When 99% Market Reach Doesn’t Guarantee Digital Success

How one user journey mapping project revealed why traditional media dominance doesn’t automatically translate to digital engagement — and what we did about it.

I’ll never forget the moment when the V.P of product looked across the conference table and said, “We reach 99% of Singapore’s population every week, but somehow we’re not even in the top 10 digital entertainment platforms. How is that possible?”

It was a question that would define the next few months of my life — and reshape how I think about digital transformation in the media industry.

The Impossible Paradox

Picture this: You’re Singapore’s national media network. Your content appears on every TV, plays on every radio, and dominates social media conversations. Nearly 4 million people engage with your brand weekly. You have decades of audience loyalty, massive content libraries, and unlimited resources.

Yet your video streaming platform feels like a ghost town.

The stakeholder meeting was supposed to be a routine project kickoff. Instead, it felt like a therapy session. Product managers described users who signed up but never returned. Marketing teams shared campaigns that generated awareness but not engagement. The content head wondered if their work was even being seen.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher. In a world where Netflix, Disney+, and local competitors were capturing attention and subscription dollars, our media house was losing the digital war despite winning the traditional media battle.

But here’s what made this project different: instead of jumping straight into solutions, we decided to truly understand the journey.

The Detective Work Begins

My approach to complex challenges always starts with one fundamental question: What story are users actually living?

Not the story we think they’re living. Not the story our analytics suggest. The real, messy, frustrating, human story.

So we embarked on the most comprehensive user research I’d conducted in years. Twenty-five in-depth interviews across every demographic Singapore could offer. Collaborative journey mapping sessions with internal stakeholders who had never been in the same room together. Deep competitive analysis that revealed uncomfortable truths about our position in the market.

The first breakthrough came during week three of research.

I was interviewing Sarah, a marketing executive and mother of two, about her streaming habits. She mentioned trying the streaming app several months earlier, but “somehow never went back.” When I asked why, she paused for a long time.

“I found the show I wanted to watch,” she finally said, “but then I had to create an account, and there were five different ways to sign up, and I wasn’t sure if I needed a different login for my TV vs. my phone, and by the time I figured it out, I had lost interest and just opened Netflix instead.”

That moment crystallized everything. We weren’t losing users because of content. We were losing them because of friction.

The Journey Map That Changed Everything

What emerged from our research was an eight-stage user journey that revealed painful truths at every touchpoint:

Awareness: Users discovered OTT app through traditional channels, but the value proposition was unclear. Why choose this app over Netflix?

Access: The multi-device experience was fragmented. Different interfaces, different features, different login processes.

Onboarding: What should have been a 2-minute process became a 10-minute odyssey through confusing options and redundant steps.

Content Discovery: With thousands of hours of content, users felt overwhelmed rather than excited. The recommendation engine was virtually non-existent.

Streaming Experience: Buffering issues, limited subtitle options, and an interface designed more for browsing than watching.

Engagement: Ad placement interrupted content at awkward moments, destroying narrative flow.

Regular Usage: No habit-forming features, no personalization that improved over time, no reason to return daily.

Premium Conversion: Users couldn’t understand what they’d gain from subscribing because the free experience never proved the platform’s value.

But here’s where leadership made the difference. Instead of overwhelming stakeholders with problems, I facilitated workshops that turned insights into opportunities.

The Art of Stakeholder Alchemy

Leading a project like this isn’t just about UX research — it’s about organizational psychology. You’re working with teams that have spent years building something they believed in, only to discover it wasn’t working as intended.

The breakthrough moment came during our collaborative workshop series.

I brought together product managers, marketers, content creators, and executives who rarely worked directly together. Instead of presenting findings, I facilitated exercises where they mapped their own assumptions against user reality.

When the marketing team realized their awareness campaigns were driving users to access points that didn’t match user expectations, something clicked. When product managers saw how their technical decisions created emotional friction for users, the mood in the room shifted.

We weren’t just identifying problems — we were building shared ownership of solutions.

The user journey map became our north star. Every recommendation was tied to a specific touchpoint, every KPI was connected to a real user need, and every technical decision was evaluated against emotional impact.

The Transformation Strategy

What emerged was a roadmap that balanced quick wins with long-term transformation:

Immediate Wins (0–3 months): Streamline onboarding, improve search functionality, optimize ad placement based on content analysis.

Strategic Moves (3–6 months): Implement AI-driven personalization, create cross-device sync, and develop social features that leverage Networks’ community strength.

Vision Realization (6–12 months): Premium content strategy focused on exclusive local productions, loyalty programs that rewarded engagement, and ecosystem integration that made the OTT Platform the hub of the Networks' media experience.

But the real transformation wasn’t in the features, it was in the mindset.

What I Learned About Digital Leadership

This project taught me that digital transformation isn’t about technology — it’s about empathy at scale.

Traditional media companies often assume their brand strength automatically transfers to digital platforms. But digital engagement requires different muscles: personalization over mass appeal, convenience over comprehensive options, habit formation over one-time consumption.

The hardest leadership challenge was helping stakeholders fall in love with problems, not solutions. Every team had ideas about what to build, but few had spent time understanding why users weren’t engaging with what already existed.

The user journey map became more than a research deliverable — it became a decision-making framework. When new feature requests emerged, we’d ask: “Which touchpoint does this improve? How does this reduce friction in the user’s story?”

The Ongoing Story

Six months after delivering the strategy, I still receive updates from the Network team. The user journey map has become a living document, updated with new research, user feedback, and market insights.

More importantly, the methodology has spread. Other Network properties are adopting a user journey mapping framework to understand their audiences. The research team has grown. The product development process now includes user story validation at every stage.

But the biggest victory isn’t in metrics — it’s in mindset. An organization that once asked, “How do we get users to engage with what we’ve built?” now asks, “How do we build what will naturally create engagement?”

For Fellow UX Leaders

If you’re leading similar digital transformation projects, here’s what I wish I’d known from day one:

Start with stakeholder journey mapping before user journey mapping. Understanding how your internal teams think about users is often more revealing than understanding users themselves.

Make workshops collaborative, not consultative. The best insights emerge when stakeholders discover problems together, not when you present findings to them.

Focus on emotional friction, not just functional friction. Users don’t abandon platforms because of missing features — they abandon them because of frustrating experiences.

Build frameworks, not just recommendations. A journey map that becomes a decision-making tool is infinitely more valuable than a research report that gets filed away.

The Media Network project reminded me why I fell in love with UX leadership in the first place: the opportunity to bridge human needs with business goals, to turn empathy into strategy, and to create experiences that genuinely improve people’s lives.

Sometimes, the biggest transformations do not come from building something new but from deeply understanding why the current experience isn’t working and having the courage to reimagine it completely.

What’s your experience with digital transformation in traditional industries? I’d love to hear your stories and challenges in the comments below.