many challenges yet to be addressed, and we […]

SAN JUAN, PR – Today, addressable TV inventory is a limited commodity that fetches a high price, and programmers and distributors tend to sell as much of it as they possibly can. But this approach won’t always increase the value of a linear TV portfolio and may even cause the value of spot inventory to […]

Just because we sell intangible goods or ‘time’ and space, media is not that different from other industries. More importantly, many of the challenges we are facing in today’s media enterprises, and the resulting competencies we must develop, take a page out of other industry handbooks. Inventory management is one. Inventory management or yield management […]

We have all heard the marketing buzz word omni-channel. It means the blurring of advertising channels, and the need for agility and a new approach to reach one audience, across multiple screens. Media is not the first to use this phrase, or have the need to transform businesses to adapt to these types of challenges. […]

When you read the analyst reports or industry commentary, one thing that is clear is that profitability is often a reason for a loss in confidence by the market. Earnings Per Share (EPS) is a clear metric as we all know for wall street. What I am continually dumbfounded by is the fact that profit […]

Shrinkage is an allowance made for a reduction in the earnings of a business due to waste or theft. Sound like ad fraud and viewability issues we are plagued with now as an industry?  TV doesn’t have this problem, however TV companies do because their audiences are spending more and more time on digital platforms. […]

If you can’t predict, how can you make a plan to get to where you want to be? The lack of hard or tangible goods in media, like other industries, and a ratings systems that is imperfect has created an industry [media] where forecasting is not as important as it should be. A good forecasting […]

General Stanley McChrystal radically changed how the US fights its enemies while leading the Joint Special Forces Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likens his experience at war to the challenges many companies face today. With enemies that were organized in decentralized networks, non-hierarchical with distributed decision-making, leveraging new technologies to communicate in real time, […]

Most Fortune 500 companies have implemented some form of continuous improvement in their supply chain or manufacturing processes. The Japanese call this Kaizen, or simply ‘change for better’. Although in media we are not making tangible, physical products, why would we not leverage best practices from other industries to power our enterprise, improve efficiency, and […]

Everyone has heard or used the phrase,”upper right quadrant”, but what does that mean? Well, the BCG [Boston Consulting Group] matrix is a steadfast strategic tool of MBAs and overpaid consultants to analyze a market or company’s health. In episode 4, Swartz maps the TV, Video, distribution and technology players on this matrix and for […]

In episode 3 of 12, Ashley looks at the 4Ps of marketing for TV; Product, Price, Place and Promotion, and explores why marketing is key to re-imagining a media business model to ensure survival and sustainable profitability. She suggests that perhaps the 4 Ps of advertising are a bit different, given the convergence of video […]

In the second episode of this multi-part series, Swartz analyzes the content and distribution landscape using [Michael] Porter’s Five Forces. (power of suppliers &buyers, threat of substitutions or new entrants and competitive rivalry) Through this, she evaluates the difference between yesterday and today; how we have shifted form controlled and protected to intense competitive rivalry […]

In this first episode in an editorial series called, “Building the Adaptable Media Enterprise,”  Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of  Furious Corp, talks about the operational cost models of traditional (old) vs digital (new) media. The greatest challenge of media companies today is that many digital media companies or businesses struggle to establish and build sustainable levels of profit to […]