Better Approaches to More Targeted and Personalized Customer Retention with Warner Bros. Discovery’s Yoav Banai

Ben speaks with Yoav Banai, Group VP Retention & Engagement at Warner Bros. Discovery Streaming, a premier global media and entertainment company. They discuss the increasing shift to retention marketing in the industry, and the ways in which they’re building long-term relationships with customers by encouraging health consumption, getting to know them and the content they watch, and offering the right messaging at the right junction. They also discuss how Warner Bros. Discovery is taking a true omnichannel approach to lifecycle marketing, how they measure engagement and activity, and how the future of consumer marketing will become one ongoing interaction with a brand.

 

Topics discussed:

• The path of Yoav's career, from time in the military, to practicing capital markets law, to focusing on strategy in the streaming music industry, to now leading retention and engagement at Warner Bros. Discovery.
• The current state of consumer marketing, which is seeing a large-scale shift to retention, and how Warner Bros. Discovery is creating a holistic, customer-centric experience across the entire organization.
• How Yoav thinks about retention and lifecycle marketing, and how it's focused on what the customer needs, finding the right moment to offer recommendations or support, and being ready with messaging at the different junctions of the journey.
• How to listen to customers, find their triggers, influence behaviors at pivotal moments, and get them to take the right action.
• How Warner Bros. Discovery measures retention by looking at customer activity, what type of content they're watching, and how much of a commitment they're making to certain content.
• Why Yoav doesn't have a plan for "the average customer," and instead looks at how to shift and influence behavior for specific users to build long-term relationships.
• How they're pursuing a true omnichannel approach for the customer, including focusing more on the message rather than the channel, and how they’re keeping messaging consistent, from emails to error messages.
• Advice for marketers that includes starting from the "why" of what you're doing, and the importance of measuring what matters.