Do you know your fans?

As audiences coalesce around micro-communities as a refuge from an ongoing barrage of content and platforms, how brands connect with them matters. Offerings like Glossier’s Slack group, Vogue Club, and A24 All Access reveal a trend of brands rethinking their audience loyalty strategies. Providing space for fans to interact with your brand (and each... See more

As we shift to a cookieless future, it’s time to find—and support—your fans.

Participation in a brand’s community can’t be as transactional as a PR pitch, as seemed to be the case with Tudum. Brands have to provide value, such as deeply reported and well-written content or meaningful experiences with like-minded community members. It’s about capturing interest, not pageviews.

But one theme that got us as editorial-y minded folks talking was the idea of fandoms. Particularly how—and why—to build an owned audience through editorial content and then cultivate them as an engaged and loyal community. It’s one thing to build a fandom, another to nurture it.

Of course there’s general subscription fatigue and the fact that “Netflix now exists in the hyper-competitive world it created,” as Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote. There’s inflation and the trend of people pulling back on their subscriptions, leading some to call it, The Great Unsubscribe.