In my more than a decade covering the media industry, it has always shocked me how little attention many media organisations have paid to thinking about what their audience – their customers – actually want and need.
Digital audience metrics have helped change that to some degree, giving insight into how people interact with the output – whether hard news, entertainment, business information or anything else – but deeper thinking about exactly what media’s consumers want to get out of the content produced has often been patchy.
There have been attempts to change that, and one of the most influential has been the “User Needs” model brought in at the BBC, in London, by Dmitry Shishkin when he worked in senior roles in its World Service during 2016-18. User Needs attempts to force media organisations to think more deliberately about how they produce content to meet – you guessed it – the needs of their users. It’s currently used by a range of organisations including the New York Times, Vox and the Daily Maverick.
Fundamentally, the model asks media organisations to define what needs they are trying to meet in their audience, and then delineate how each piece of output meets one (or maybe more) of those needs. A daily news organisation might, for example, decide that its audience’s needs include being updated on the big story of the day, having a complex issue explained, or simply being entertained. The key thing, however, is thinking about how each of those needs can be best met by the characteristics of each piece of content.
“The most important thing is to remember that you only exist because of the audience, you don’t exist because of anything else,” Shishkin told Flashes & Flames. “It’s a sobering thought and not a lot of people ask themselves that question, ‘why do we exist in the market’? and it’s a useful question to ask.”
The point, says Shishkin, is to improve efficiency, focus on the most effective ways to meet revenue goals and, particularly important in the digital age, help differentiate a media brand from the wealth of competition.
“You always need to remember that every single piece of content exists for a reason. A lot of media organizations at least, in my view, don’t allow enough time to think about this and it’s really crucial because that is what your unique selling point is. It’s what differentiates you from the crowd.”
That differentiation is as vital for ad-based businesses as it is for subscription focused outlets. For ad-based businesses, it can help not just make a more coherent pitch for advertisers, but help increase engagement by giving a new framework for thinking about what works and doesn’t beyond subject matter and less nuanced characteristics such as length. For subscription businesses, it can help point to the types of content that convert and retain subscribers. For the latter, many outlets have been tracking different kinds of content in this way for years. But often using categories that are carryovers from print – op eds, explainers, long reads etc – which have more to do with physical layout and newsroom structure than the way people actually consume the content.
“You will be able to say ‘we haven’t known that people who are already subscribed. They like our “inspire me” articles, but we just don’t produce enough of that’,” says Shishkin. “So that means this is immediately a message to your editorial team, but this is also a message to your product team potentially because they will say ‘well actually every single article needs to have an “inspire me” module inside of our furniture or recirculation modules there because otherwise it won’t we are not going to give value to people’.”
The key point is that, by working out which needs your content is serving, you can then track how effective different formats are in meeting those needs (as long as you can put in place an internal taxonomy). It has the advantage as well of adding an extra layer of analysis that isn’t just “people like reading about Kim Kardashian, or “deforestation in Brazil” – journalists can write about the topics that interest them and readers, without being tied to specific topics simply because the numbers look good – as long as they can meet the same needs that the data says the audience is looking for.
Shiskin is well aware that getting media organisations to re-think what they do – especially amid the daily grind of actually putting content in front of their audience – is no easy task. It is unlikely to work without clear leadership and communication from the top, and the involvement of stakeholders from across the different parts of an organisation.
“I prefer to talk about user needs when there are three types of disciplines in the room,” he says. “There is product person. There is an editorial person, there is a data person and by proxy, there is also a commercial person. So ideally it’s four-dimensional thing.”
“Commercial people have their own way of talking about the company they work for, to advertisers and the user needs work will inevitably contribute to a narrative, which is going to be somewhat different and hopefully much more efficient, much more effective. I think that you don’t necessarily need to have them in the room from the Day 1 because obviously it’s a complicated project and people get very defensive. Crucially, I think it’s also about understanding that people from the editor-in-chief to the youngest product people need to know how the organisation earns money.”
Shishkin’s ideas are – to my mind – not revolutionary. Elements have been part of thinking from media businesses in various ways for years. But what the User Needs model does is provide a framework for putting it all together with a focus on the customer. And it’s a focus on the people who actually consume media that will make the difference between success and failure for an industry that is, as Shishkin says, nothing without its audience.
To learn more about the User Needs model and how to implement it, you can find a post from Dmitry Shishkin and a white paper laying out the approach, here.
