A year of unprecedented change has underlined all I’ve ever known about consumer media; that audiences love original content that excites and inspires them, content they can rely on, relate to, and trust, and content that fits unobtrusively into daily life.
Also, that content creators are busy. That the content they create is becoming evermore complex and diversified, and the hungry mouths of distribution platforms will never be fully fed.
None of this is news to me. But at the same time, everything feels very different.
Generative AI has exploded opportunities for content creation. The ability to reformat and repurpose IP, provide hyper-relevant experiences, unlock archives and give audiences autonomy over mode of consumption is dizzying. As is the volatile marketplace, with platform partnerships and technical integrations challenging the very concept of what content could be.
We’re left asking ourselves an existential question: in a world where audiences might access automations tailored to their every whim, what is the role of content creator and how do we best serve?
The answer is reassuringly familiar: by giving audiences the relevant content they value created by people they trust.
To deliver this at Immediate, we’re focusing on two key areas:
- Content creators: ensuring we’re represented by authentic voices with lived experience in their field. People who reflect our audiences and the topics that hold relevance to them. We’re expanding our creator ecosystem beyond pure publisher broadcast and embracing the plethora of creator communities increasingly meeting audience need. We need to find symbiotic ways to be part of communities and reflect and represent them as well as inform and inspire. Authenticity cannot be short cut and neither can relationship building and therefore we need to find more time. We need to be creative, collaborative, experimental and innovative and that’s hard to do as an add-on to the already groaning daily grind.
- Therefore, we need to also invest in efficiency; finding the tools and workflows that will redraft, repurpose and reformat our quality content and allow us to feed the myriad platforms on which our audience expects us to exist. Lots of these efficiencies will be AI driven but not all. This is about organisational set up, asset management and infrastructure, data-informed marketing, and planning processes that best set up teams to efficiently collaborate and succeed.
Publishers walk a gauntlet between pure play creators free from the shackles of traditional publishing complexity, and huge tech giants increasingly controlling access to consumer. But we still have a USP. Brands sit at a unique junction between authority and authenticity. The technical advancements disrupting our market are also those that can bring us closer to our audiences and deliver personalised value more than we ever have before.
This article was first published in the Publishing Partners Guide 2025, which was distributed with the January / February 2025 issue of InPublishing magazine. You can register to receive InPublishing magazine here.
