Foreword

We live in the midst of a time of rapid transformation in all industries, and media is certainly no exception. The media groups should start thinking digital-first to stay competitive for audience attention and advertising spending.

More and more brands, influencers, and digital creators are developing their media production units, enabling them to compete with the media industry leaders for attention.

With the new digital tools and technologies available, the cost of creating content has dropped significantly, and companies compete to provide quality content to consumers in today's media landscape. In this regard, the source of a piece of content, be it print, TV, radio, or online, is less important than its relevance and usefulness to readers.

From the advertisers' perspective, even if statistically, early-stage companies have a high rate of failure. Usually, the ones that depend only on performance advertising, a website, and social media to capture their future customer's attention will start to observe a decrease in efficacy. Today's business landscape demands an omnichannel content strategy with multiple touchpoints for connecting with consumers.

That is why every company should be a media company — producing content and distributing it cross-platform to maximize the chances of reaching a larger audience of their ideal customer profile.

Today, companies that want success should develop themselves as media companies by producing premium content that is personalized and performs well on multiple platforms, cuts through the noise, reaches their target audience, and engages customers in a customized style.

Media-for-equity is here to open up traditional media as one of the omnichannel platforms, which is unreachable to many early-stage companies. The model enables these companies to build 360 degrees of integrated marketing and growth strategy, combining the best of both worlds.

The six markets we analyzed account for more than half the world's physical landscape and can perhaps illuminate trends elsewhere. We focused on markets with some history or light engagements with media-for-equity investments. Our goal is to provide and equip you with an understanding of how this model has been adopted worldwide and is performing from one region to the other.

Reimagining global scaling with media-for-equity, our community membership club, Borderbridge, brings together senior media-for-equity professionals and specialists from across a worldwide network. We aim to help, and support our members and customers by addressing and supporting their global growth plans with globally validated and high-performance growth-investment models, media-for-equity, and media-for-revenue.

This report continues to benefit from a strong network of partners and contributors worldwide. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with several leading academics, investors, and experts from the media-for-equity sector. Our partners have helped in various ways, checking questionnaires, contributing with their inputs, helping with interpretation, and in many cases publishing their reports