We Need to Introduce a Chief Audience Officer

By Jacob Cohen Donnelly • July 19, 2024

I hope your week has been productive. Things have been very busy here at AMO HQ since we’re 88 days out from the AMO Summit. On October 15th here in NYC, we’ll be spending a day digging into innovative business models, talking about what’s working in events, exploring what marketers are looking for, and, of course, the state of media M&A.

I’m excited to announce two discussions that we’re going to have.

  • Arsalan Arif is the founder and CEO of Endpoints News, a b2b media company covering biotech. We’ll be sitting down to do a deep dive on Endpoints, how they built, and also what has been going on since the FT bought the brand.
  • Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. Earlier this year, The Atlantic announced that it had finally reached profitability only three years after being in a $20 million deficit. And so, we’re going to take the stage to discuss this turnaround and so much more.

These are two of the eight discussions we’ll be having on stage and I am excited to dig in with both of these CEOs. If you want to be in the room, buy your ticket today. I’ll have more to share over the coming weeks on the agenda, but you’re not going to want to miss the second AMO Summit. Register here.

Also, next Wednesday at 12pm, I am holding a webinar with SEBPO all about unlocking the advantage of outsourcing. Media companies are going to get leaner and outsourcing back office tasks is a great way to push more resources into audience-first initiatives. Click here to register.

Let’s Talk CAOs…

As media rapidly evolves and publishers realize that their businesses are going to become increasingly dependent on a known audience, having a voice at the table representing the audience has never been more important. Especially as media companies start identifying newer, audience-first monetization strategies, it’s important that this person—a chief audience officer, if you will—is clearly empowered.

Consider your typical media leadership team. You’ve got your CEO, COO (maybe), and CFO, which are standard roles at most companies. Then you’ve got an editor-in-chief, who is representing the newsroom and is responsible for the product that is shipped every day. Many larger media companies have CROs, who are responsible for the revenue targets. Perhaps there’s a CPO, who is head of product. And then depending on how large the leadership team is, there may be business heads also at the table.

But nowhere in there is the audience represented. You could argue that the editor in chief does this, but consider the editorial process. Journalists talk to sources and then those sources inform stories. Smart newsrooms will look at analytics for sure, but that’s still an anonymized representation of traffic. So, who represents the audience at the table?

If you consider a good media company, there are three critical functions that form a triangle. On one corner, there’s editorial. On another corner, especially in a media company with advertising, there’s sales. And then the third corner is audience. Here’s a simple graphic to represent it.

Each of these must be run by a senior leader because each of them needs to be empowered to push on the others at the table. Consider the following scenarios.

The revenue team comes to the table and says, “we’ve got a ton of advertising demand for companies looking to target CFOs.” The two people responsible for ensuring that there is a deep bench of highly engaged CFOs in the database are the editorial lead and the audience lead. Those two need to link up to make sure there’s a strategy to support this growing advertising demand.

Here’s another scenario. The editorial team identifies a new coverage area. They go to audience to determine if there are people that would benefit from that and then they go to the revenue team and push to get that coverage sold. Audience and revenue need to link up to ensure that there is are enough people to support this coverage area and enough potential contextual advertising.

And then here’s one final scenario, which is my favorite. Since the chief audience officer will be spending all their time understanding the audiences, they can identify new audience segments that no one considered. Using 1st-party data, they may find that there’s been a massive spike in FP&A professionals. Suddenly, the audience team can go to editorial and tell them that they should be producing more coverage for this audience segment and also go to revenue to make sure there are advertisers targeting them.

The above diagram represents what the leadership team looks like. Each member is pushing the others to bring what is needed to the table.

Another way to think about it is the difference between strategy and tactics. 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.

This doesn’t surprise me. When most people talk about audience development, they get very focused on tactics. We’re going to spend on Facebook or we’re going to start surveying people for declarative data. But that’s all very short-term thinking. Before we can talk tactics, we need to discuss the strategy.

In a nutshell, a strategy is defining what you want to accomplish. And so, an audience strategy is a blend of understanding who matters most and what their expected behaviors are. The revenue team won’t do that because they are focused on selling ads. The editorial team won’t do that because they are focused on producing content. And so, you need an audience person.

What about a CMO? Why can’t this person be responsible for the audience?

In many organizations, they probably are. But this could be a mistake because the CMO’s job is to market the brand. They’ve got dual loyalties, therefore. On one hand, they’re trying to pump up how great the brand is to bring in advertising. And on the other, they’re trying to acquire users. When you’ve got two jobs, you’re going to do one better than the other. And so, splitting audience from the CMO is one way to accomplish this. Let the CMO be the head marketer of the brand and let the CAO be the head of audience.

In this world, reporting structures start to change. Product teams, for example, belong in the audience organization. This is a controversial statement, but consider what a good media product team does. Their job is to deliver a good experience to the audience and maximize the expected behaviors of that audience. Who defines those expected behaviors? The chief audience officer in conversation with the editorial team and the revenue team. It all comes back to that triangle.

Media companies are evolving. Many are realizing that they need to prioritize the audience, both in terms of acquiring users and monetizing them. As these companies invest more resources into serving and engaging the audience, there needs to be a voice at the table that is strategically and tactically focused on the users. Just focusing on tactics—how to get more people—won’t help the business over the long term. We need a solid audience strategy.

Having a chief audience officer sitting at the table with an editor-in-chief and a chief revenue officer is how media companies of the future will win. Each can push the others to ensure the business is moving in the right direction.

Thanks for reading today’s AMO. A couple of quick points:

Have a great weekend!