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The case for hiring a Chief Audience Officer

Last updated: September 19, 2024

Imagine a tech company without a CTO. Or a Wall Street firm without anyone managing their own books. Nobody would run their business that way. So why don’t media companies have a chief audience officer? 

Sure, most media companies have director- or VP-level audience professionals on their mastheads. But we almost never see them in the C-suite. They’re investing in the audience, but so far, they don’t have anyone in the C-suite whose sole job is to grow, engage and advocate for it. 

And that’s a problem. 

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“Why isn’t there a Chief Audience Officer in media organizations? If everyone’s talking about the audience, why aren’t we promoting audience development to a level that it needs to be within organizations?” our CEO James Capo said in a recent interview with Jacob Donnelly of A Media Operator. 

Whether your company needs a chief audience officer depends on a lot of factors — your business model, your marketing mix and, of course, your audience itself. So we’re not making any hard and fast prescriptions here. 

Instead, we’re laying out a few arguments in favor of hiring a chief audience officer for your media company — and elevating the work of audience development within your business. 

A Chief Audience Officer will help you create an overarching audience development strategy  

Right now, most media companies say they’re maintaining or increasing their audience investment. But 65% of them don’t have a formal audience development plan, according to our State of Audience Report. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them is that there’s nobody at the top of the organization that’s solely responsible for growing, developing and engaging the audience. 

Intuitively, that makes sense. After all, everyone in media answers to the audience, right? 

In a perfect organization, every team would contribute their own insights, data, and domain expertise to a centralized place. That way, they can reduce silos and create a single view of the audience. And everyone else could asynchronously access those insights, use them to advance their audience development initiatives, and create a single audience experience that isn’t just engaging, but cohesive and unified across channels.

But in practice, each team is working toward their own goals. Many are operating off their dashboards and optimizing for their own pet metrics. Even if everyone’s got the same data, each team’s coming into the exercise with their own ideas of what works and what doesn’t — and they’re incentivized to work toward different definitions of success.

For instance, maximizing traffic might be top priority for your SEO person, whereas your subscription people are optimizing for deeper metrics, like time on site, repeat visits and conversions. 

(Try for yourself: Ask five different people what “engagement” means or, better yet, how they’d measure it. Chances are that you’re getting five very different answers.) 

In this case, hiring a Chief Audience Officer is like addition by subtraction. When one person’s responsible for setting and monitoring audience development goals, they can help the organization settle on a single vision and, more importantly, a single set of metrics that’ll define success or failure in achieving that vision. 

This way, teams aren’t chasing shiny objects that may or may not deliver an audience. Instead, they can find and work toward tactics that ladder up to the organization’s single audience goal.  

Having a single stakeholder responsible for audience experience helps create more cohesive audience experiences 

Imagine. You land on a website to read an article, but your view of your page is blocked by a banner ad along the top and a roll-play video along the bottom, before a pop-up promoting their paid subscription blocks the entire thing. So you’re clicking X three or four times before you can even read the first page of the post and at that point, why bother?

We’ve all been there (and immediately clicked out). But what’s causing these kinds of disjointed, clunky user experiences? Most likely, it’s not that one person’s quality testing the page, then saying the audience will love it.  

Instead, individual teams are contributing their own pieces to the on-page experience and as a result, they’re literally working on top of one another. That’s where the Chief Audience Officer comes in. An audience person will be able to take in each team’s needs and inputs, then prioritize and combine it to ensure that it all comes out to one clean, cohesive user experience. 

A Chief Audience Officer will advocate for audience investment

We’ve been avoiding a big, expensive elephant in the room so far. The things that create a positive audience experience tend to require patience and gradual improvement, which might be in short supply among your board or investors. A chief audience officer will make the business case for those long-term plays (and if not, who will?).

Giving audience people a the seat at the table gives them the opportunity to fight for some of the investment — and fight against the cheap plays that’ll boost this quarter’s metrics at the expense of your relationship with your audience. 

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