Audience Matters. Who’s In Charge of Representing Them?
By: Christiana Sciaudone
With Google a shadow of its former traffic-driving self, knowing the customer has become a top priority for many media companies.
Unfortunately, editors and reporters often have little insight into what their audience wants and needs. Blame the so-called Chinese Wall, that invisible divide between the editorial and business sides of the newsroom built to avoid ethical conflicts, or a simple inability to communicate across teams.
The bottom line is that there isn’t really a role at media organizations that represents readership or viewership. Enter the chief audience officer. It’s a position that can be found in the art world, but makes scant appearance in news.
That may be changing. Rest of World is currently hiring for a CAO; they declined to comment for this piece as they are just getting started on the process. Amanda Landsaw, vice president for audience development at Endeavor Business Media, was promoted to chief marketing officer last week and told AMO she will incorporate the “audience mindset” to the division.
KCRW in Los Angeles, on the other hand, appears to be ahead of its time. They hired Nathalie Hill as CAO in June 2022 and she built the radio station’s audience department in October of that year. Since then, the team has overseen:
- An 8% increase in membership
- A 43% increase in newsletter subscribers
- A 69% increase in Summer Nights event RSVPs
Hill is KCRW’s first CAO. The National Public Radio member station has been broadcasting for decades, but younger generations hardly know what radio is. So KCRW is moving away from being defined by its manner of distribution, including its web presence, and focusing on direct relationships with the ultimate goal of building out its membership base.
“For us, a lot of it has been trying to reposition how we think about ourselves, to not be positioned by our distribution channel, but more so what we do for the community,” Hill said. And then converting the community to membership is “how we’ll stay alive.”
Above or Below?
With platforms no longer a dependable source of traffic and artificial intelligence poised to bring changes yet unknown, there is a deep refocus on value.
A recent episode of People vs Algorithms, a podcast about media and culture, discussed “above the line” and “below the line” media. The line represents the threshold of human uniqueness in content creation—above lies human creativity, insight and expertise. Below is AI-driven processes and automation.
Hill told AMO:
Some of the things that I’ve definitely been harping on as the audience officer is the importance of brand reputation and brand credibility and brand differentiation, and that’s all through having a unique point of view and something that people directly go to… There’ll be a higher currency for stronger expertise and point of view. All of that leads to why having that direct relationship matters because if you don’t have a strong relationship with your audience, people will just go to AI.
The industry appears to be woefully unprepared: earlier this year, Omeda released its first State of Audience Report. The team found that “Media companies report increasing (27%) or maintaining (54%) audience investment. However, most lack a documented audience development strategy, as nearly two-thirds do not have a formal audience plan.”
To retain that audience, high quality and regular content is requisite, Landsaw told AMO:
The collaboration between editorial and audience specifically is so important for success, because audience can’t do their job without the content, right? But then to add another layer on to that, collaboration between audience, editorial and sales is extremely important, because the sales team is hearing, hey, our clients are really looking for these types of audience members. Are we producing the right content to attract those audience members, and then is the audience team able to activate on that and keep those audiences engaged. That’s just a critical component that we always have content at the forefront of our minds.
Pies & Summer Nights
Content and audience truly meet when it comes to live events, and KCRW sees a clear appetite for face-to-face interaction. When they held a kitschy pie fest, Hill wondered who in cosmopolitan Los Angeles would show up. The answer: some 8,000 people, far more than expected. KCRW also reached a record number of RSVPs for the KCRW summer night series, with 110,000 people signing up.
“It just signaled to us how much people are craving connection and real in-person connection and so for us, if we can create a more engaged community, both digitally and in real life, that is a public service that I think people desperately want,” Hill said.
It’s no longer a simple matter of providing information or news to an audience, or assuming how you reach them now is how you’ll always reach them. You have to go where they are. It’s a journey in which media must be constantly engaged and providing value so that if (or when) radio, social media or otherwise disappear, they’ll follow you forever.
To Landsaw, that means bringing the whole organization together.
“Very few look at audience holistically, and looking at that audience journey from start to whatever that finish might look like, and that engagement and that retention,” Landsaw said.
To get the best engagement and retention, media companies cannot continue to live in silos: audience, sales and content have to work together.
“That’s something that we’re continuously working on, that collaboration between our content teams, who are subject matter experts, who understand really great presentation, but our audience teams are experts in the platforms and understands how audiences interact with things like social or events or newsletters,” Hill said.
KCRW still engages with some third-party platforms as starting points for relationship development but decided to abandon X, formerly known as Twitter, altogether. That helps them limit risks as they continue to readjust their priorities and focus on what they can control: their direct relationship with the audience. The company stopped engaging with a whopping 500,000 people when it abandoned X.
“Our direct relationships are so important, and that’s why having a core value for our community that extends beyond just a distribution channel is so important to us,” Hill told AMO. It’s “a much more sustainable business model.”
