2021 was an exciting year for Antenna. We more than doubled our client base, tripled our team size and quadrupled our revenue. More importantly to our Mission - “To expand knowledge of subscriber behavior so brands can entertain, inspire and empower the world” - we made tremendous strides in helping our clients to better understand this spectacular transformation in consumer behavior which is taking place around the Subscription Economy.
Antenna was originally conceived as a market intelligence provider to the streaming ecosystem. With the cable bundle coming apart, each media company would need to build direct relationships with its consumers; therefore, understanding how consumers spend their entertainment dollar would take on a new level of importance.
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 vacation resort, the education system, the healthcare state. Today, consumer brands across almost every category are forming direct, digital, recurring relationships with their customers. The economics for transaction-based businesses on the internet are bad and getting worse — recurring is the future.
If “brand awareness” was the holy grail of the linear TV and retail store-driven model of yesterday, the CRM database is the beating heart of tomorrow’s brands. Subscription marketers (commonly titled “Heads of Growth”) obsess about customer acquisition, retention, and monetization using their customer data as their fuel: everything a customer does on their app is recorded and acted upon.
As the subscription model proliferates, consumers build these direct, recurring relationships with dozens of brands at once, often switching in and out of services according to their immediate needs.
For these Heads of Growth, the message is becoming clear: it is not enough to track what users do on your services; you increasingly need to understand how they engage with other the rest of the market. Antenna’s current product reports KPI’s which help subscription brands evaluate their performance against their peers; and provides them with deep insights about their competitors’ subscriber behavior.
In the future, we aspire to model that data onto the clients’ actual CRM records. Imagine a world in which Headspace signs up two new customers, and Antenna can tell them that one of those individuals just canceled Calm, while the other is new to the meditation category. Headspace would give those two users a completely different experience, dramatically improving their chance of building a long-lasting allegiance. Is this even possible? Yes, we think so. In a wholly privacy-compliant way, at that.
This is the Antenna of tomorrow.
To that end, we are excited to announce the closing of a $10M Series A round. We are thrilled to have Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments lead the round. BDMI has such deep knowledge of our space, as their past investments have included both data companies we admire, like Suzy, Pathmatics, and Sensor Tower; and subscription brands we love like The Athletic, Dramafever, and FloSports. And they are joined by an all-star group of institutions, including Grit Capital, Hyper, Imagination Capital, SK Ventures, Waverley Capital, and UTA Ventures.
We think this is going to be huge — and we hope you agree.
Onward,
Jonathan and Rameez
PS - To support all this growth, we will be ramping up the team significantly, so please check out our Careers page.
Brendan Brady is a Content Strategy Associate at Antenna, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape.
