Digital born brands are reshaping the world of retail and bypassing established routes to market to offer convenient, high-quality, personalised products.

The IAB commissioned MTM to map and evaluate 50 of the UK’s leading DTC brands, profiling the businesses against a valuation framework, and exploring key behaviours and preferences of DTC consumers. Our Born Online report is available on the IAB website , and shines a spotlight on the founders and explores how agency partners and media owners can best work with DTC clients.

In 2020, MTM developed a growth strategy for the Ecommerce division of a global digital platform. Our work looked across European markets including UK, Germany, France, Italy and Netherlands, building up a detailed picture of ecommerce trends, including the business models and marketing and sales strategies of leading ecommerce businesses across various retail categories. Based on this we advised our client on high potential areas of the market to target and how to develop and expand its product and service offering to meet the evolving needs of Ecommerce companies, taking into account important differences between the major European markets.

In 2021, a leading digital audio content provider engaged MTM to identify and size growth opportunities within the news and information content vertical. Combining expert interviews with market leaders, case studies on leading news providers, and social media analysis to uncover consumer trends, MTM provided an in-depth report – and some new content ideas – detailing how to grow in this vertical.

MTM is engaged frequently to provide content trends analysis for leading content providers – combining tastemakers’ perceptions, consumer research, and in-depth market analysis. This ensures creators stay abreast of recent developments and pursue opportunities in content areas that consumers find engaging, but are currently underserved.

MTM produced Turner’s first truly cross-platform picture of how kids consume media nowadays, and where the opportunities are to grow fandom.  We conducted a survey of >10k kids aged 4-11, in-home qualitative interviews, filming, and we calculated the value of each segment to Turner’s business.  MTM involved the senior EMEA team at inception (Finance, Marketing, Content, Digital, Licensing), and presented findings to the President.  The study is being used to support licensing and merchandising, marketing, as well as content and product investment decisions.

ITV asked MTM to review the online short-form video landscape, assessing the opportunities for the brand and delivering guidelines to inform the content it creates and where it’s distributed. We created a market mapping exercise before running a quantitative profiling survey to assess video-viewing behaviours among consumers. A qualitative stage completed our research, to understand which types of content deliver most value back to the brand.

A leading global video platform wanted to develop marketing strategies for its brand advertising division. MTM conducted a global research study on brand advertiser perceptions of the platform, developing recommendations for marketing and sales teams. We also assessed advertiser awareness of our client’s performance marketing offering and identify key barriers to adoption. From this, they were able to develop a robust marketing strategy to drive growth.

MTM works with investors around the world, supporting across the transaction lifecycle from target screening and commercial due diligence through to post-merger integration and performance improvement. In due diligence we draw on an extensive network of executive-level industry contacts and proprietary data sets to provide an outside-in perspective. Recent target screening and diligence assignments have covered TV production, OTT and ad tech sectors.

A major international broadcaster wanted to assess opportunity for a single-genre OTT service that would appeal to a particular audience segment, and asked MTM to help develop a realistic plan.  MTM undertook an analysis of market characteristics, competitive dynamics and customer demand to deliver practical insight to our client’s senior team.  Our audience research tested preferences for content and functionality, so that we could advise on the marketing proposition. Following our presentation, the client announced the launch of a new SVOD service.

A global provider of news and information was looking to drive step-change improvement in one of its content divisions. MTM led the development of a digital transformation strategy, assessing customer demand, benchmarking against competitors, and analysing the sustainability of the division’s product and service portfolio. The project set out a roadmap for the business unit including new product offerings and a revised operating model.

MTM scoped out the requirements for a new data and insight capability for an international multichannel broadcaster. The project involved benchmarking data and insight capabilities against eight comparable organisations, and capturing the requirements of the core operating divisions of our client We then scoped the technical and operational requirements for a new international data strategy, which was subsequently implemented by the client.