Your Audience Isn’t a Segment, They’re a Subculture

Every spring, I find myself in the same moment: the current season isn’t quite over, but we’re already deep in conversations about next year. Budgets are getting set, creative briefs are being drafted, and teams across the industry are staring at a blank page asking the same question: how do we want to position ourselves to audiences this season?

That’s exactly what we set out to explore at our recent From Show to Season livestream, and honestly, it turned into one of my favorite conversations we’ve had in a long time. Because we ended up talking less about tactics and more about something more fundamental: the gap between what we want to tell audiences and what they actually need to hear. If you’re interested, you can watch the full recording below: 

We framed it around the tension between Thinking Smart and Dreaming Big. Thinking Smart gets you targeting, messaging, efficiency. Dreaming Big gets you to the version of your campaign that actually moves people. The goal is both, but most of us — and I’ll include myself here! — default to one and call it a day.

We’ve spent years getting better at segmentation: age, geography, purchase history. But the data is pointing somewhere more nuanced. 60% of Gen Z and 40% of Boomers consume media tailored to niche interests. The monoculture is genuinely over, and the people we’re trying to reach are — as Forbes put it — “aware, selective, and highly attuned to authenticity.” They expect us to understand them not in a broad, demographic way, but in a way that reflects who they actually are.

That shift changes the creative instinct entirely. Mass campaigns run on awareness and colloquial brand language. Niche campaigns run on obsession and precision. They’re not in competition with each other, they just require completely different approaches, and knowing which one you’re doing (and for whom) is the first decision you need to make.

Ken Haemer said it better than I ever could:

designing a campaign without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it ‘to whom it may concern.

I think about this every time I see a campaign that’s trying to speak to the longtime subscriber, the curious newcomer, the occasional buyer, and the holiday gift-giver all at once. The impulse is understandable: we don’t want to leave anyone out! But the result is usually creative that hedges on everything and commits to nothing.

The flip side of getting smart about your audience is getting ambitious about how you court them. Courting — real persuasion — is personal. What are their motivations? What are their concerns? What do they already know, and what needs to be earned? What language do they actually speak, versus the language your institution tends to use? These aren’t soft questions. They are the core of your creative strategy.

At the end of the session, we kept landing on the same three words: valuable, authentic, and clear. Valuable means the creative serves the audience, not just the organization. Authentic means it sounds like you — genuinely you — not a version of you that’s trying to sound like everyone else. Clear means there’s one most important thing you’re trying to say, and everything else either supports it or goes.

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, put it best when he said, “Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.” Getting the audience right, the message right, and the reason-to-believe right before anything else gets built on top of it.

Want to keep the conversation going? Join us on May 13 at 12 PM ET for our next livestream: The Intermittent Audience: How Occasional Buyers Discover Broadway — in partnership with Ticketmaster. We’ll be digging into new research on the audience that loves live entertainment and still only shows up once a year. It’s one of the questions I find most fascinating in this business, and I can’t wait to share what we found.