Insights
What changes when we start with audience? Annelise Larson examines how people find stories and what makes them care enough to stay, connecting audience relationships with the wider questions facing screen media and cultural policy.
What Is Audience Infrastructure?
What remains after a release campaign ends? Audience infrastructure is the lasting capacity to connect people with Canadian stories and sustain those relationships over time. New funding approaches offer an opportunity to invest in the work that continues between projects.
Audience Development as a Practice of Care
For years, I thought of caregiving and my work with audiences as separate parts of my life. Grieving my dad has made me reconsider that separation. This article explores what caring for someone has taught me about paying attention, and why audience relationships need care long after a story has been shared.
When Canadian Culture Becomes a Trade Barrier
The collapse of Canada-U.S. trade talks exposed a fight over who controls the pathways connecting Canadian stories with audiences. Discoverability matters, but cultural sovereignty depends on supporting the full journey from a story’s first encounter to a lasting audience relationship.
The Audience Ladder: How Emotion Moves Audiences
Making a film available solves a logistical problem. It does not make an audience care. The Audience Ladder traces the work that moves people from access to attention, choice, discussion, memory and an ongoing relationship.
The New Theatrical Is Not a Run. It Is a Relationship.
Streaming sold audiences convenience. The new theatrical must offer something home viewing cannot: intimacy, participation and a reason to gather. As Telefilm introduces more flexible production and marketing guidelines, Canadian filmmakers have an opening to build theatrical pathways around specific audiences, trusted communities and relationships that last beyond a single screening.
We Make Movies. Fandom Grows Between Them.
Filmmakers do not need to become influencers. They need the ability to identify, earn and activate audience relationships. Through the Canadian examples of Middle Life, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and Indie Game: The Movie, this Audience Reality Check explores how fandom creates leverage, and why our film system needs infrastructure capable of meeting that momentum.
How to Make Your Story Legible to the Machines That Guide Our Audiences
The old discoverability question was: can people find your story? The new question is: can the systems guiding audience attention understand it? This practical 10-point AEO checklist helps filmmakers, producers, and cultural storytellers make their work clearer, more consistent, and easier for both audiences and machines to understand.
A $600 Million Lifeline Will Not Save a Disconnected System
Canada’s screen sector is fighting over who pays for Canadian content. But the deeper question is what kind of audience system that money will build. A $600 million lifeline may buy stability, but without shared data, audience research, metadata, release-pathway learning, and community connection, it will not create transformation.
Discoverability Is Not Enough. Canada Needs Desire.
The CRTC’s new discoverability decisions recognize that Canadian and Indigenous stories need to be findable and visible. But visibility is not the same as desire. This Audience Reality Check looks at why metadata matters, why AI search raises the stakes, and why Canada needs audience infrastructure that helps stories reach people with meaning, momentum, and measurable learning.
Banner photo by Stephen McFadden on Unsplash