Intentional Audiences 🎧
Listen to Matt chat with Brian Morrissey on The Rebooting Podcast
Summary:
Prioritizing customer needs is crucial, according to Brian Morrissey and Matt Cronin as they discuss media & publishing. It’s challenging to engage with diverse audiences and it starts with recognizing the consumer as the customer rather than the advertiser. The shift from 'traffic' to 'intentional audiences' emphasizes the need for publishers to experiment and adapt to the human experience, not just the spreadsheet-reported data.
Highlights:
There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs.
We all have to recognize that so much of what we try to do to make our businesses better is derived from an organization-centric point of view, right? It's a hell of a lot easier to apply dynamic pricing to eke out a couple extra cents or dollars from certain customers than it is to rethink the product altogether, and to better understand the audiences and their jobs to be done. So we tend to default towards those sort of knob-spinning and lever-moving tactics that seem to show performance on a spreadsheet versus actually doing the work of understanding the audience, understanding the consumer, understanding their jobs to be done so that we can better meet their needs.
The intention comes in the form of trying to create something that's a mutually beneficial commercial relationship. Quite simply, it's building something people are willing to pay for.
Spreadsheet optimizations for ROI find relatively small gains, and that's okay, a small gain every day adds up. We're finding that there are much bigger gains to be had by understanding the human experience and adapting to the human experience versus just the minute optimizations that occur within the spreadsheets.
Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly.
Advertisers need to get closer to their publishing partners in order to foster and cultivate a higher quality audience.
Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to provide added value to audiences.
There is so much potential in this specific moment to really see that and to build around it by testing and learning and adapting very, very quickly. So that that's what makes me excited. I do think that there is a ton of potential in that for those, those publishers that are willing to experiment and make those investments who see themselves with a long term future. I think there's a ton of potential here in this very moment. the short sighted folks unfortunately I think are going to try and squeeze as much as they can out of this you know this current traffic decline and you're gonna end up missing the boat quite frankly.
