Viu

Growth is not a marketing function. It's an operating model. Most companies hire a Head of Growth and point them at paid media. That's acquisition with a fancier title and a much smaller ceiling. Nine years across SEA, MENA and Africa taught me that the real shift wasn't a better bidding strategy or a smarter attribution setup. It was when my team stopped owning campaigns and started owning the read across between product, content and marketing. Most orgs aren't built for this. Product ships the app. Content fills the catalogue. Marketing buys users. Each team runs on its own targets and growth sits somewhere inside marketing, watching CPIs. Nobody owns the full journey. The user doesn't care. They experience one thing: an ad, then an app, then content, then a decision on whether to pay. When those three teams aren't aligned, that journey breaks somewhere and growth gets blamed for the CAC. The fix isn't a meeting. It's rewiring what each team tracks. Growth and product need a shared number: activation rate by acquisition channel. The growth team sees which campaigns bring users who stick around. Product sees where those users’ hit friction. Without that handshake, both teams are half blind. Growth and content are the most underused pairing in OTT. We had a cohort where users acquired through a specific content genre showed 2x the 30day retention of users from brand campaigns. That finding didn't live in any one team's data. It came from stitching acquisition source, onboarding path and viewing behaviour together. The output wasn't a new campaign. It was a brief to the content acquisitions team and a change to the onboarding flow. Growth and data, a shared user ID across all three functions isn't a nice to have. Without it, everyone is optimizing a different version of the same person. None of this works without one uncomfortable structural change shared OKRs. Right now, content is measured on catalogue size, product on DAU, marketing on CPI. Every team is incentivized to optimize its own silo. Until that changes, cross functional integration is just a slide that gets nodded at in a quarterly review. When it does change: CAC falls, retention improves, content bets get smarter, and SVOD revenue compounds rather than plateaus. That's the difference between running a growth team and building a growth operating model. How wired together is yours, actually? #GrowthMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #GrowthStrategy #DigitalGrowth #CustomerAcquisition #GrowthHacking #digitalmarketing