The media landscape has changed.
We help navigate what comes next.
Today’s screen media storytellers operate across two realities. Legacy systems built for a previous era. Digital ecosystems built around direct audience connection.
What connects them is often overlooked.
Audience is built somewhere before it scales everywhere.
veria.ca is an audience strategy and research practice led by Annelise Larson. We work with institutions, funders, and media organizations to translate audience reality into policy, funding, and decision-making.
Legacy Media
Film and television systems were built on established pathways for development, financing, and distribution. Those pathways no longer guarantee connection with audiences.
Digital Creators
Caught in the “missing middle,” digital creators are building direct relationships with audiences, often without access to the structures, resources, or business frameworks needed to maintain and grow their enterprises.
While these storytellers are doing the ground-level work, institutions, governments, and funders are the ones tasked with solving these systemic problems.
That is where veria.ca comes in. We provide the foundational research, policy guidance, and strategic insight that institutions need to make informed decisions. By translating how audience is actually built and sustained today, we help organizations understand what is working in emerging and independent creator spaces and how to apply those lessons to futureproof the entire screen media industry.
Audience starts somewhere.
Audiences are not abstract. They are rooted in place, language, and community. They form in physical spaces and within digital environments.
They are built in independent cinemas, community spaces, festivals, and pop-up screenings. They are also built through platforms, niche communities, and direct creator relationships online. These are the environments where connection happens and where stories begin to matter to people.
From there, audiences extend across platforms and borders, both online and off.
Most successful storytellers move fluidly between these layers. They build trust in specific communities, whether geographic or digital, and then expand outward through networks, distribution systems, and platforms.
Media systems, however, are still structured as if these are separate worlds.
veria.ca works across this gap.
We connect hyperlocal audience development with national and global strategy. We help organizations understand how community-based engagement, exhibition, and audience relationships translate into long-term cultural, social and economic impact.
In a country as large and diverse as Canada, cultural connection and nation-building begin at the community level. Local audiences are not the smallest unit of the system. They are the foundation.
About Annelise
Annelise Larson sits at the rare intersection of legacy media, digital creators, and public policy. As a strategic translator, she bridges the gaps between these distinct ecosystems, turning audience realities into actionable strategy.
Through veria.ca, she brings a unique intersection of cross-sector experience to organizations navigating the shifting screen:
31+ years in digital knowledge and marketing
17+ years in audience research, development, and solo entrepreneurship
15+ years of teaching, speaking, and writing
14+ years in legacy media-making (film and TV)
9+ years driving government research projects and participating in think-tank consultations
As an international speaker, researcher, and strategic advisor bridging Canada, the US, the UK, the EU and beyond, her foundational work includes:
Major Policy Reports: Cultivating the Canadian Creator Economy (2026), Navigating the Shifting Screen (2025), Futureproofing Canadian Film (2022), and Thanks COVID!: 15 Lessons for Film Distribution from the First Wave (2021).
The STORY+AUDIENCE Podcast: Conversations bridging the gap between legacy storytelling and digital audience realities.
Articles & Reality Checks: Ongoing thought leadership and commentary, including the new "Audience Reality Check" series, published on LinkedIn and in key industry publications.