Mass producing…for an audience of one?

It doesn't take a lot of deep introspection to see the media industry’s journey from its roots in free over the air broadcast to today’s far more segmented distribution. Just like a great many manufacturers producing for the masses, eventually the novelty of a ‘one size fits all” product or service leaves consumers with noticeably unmet needs accompanied by some aspect of your business unprotected from competitive threats.

Most media companies focus on balancing their resources between products and services that can scale to reach as many as possible and taking advantage of newer content consumption experiences (AVOD, SVOD, TVOD, FAST etc) that offer value for a more targeted audience.

Looking back, initially broadcast networks segmented their broadcast day to do this—daytime, news, primetime etc. Once pay TV (cable & satellite) proliferated, networks rallied around content verticals and demographics, no longer needing to day-part this way. Advertisers bought demos rather broadly, viewers knew which branded networks had content that interested them most and the industry got comfortable in these zones. Satellite radio was a neat analogy of that experience too.

That said, it was always possible to see glimpses of further partitioning a demo with psychographics and other narrower segmentation within a network. ESPN is a great example. ESPN invested a lot of resources to understand as much as possible about sports viewership, and discovered their viewers had different life-stages and need-states driving decision-making on what content to tune into. Simply put (and some would say oversimply… and I agree but prefer to keep a manageable length to these missives), younger sports viewers are more interested in learning about how the game is played—they want insights and analysis, tips and to watch game highlights. Older sports viewers…well they mostly just like to watch the game. You can see pretty clearly in ESPN’s ratings history when they actioned this insight and started airing SportsCenter multiple times per day & full play by play games less so—and track how the average viewing age drops and advertisers shift accordingly.

Then the world got interactive, content became “freed” from its traditional moorings, and appointment viewing started becoming rare and more on-demand. Media networks started addressing the daunting task of understanding how to best manage “the last mile” now that they could distribute content outside of MVPD control. This enables the industry to further understand better who we all are as individuals and requires us to respond in kind.

Advertisers play a role here, and their actions drive a large part of how we produce at scale for smaller audiences effectively. Since I started working in the media industry in the late 1980’s, advertisers were keen to show interest in reaching not just the widest possible audience but also to the exact right audience. The trouble early on was an opportunity cost of doing this, and the expense of reaching the exact right audience wasn’t particularly feasible then. It has taken more than 2 decades but that started to shift, with certain content commanding impressive CPMs for a very small audience, yet one that is pre-qualified and self-selected—preventing the need to waste a good impression.

This brings us to the present. How do we accommodate our audience’s life stages, need states, psychographics, range of cultures, and where their interest over-indexes into adjacent topics? How do we do this sustainably? Part of this is a keen understanding of why your audience engages with your content or your brand, and the rest is to be quite clever in determining how your content is shared with them via your owned & operated networks as well as those belonging to third parties (your ‘virtual’ network in aggregate), delivered with a delightful user experience that shows you understand them. Keeping your audience in mind—all aspects of who they might be—is key to discoverability and engagement with your content, your brand, and your business.