How to structure an audience team

There's no right answer to how a company should organise its research, insight, data and analytics people. Here's the one we'd argue for.

Start at the top. The audience's needs should be represented in every major decision, and that only happens if someone senior answers for it. We'd create a Chief Audience Officer, sitting with the executive team, whose job is exactly that.

Two teams report to them.

Audience Strategy is what most companies call insight. It brings research, insight and analytics people together around one goal: use what target audiences want and need to find the business decisions that will drive growth. Its tools are qualitative and quantitative research, internal data, and social, market and competitor intelligence. Its output is recommendations.

Audience Science is the data scientists and economists. It tests the hypotheses Strategy produces. Which decisions actually change audience behaviour? What's an investment or a partnership likely to be worth? What did the last one return? Its tools are experiments, causal methods and economic models.

They answer different questions. Strategy asks what the audience needs and what we should do about it. Science asks whether doing it worked, and what it was worth. That's the case for two teams, and for one boss: someone has to carry the second answer back to the first question.

What changes when much of the routine analysis is automated? The structure holds. One assumption underneath it doesn't. Junior people used to learn the craft by doing the routine work, and the routine work is going. It came up again and again at the TMRE Insights Executive Retreat in Denver in October 2026: "If the tools take the routine work, the learning goes with it unless someone replaces it on purpose." So the Chief Audience Officer now has a third job beside running the two teams. They have to build judgement deliberately, in people who'll no longer pick it up from writing the report by hand.

What to do on Monday

• Draw where your research, insight, data science and analytics people sit today, and who each of them reports to.
• Name the one senior person who'd answer for the audience in an executive meeting. If you can't, that's the gap.
• Take one big recent decision and ask who tested whether it worked. If nobody did, you don't have Audience Science, whatever your org chart calls it.
• List the judgement your juniors used to learn from routine work, and decide how each piece will be taught now.

Related service: Steer

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