The Economics of Engagement Firstly, a huge thanks to everyone that engaged with my first musing last week. It was great to connect with so many new peers, and reconnect with familiar faces, so I appreciate your taking the time to reach out! This week, I’m switching gears from looking backwards to something I’m seeing today. There’s a phrase that I’ve been using in conversations with customers and investors that seems to land every time: the economics of engagement. I'll explain what I mean, because I think it captures something the industry hasn’t named clearly enough yet. The economics of engagement is the relationship between what it costs to produce content, how widely and effectively it reaches an audience, and what value that audience interaction actually generates. For most of the last decade, those three variables moved in reasonably predictable ways. You could build a business around them, but that predictability is gone. The cost of production is collapsing because AI is accelerating that faster than most forecasts anticipated. But fragmentation has made distribution exponentially more complex, and attention has now become the scarcest and most contested resource in any content business. Attention is a currency. Producing more, cheaper, is the instinctive response to that pressure. It’s also, in most cases, wrong. The organisations that I see navigating this well have made a different bet. They’re not chasing volume but instead engineering engagement — building the capability to produce the right content, in the right format, for the right audience, at the right moment. And what’s bringing them consistency and scale as they do this is embedding AI into the workflow as an operating model, not treating it as something to be bolted on as a feature. That’s the difference between AI that saves you time and AI that goes beyond efficiency gains to actually change what’s possible. From a scalability perspective, it’s what’s moving a production team from covering one market to covering five. And, fiscally, it’s the shift from the economics that constrain you and the economics that compound in your favour. The technology to do this exists today. The gap I see (and I’m referring specifically to what I see across media, sports and enterprise audiences) isn’t a technology gap, but a transition gap. It’s knowing which workflows to reimagine first, which investments compound, and which changes require the whole organisation to move together. That’s the conversation I find myself having more and more. I actually think it’s the most important one in our industry right now, and would love to hear from anyone about the economic impact they see from the engagement they drive. PS the photo below was of the valued members of our Vizrt Customer Advisory Board in May. My thanks as always to our customers that help us build and validate our strategy and evolving role in the industry. #EconomicsOfEngagement
Martin Cade
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hope you are doing well Rohit Nagarajan
Ryan Poggi Pierre Milet Anna Dahlfors Louise Bjerring Sabel Chris Black Lionel Schonberg Karen Quinn Daniel Collett