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“Why does your audience need your brand?” This was the question a veteran executive asked me when I first became editor in chief. It’s the same one editors have had to answer for a century and a half.
It was a gorgeous day in that heady top-floor dining room, the city glinting beneath us, and I didn’t want to kill the mood. But the truth was: They don’t.
Depending on which side of the publisher/audience equation you’re on—and probably also what generation you’re in—that fact will hit you as either painfully obvious or existentially bleak. The latter if, say, you’re a legacy publisher who built your empire on a one-way pipeline of information where supply dictated demand; the former if you’re the owner of a smartphone and a dwindling attention span. (While we’re being honest, attention isn’t the crisis it’s chalked up to be. American adults rack up an average of 12 hours of media consumption every day. We’re lousy with attention. The real prize is memory.)
Throughout my time at the helm of magazine brands, I was stunned by how frequently I heard leaders across the industry lament the fact that consumers behave differently now than they did 100 years ago. I always wanted to tell them it wasn’t personal, that audiences don’t owe us anything and we can’t take them for granted. They’ve probably always engaged more fleetingly than we’ve let ourselves believe—we’re just finally able to measure it. That while we fight for our territory back, consumers, spoiled for choice, are happy to keep running free. That most of all, our industry’s attachment to its old soapbox is palpable and is part of what’s driving people away.
Consumers now prioritize two things: getting the fastest answers to their questions (which LLMs already do better than traditional search), and being passively entertained or informed on their free-time platforms of choice (which are increasingly successful at keeping them there versus sending them to publishers).
And then, of course, there’s also the fact that consumers don’t just consume media anymore, they make it as well. They create their content, curate their feeds, and are the experts on their own lives. Against a backdrop of decreasing trust in mainstream media, especially for younger generations, consumers are redefining what authority looks like—and who gets to have it. In many ways, they are your competition, too.
