"Whoa, this could be big"

Yesterday, we announced a $10M Series A financing with an incredible group of institutional and angel investors. As Jonathan & I went through the fundraising process, we were able to crystallize our vision for Antenna and, in doing so, we both realized just how big the opportunity ahead of us is.

From Streaming to the Subscription Economy — and beyond

Antenna started as a market intelligence provider to the subscription video (“streaming”) ecosystem. With the cable bundle coming apart , each media company had to build a direct relationship with its consumers. As a result, measuring purchase mattered for the first time ever. It was no longer just about maximizing viewership and letting the rest take care of itself. The new metrics that govern this new paradigm may sound familiar by now.

We quickly realized that this wasn’t just a Media thing. It’s not just the cable bundle that’s coming apart; it’s the shopping mall, the grocery store, the healthcare state. Today, every consumer brand is trying to form direct, digital, recurring relationships with their customers. The economics for transaction-based businesses on the internet are bad, getting worse — recurring is the future.

For these new brands, their customer database is the crown jewel asset. Subscription Marketers (commonly titled “Head of Growth”) obsess about customer acquisition, retention, and monetization using their customer database as a weapon: everything a customer does on their service is recorded and acted upon. Ken Auletta astutely described this transition in his 2018 New Yorker piece titled How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men.

As Head of Growth at Axios, I was  no different. Our team would  use everything we knew about a user’s behavior on Axios to inform our strategy.

• Users are reading in a certain category » launch a new product in category

• Certain users have stopped engaging » send them reminders to reengage

• Certain users engage frequently » target similar users for acquisition

Everything will change as competition heats up

There are more choices than ever and it’s easier to switch between them. As a result, consumers have direct, recurring relationships with dozens of brands at once, and often switch in & out of services as they see fit. Today, a Head of Growth must understand not only what a user does on their service but also across all the other services that same user subscribes to. Without this market context, companies are misled into believing that they truly understand their users.

I faced this exact challenge at Axios: when a user churned from our newsletters, we never knew whether it was something we did wrong or something a competing product did right. There was no tool to help us answer this question. I wish Antenna had been around a few years ago ;).

Market Intelligence: a business model as old as time

In any competitive consumer market, a third party always exists to define success and act as a currency in counter-party negotiations.

• Retail: NielsenIQ and IRI

• Web: ComScore and SimilarWeb

• Apps: App Annie and Sensor Tower

These businesses have proven across paradigms that market intelligence is a winner-take-all (or two-winners-take-all, as it were) market — and that enterprise values of those winners are measured in the billions. We believe the Subscription Economy will be no different. Brands will need to know what else their consumers are subscribed to or how loyal their customers are vs. peers in order to thrive.

But wait… there’s more

OK, so market intelligence for the Subscription Economy is a given. But there’s a wrinkle. For decades, market intelligence amounted to a report that a client read, and maybe made decisions differently based on. Today’s world allows for a much deeper level of integration between client and measurement partner.

Example: what if, for each individual user, a Head of Growth could know what else that user was Subscribed to, what else they had recently purchased, and whether they had a predictable loyalty pattern across those services? Imagine what you could do with that data: personalized pricing, product experience, marketing messaging, and more. This would revolutionize the world of consumer brands. Is this even possible? Yes, we think so. In a wholly privacy-compliant way, at that.

We believe that every time a Head of Growth pulls any data on one of her users (many times a day), she will enrich it with market context before taking any further actions. What else is that user Subscribed to? What services did they recently cancel? How much money are they already spending on similar services? 

This key piece of market data will come from Antenna. This is the Antenna of tomorrow.

While this may seem novel in the world of consumer brands, there’s a precedent hiding in plain sight: the humble Credit Score. Think about the process that every bank follows when extending a mortgage: first party data enriched with market data resulting in an optimal decision!

We believe this process of enriching first party customer data with relevant, accurate market data will act as a force multiplier for the consumer brands we serve. Just as market data unlocked a vibrant consumer lending sector, we believe it will unlock a vibrant ecosystem of direct, digital, recurring consumer businesses over the next decade. We think this is going to be huge — and we hope you agree. If you want to join us on the journey check out our careers page or message me directly. I’d love to chat.