Audience Shapes Product

Recently I came across an interview with Conde Nast’s audience development lead, Ainul Huda, on Adobe’s CMO blog about his views on audience growth strategies for media companies, the role of content, and basically what ‘audience development’ is.

I encourage you to read the interview yourself (link below) but here are some thoughts it inspired for me …

Most consumers think of CN as a company of famous and fortunate editors, photographers, designers cranking out premium media brands like Wired, Bon Apetite, Vogue. Mostly in glossy print magazine format.

This view puts the focus on the stories, images, layouts that they produce.

The content experience.

But as CN’s head of audience development, it is Huda's business to convert this premium content into subscribers, consumers, members and micro-patrons.

Huda does this by using analytics to look for signals in interactions that are meaningful, understandable, actionable. And then feed them back into the product.

What? How?

For example, by looking for white space where audience interest is high but content supply is low. And passing that information back to CN’s creators.

Or studying high-consuming segments of users to parse out the factors of loyalty. And surfacing them in the experience everywhere that makes sense.

Or chasing-down anything that introduces distraction or divides attention. And erasing it.

Huda’s background in analytics leads him to "audience data signals" as a starting point, implying an algorithmic approach to capturing insights. But his experience in marketing and program management help him push past statistical observations and measurement, to truly shape the product experience.

As the digital transformation of media continues, and the most-valuable consumers have more choices than ever to see what they like and avoid what they don’t, roles like Huda's will become even more critical.

And so will the platforms and workflows that enable them to manage what they measure.

Making this a very appropriate interview for the Adobe CMO blog. Good choice!

Read the interview here …

https://cmo.adobe.com/articles/2020/4/how-conde-nast-crafts-meaningful-kpis.html