In my professional life, I am obsessed with audiences.
I think about them before a campaign brief is written. I think about what they need, what they believe, what they’re afraid of.
I’ve spent eight years at Kaiser Permanente helping translate complex healthcare concepts into messages that actually reach people. Audience awareness isn’t a skill I’m still developing. It’s the job.
And yet, if I’m being honest about this blog, I haven’t been thinking about the audience very much. I’ve been thinking about consistency. About showing up. About making sure Google knows I exist.
Passing the class, basically.
Because underneath that admission is a tension I haven’t fully worked out: I want this work to be seen. And I’m genuinely uncertain whether holding that desire while I write changes what ends up on the page.
Rick Rubin, the music producer behind some of the most enduring albums of the last four decades, writes in The Creative Act: A Way of Being that the audience is a real part of the creative relationship. The work is made in conversation with the people who will receive it. Caring about reach isn’t a compromise of the creative act. It’s part of it.
I find that both reassuring and inconvenient.
In advertising, the best campaigns I’ve worked on found the place where a genuine human need and a genuine creative idea overlapped. The campaigns that chased audience without conviction felt hollow. The ones that ignored audience entirely felt indulgent.
As a producer, in the work I’m building toward, that overlap is the job. A producer who ignores audience makes uncommercial art. One who chases audience without conviction makes forgettable content.
The craft is learning to hold both without letting either one win too early.
The posts that have actually connected weren’t the ones I planned most carefully. They were the ones where something I needed to say happened to be something someone else needed to hear.
That overlap felt less like strategy and more like luck. I’m trying to figure out how to find it on purpose.
When you make something meant to be seen, how much does the wanting to be seen shape what you make?
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