Give your audience a seat at the table
Audience insight changes decisions only when it's in the room where they're made. Too often it's in another building.
28th March 2024
Most organisations collect audience data. Far fewer let it shape their decisions. The data sits with a team that reports upwards and waits to be asked.
Ray Tarantino of Forequest described the pattern well. Too many companies treat their data team like "dishwashers in the back of a restaurant", when they should be "at the table with everybody, analyzing everything in real-time."
David has worked on both sides of that line. At EMI Music, audience insight had a seat at the decision-making table, and strategy moved with what fans were doing. In other businesses his team sat in a separate building, cut off from the decisions it was meant to inform. At one global brand, hired to lead a new insight division, he was given no more than 15 minutes with the executive team, and had to book them months ahead.
Fifteen minutes is a report. A seat is being there when the options are framed, not only when the answer is checked. It means the questions about audiences get asked while they can still change the choice.
That matters because growth comes from few places: selling more to the audiences you have, reaching new ones, or offering something new. Each depends on understanding the people involved, and that understanding is worth most at the moment of choice.
The question is back near the top of insight leaders' minds. Our analysis of the TMRE Insights Executive Retreats, which David hosts, tracks what insight leaders choose to talk about off the record. How insight earns a place in decisions took 14% of the discussion in Las Vegas in October 2025. It rose to 28% at Cannes in June 2026, and was 27% in Denver in October 2026. (Different rooms, so read it as a direction rather than a measurement.)
Denver added a warning. A seat isn't enough on its own: "the seat is necessary but not sufficient, because access doesn't confer influence." Getting into the room is the start. Being listened to depends on speaking each leader's language and arguing for what they care about.
What to do on Monday
- List your organisation's five biggest decisions this year, and note whether insight is in the room for each one or only sees the outcome.
- For one of them, ask to join the meeting where the options are set, not the one where they're approved.
- Find out how each key decision-maker likes their evidence (numbers, stories, video, a pre-read) and give it to them that way.
Related service: Steer