Today's consumers face an overwhelming choice of content - millions of music tracks available to download, tens of thousands of movies on-tap, over fifteen thousand unique shows to choose from each week, as well as mobile content comprising of thousands of songs, games and ring tones. 

In this age of too many choices, too little time how will content providers compete to attract and retain valuable customers?  Content providers need to understand what consumers like - and why - enabling the delivery of content the consumers will enjoy, right at their fingertips.

Most of your customers are probably only aware of a fraction of the content you are able to provide.  Their perception of your brand and what you offer is therefore governed by a very narrow experience.  Undoubtedly you have content which would interest them, but consumers need help to find relevant content.

Outbound Marketing: The traditional approach to marketing is to create an offering and then review the customer database to find the people most likely to respond to the offer. Here we have days to go from finding the offer matched to a target group.

Inbound Marketing: In contrast, this requires a marketing strategy based on a Real Time Recommendations solution, learning individual taste and choices people make to be able to make recommendations that are relevant to the consumers as and when they choose to interact with the brand. Here we only have milliseconds to determine consumer taste matched to the most relevant content that can be recommended to the consumer.

A Real Time Recommendations strategy from OAL matches content to the consumer by analysing both the content and the consumer: it classifies content into features people care about and learns user preferences to match them with new content.  OAL calls this the Nature & Nurture strategy.

Take the example of a music content provider:

Nature recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music.  If a customer states a liking for a particular artist or song it will find similar music in terms of melody or harmony, for example.  Songs are classified against such attributes.

Nurture recommendations are all about the people around the target customer.  Nurture cares little for the inherent qualities of songs, such as melodies, instead it assumes that if the customer and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, the customer will probably enjoy other artists who are popular with that group's choices.

Only a handful of organisations have managed to combine nature and nurture into a unified content strategy, which makes it a very exciting new area.  OAL's solution strategy makes real time recommendations an achievable goal.

• Creates brand differentiation attractive to new customers, helping you to stand out in a crowded market.
• Enhances customer affiliation with your brand.
• Demonstrates depth & breadth of offering to improve customer acquisition, growth and retention.