Partnerships Led Growth Project

Step 1

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Step 2

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Step 3

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Apply the Partnerships Framework

Go to each page to step-by-step formulate your partnership strategy

Step 4 - Identifying the right partner

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​The following factors played a major contribution in selecting Tata Play as a potential partner

1. Tata Play Binge was initially a closed platform, i.e. only Tata Play DTH customers could subscribe to Tata Play Binge. This was about to change. They were planning to open the platform for all the users irrespective of whether they were Tata Play DTH subscribers or not.
2. They intended to create a freemium platform where users could access some content for free.
3. To create a freemium platform, they required a large library of content that could be offered for free.
4. MX Player has a huge library of content that can be offered for free (and monetized by Ads).
5. Other potential partners (Airtel, Vodafone, etc.) wanted to partner with content providers who offered exclusive content, i.e. the content is exclusively available behind the paywall.
6. MX Player content was available for free the subscription only offered an ad-free experience.
7. Adding MX Player to their subscription bundle didn’t add any value to their existing offering.
8. Thus, MX Player preferred Tata Play as a partner and was able to build a partnership with a minimum guarantee of subscriber assurance from Tata Play. (I can’t disclose the exact details of the partnership due to NDA).

What does your partner gain from this partnership?

1. Access to a large content library that can help the partner build the freemium platform.
2. Access to popular shows like Aashram that had millions of viewers across the country.
3. Tata Play Binge viewers can access MX Player content without leaving the Tata Play Binge app

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Step 5 - Outreach strategy

​Scoring Method

Yes - 1; Maybe - 0.5; No - 0

🚨 Uh oh! Imagine haven’t received a response for any of your outreaches. Your filled out their partner form, tried contacting them on LinkedIn, found a POC from the company but to no avail.

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Use the FES job matrix to identify potential follow ups approaches for different POCs.

What would your strategy be to get your foot in the door to reach a meeting?

Outline the channel you’ll reach out on, the message you’ll send, and any follow-ups you might want to do. Build a comprehensive strategy from A-Z on how you’ll reach out on email, socials, cold calls etc.

👉🏼 Submit your strategy here

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Step 6 - First Call Design

💡 Create your first call design with the partner PoC. Divide it in terms of what you will do:

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Before the call

Research your partner’s current goals (what do they talk about on their website, social handles, content blogs, recent events, other resources)

👉🏼 Write partner’s current goals:

1. Create a single destination for all popular OTT content by becoming the largest OTT, discovery, aggregator, and distributor platform.
2. Build a content-first approach rather than an OTT player-first approach.
3. Remove the necessity to manage multiple OTT subscription cycles and credentials.
4. Create a freemium platform to build the top of the funnel and drive sampling of the platform that will eventually lead to the users subscribing to Tata Play Binge plans.

👉🏼 In India today, approximately 70 plus OTT services cater to 450 million consumers with just 90 million paid subscribers. The penetration at a subscriber level drops further as each consumer needs to subscribe to multiple OTT services. The biggest bottlenecks to the growth of OTT subscriptions are accessibility, availability, and affordability. With our aggregated OTT platform Binge, we endeavor to address these pain points. - Harit Nagpal, MD & CEO, Tata Play.

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Do these goals align with your current goals?

👉🏼 Justify your reasoning here:

1. The current goals are driving paid subscriptions for MX Gold without compromising on the ARPU.
2. Through this deal, MX Player can expect assured revenue in terms of a minimum guarantee of subscriptions.
3. Tata Play Binge will serve as an additional subscription acquisition channel.
4. The amount of discount offered to Tata Play is much less than the CAC to acquire the subscribers directly on MX Player.

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Why should the partner consider you? Perform a competitive analysis + identify mutual customer pain point to find your edge against the competition.

Competitive Analysis Template​

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As Tata Play is building an OTT aggregator platform, the arrangement is not exclusive to any partner. Each OTT platform - small or big comes with its unique strength in terms of content - viewers, genre, language, and popularity. When MX Player approached Tata Play, they already had partnered with 15 OTT platforms, including the top SVOD platforms. So, competitive analysis wasn’t required and presented.

Tata Play selects a partner based on the following criteria

1. Reach and popularity of the platform - MX Player - 280 M MAU, and many shows have 1B+ views.
2. Content library - MX Player has produced 100+ original shows and has acquired 10,000+ hours of content.
3. Subscription price - At Rs. 299/year, MX Player was priced competitively.

Create a value prop for your partner

👉🏼 Submit your value prop design here MX Player will offer:

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👉🏼 1. Seamless access to MX Player’s content through an SDK integration: Some other larger platforms have refused to do an SDK integration. So, the users are either redirected to their platform (Disney+ Hotstar) or the content is visible in a web view (Zee5). This is not a consistent experience for the user. As Tata Play wants to create a freemium platform, a consistent native content streaming experience is imperative. 2. Access to original shows that have helped MX Player build an audience of 280M MAUs: MX Player has multiple shows that have 1B+ views. It also has a large library of acquired content - International, Indian, and multi-lingual. 3. Competitive subscription pricing with a lucrative bulk discount to Tata Play. 4. An exciting lineup of original shows and international partnerships: MX Player planned to launch 30+ new shows in 2022-23.

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📞 During the call

Create a conversation design for your first call with your partner PoC. Set expectations, discuss how your joint solution benefits mutual customers, build trust, outline deliverables

Optional: Take a feeler on possible GTM opportunities you could explore

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👉🏼 Submit your conversation design here:

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📝 After the call Create a summary that you’ll send to your partner PoC

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👉🏼 Submit your summary here:

👉🏼 Share MX Player data: **1. Performance of top shows on MX Player - total views, show completion rate, audience profile, minutes watched, etc. 2. Platform-level audience profile - city, age, gender, smartphone model, mobile network, etc. 3. Platform level consumption data - MAU, average watch time, show completion rate, minutes watched, etc. 4. Subscriber data - Total subscriptions till date (range), consumption pattern comparison of subscriber vs. nonsubscriber

Proposal:

1. Estimated free and paid users that Tata Play can acquire through the partnership
2. Tentative roadmap of the upcoming shows - a joint marketing campaign can be launched during the show launch
3. Retail price of MX Gold subscription, proposed bulk discount, and expected minimum guarantee of subscribers

Step 7 - Company buy-in and alignment

💡 Mention your stakeholder and team concerns for this partnership. Explain how would you address each concern.

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👉🏼 Stakeholder concerns: 1. Brand dilution: When this partnership was being discussed, MX Player was the second largest OTT platform in India, and other smaller OTT players were distributing their content through MX Player. Tata Play was a significantly smaller player in terms of reach. Hence, the stakeholders were worried about brand dilution because MX Player content needed to be made available on a smaller platform.

2. Cannibalization of AVOD and SVOD users: a. AVOD - Syndicating content on Tata Play may drive users to Tata Play. b. SVOD - The bulk discount offered to Tata Play will reduce the ARPU and may cannibalize direct subscribers.

3. Content rights: Content rights are granted as per the platform, and MX Player may not have syndication rights to a lot of acquired and co-produced content.

👉🏼 How was that addressed -

1. The industry is constantly evolving, and different ways of discovering, accessing, and aggregating content will be introduced. Instead of considering integration with Tata Play as a content syndication deal with a smaller platform (in terms of MAU), it should be perceived as an additional medium for our consumers to discover and consume our content. Tata Play Binge has partnered with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ Hotstar. So, in fact, an absence of MX Gold can be negatively perceived by the market and our users.

As we planned to do an SDK integration, the playback experience was controlled by MX Player. Hence, our users would still get the best experience we provide on our platform. Even if customers watch MX Player’s content on Tata Play, the MX Player’s branding will make it clear that they are watching MX Player’s show. Hence, the brand will never be diluted.

a. AVOD: MX Player has 1B+ downloads and has built a strong brand. It’s difficult for a new platform to suddenly achieve that reach. As MX Player is doing an SDK integration, MX Player will control the ad tech and serve the ads.

b. SVOD: The bulk discount is significantly lower than the CAC (inorganic). Even though the discount will reduce the ARPU, the minimum guarantee of subscribers will compensate for the reduction in ARPU.

3. MX Player had syndication rights for a majority of the titles. For the rest of the major titles, the agreements can be renegotiated.

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👉🏼 Product team concerns:

1. Development effort: MX Player didn’t have an SDK version to be integrated with Tata Play. Creating that from scratch was a humongous task as the tech team had other ongoing high-priority projects, and the team was spread across geographies - India, China, and Singapore.

2. Supporting multiple devices: Mobile, Web, and Large screen devices (STB, Firestick) needed to be supported.

3. As Tata Play was launching the freemium offering with MX Player, there was a lot of development effort required at Tata Play’s end. MX Player’s subscription was feature-based, where majorly, the only benefit a subscriber got was ad-free access. Unlike other partners, where content can be flagged as ‘Paid’ and the access restricted to only subscribed users, MX Player’s content was available to all users. This needed to be handled at Tata Play’s end. This involved extra coordination between the teams.

How was that addressed -

1,2,3. Over time, MX Player had plans to build similar minimum guarantee partnerships with other OTT aggregators. Hence, this was proposed as a one-time effort with significant upside.

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👉🏼 Marketing team concerns:

1. Audience confusion: As Tata Play will promote MX Player’s shows, it may confuse existing MX Player users and prospective users. ATL and BTL campaigns of MX Player may drive users on Tata Play Binge.

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👉🏼 2. Brand guidelines and celebrity concerns: Each and every communication created by Tata Play will need to be vetted by MX Player’s marketing team to ensure that all the brand guidelines are followed. There are stringent guidelines around using celebrity imagery in promotional material. Every show contract needed to be revisited to check the guidelines.

How was that addressed -

1. Tata Play will always mention MX Player while mentioning the shows. Irrespective of where our users watch our shows, it will not impact the revenue, audience perception, and recall value of our shows.
2. Tata Play is already working with other leading OTT players and is well aware of such guidelines.

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👉🏼 Sales team concerns:

1. Ad-sales team was concerned about the possible ad-revenue sharing with Tata Play.

How was that addressed - Can’t reveal it as that will reveal the commercial details.

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👉🏼 What does success look like? **1. Tata Play acquiring X million free users through this partnership. 2. MX Gold acquiring Y million paid users through this partnership. 3. This deal contributing A% of subscribers and B% of revenue for MX Gold. 4. This deal cannibalizing less than ~Z% of direct MX Gold subscribers.

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📝 Create your stakeholder pitch. Make a small ppt (max 8 slides) to get your stakeholders and teams onboard. It must include the following:

• Partnership objective
• Value prop
• Impact on your org’s north-star metric
• Customer needs and user base analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Effort required from various teams
• What does success look like?

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👉🏼 Upload your ppt here:

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Step 8 - Building Trust

💡 Solving for trust and engagement with the partner

1. Create a strategy for building trust with your partner at each step of the partnership
2. Create a strategy to improve transparency between you and your partner
3. Create a strategy to increase engagement with your partner

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👉🏼 Strategy for trust building

1. Trust is built when the partner knows that the company has complete buy-in from the leadership and all other departments. To instill this confidence, meetings with respective teams and leadership teams to be organized.
2. It should always be conveyed that the goals are aligned, and the success of the company is linked to the partner’s success.
3. As this partnership is non-exclusive, MX Player may build a similar partnership with Tata Play’s competitors. Partners are worried about the confidential data shared with the companies and the terms and support offered to other competitors. It should be ensured that no confidential information about other partnerships is ever revealed to the partners.

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👉🏼 Strategy for improving transparency

Specific to this partnership: **1. Clearly communicate the integration timelines 2. Provide the content roadmap 3. Provide visibility on the trends - which shows are popular on MX Player, how’s the show completion rate, etc. 4. Help build acquisition, engagement, and retention campaigns for Tata Play.

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👉🏼 Strategy for increasing engagement

Specific to this partnership **1. Create co-marketing campaigns around the show launches 2. Design contests, meet and greet campaigns for Tata Play subscribers

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Step 9 - Plan and Launch GTM

💡 Before creating your GTM strategy, answer these questions:

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👉🏼 What is the problem you are solving for?

1. MX Player, by syndicating its content to Tata Play, is helping Tata Play build a successful aggregator platform through which users can subscribe to and consume the content of the leading OTT platforms through a single subscription.
2. This will help MX Player in acquiring new subscribers who are reluctant to pay directly for MX Gold.

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👉🏼 Is there demand for your offering?

1. There are 40+ OTT platforms in the country, each with a different UI/UX. This is leading to a broken viewing experience for the users.
2. OTT aggregators offer a unified way to discover and access content from different OTT platforms through a single app.
3. Subscribing to multiple OTT platforms is costly. OTT aggregators bundle multiple subscriptions and offer it at a lower cost to the users.
4. Power users who watch a lot of streaming content and have subscribed to multiple OTTs favor such an aggregation model.
5. Users of MX Players were requesting MX Gold to be included with leading aggregator platforms.

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👉🏼 Who’s your brand offering for?

1. The primary TG of MX Player is someone who has a smartphone and mobile data connection but doesn’t want to pay for a subscription. This is a subset of the YouTube audience.
2. The primary TG of MX Gold is the power user of MX Player or is a subscriber of other leading OTT platforms who doesn’t mind paying a nominal subscription amount for an ad-free experience.

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👉🏼 Where does your ICP spend most of their time? Social media, Short Video Platforms, Youtube, OTT platforms

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💡 Create a value matrix for your mutual customers.

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Create a co-marketing strategy for your partnership, include the teams involved, timelines, and effort. If the co-marketing activity is on the partner’s real estate, please mention the approach you'll follow to convince your partner.

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If the co-marketing is on the partner’s real estate, please mention the approach you'll take

Write your approach here 1. Closely work with Tata Play during show launches. 2. Provide trends around consumption data (due to SDK integration, all the consumption data will be captured by MX Player, and Tata Play won’t have any visibility) to devise engagement and retention campaigns.

Step 10: Channel Partners

• Agency vs Affiliate Partners
• 📝 Choose either or both, and give justification based on your product & problem statement
• Onboarding Plan
• 📝 Build a plan that enables you to Educate, Empower & Activate Channel Partners
• Partner Directory
• 📝 Think of innovative ways in which you can showcase your partners and gamify the process of earning incentives.

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