Audience Reality Check #3
Photo licensed under the Unsplash+ License
For 30 years, I have argued that audience strategy starts with a deceptively simple question: where are the people you hope to reach already looking, gathering, asking, and caring?
Then be there.
Not by chasing them or shouting louder, but by understanding their language, their questions, their communities, and the pathways they already use to find meaning. This principle has guided my work through the early search era, the rise of social media, the platform economy, streaming fragmentation, and now the emerging age of AI search.
The tools keep changing. The audience principle does not.
The CRTC Has Moved the Conversation Forward
On May 21, the CRTC released two major decisions connected to the modernization of Canada’s broadcasting system. The public release framed the decisions around two goals: ensuring more stable support for Canadian and Indigenous content, and making that content easier for audiences to find.
That matters.
For too long, Canadian screen policy has focused heavily on whether Canadian content gets made. These decisions move the conversation further into what happens after that: how Canadian and Indigenous stories are made available, made visible, promoted, measured, and supported across the platforms people actually use.
This is a meaningful shift. The CRTC is recognizing that availability alone is not enough. Canadian and Indigenous content cannot simply exist somewhere inside a catalogue, platform, interface, app, channel, or archive and be expected to magically reach people.
It has to be findable, visible, and described in ways that both people and systems can understand.
But this is still only part of the audience question.
Supported is not the same as sustained. Available is not the same as found. Visible is not the same as wanted.
Metadata Is Where Discoverability Begins
One of the most important details in the CRTC’s discoverability decision is its commitment to establish an industry working group on metadata and metrics for audiovisual content. Metadata sounds boring. It is not.
Metadata is the information attached to a work that helps people and systems understand what it is. At the most basic level, it can include title, genre, language, cast, director, production company, release date, and format.
But for cultural work, that is not enough.
Meaningful cultural metadata also needs to help describe region, community, themes, tone, accessibility features, language context, cultural specificity, subject matter, audience relevance, and relationships to other works, histories, and conversations.
A film is not just a “documentary.” It might be a climate justice story rooted in northern Indigenous knowledge. A series is not just a “comedy.” It might be a queer coming-of-age story from rural Canada. A feature is not just a “drama.” It might be a Black Canadian family story shaped by migration, faith, music, food, and intergenerational memory.
If those deeper signals are missing, our stories become harder to find, recommend, contextualize, measure, and connect to the audiences most likely to care.
Search Is Changing Again
This matters even more because search itself is changing again.
For decades, we talked about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. At its best, SEO was never just about tricking search engines. It was about understanding what people were already trying to find, then making sure useful and relevant information could be found.
Now we are moving into the age of Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. People are no longer just typing short phrases into search boxes and scanning a list of links. Increasingly, they are asking full questions and expecting synthesized answers from AI-powered tools.
They may ask what to watch if they care about climate change, whether there are good Indigenous science fiction films, which Canadian documentaries could help a class discuss food sovereignty, or what films explore grief, disability, migration, humour, faith, or family in ways that feel relevant to their lives.
If Canadian stories are poorly described, weakly linked, inconsistently categorized, or disconnected from the language audiences actually use, they risk being excluded from the next layer of digital discovery. Not because they lack value, but because the systems cannot understand them, or because there is not enough meaningful cultural context around them.
Discoverability Is Not Desire
This is why the CRTC’s metadata and metrics work matters. It is a vital first step toward ensuring Canadian and Indigenous stories can be seen, categorized, measured, and surfaced in a more complex discovery environment. But metadata alone will not solve the deeper problem.
Metadata can help systems understand what a story is. Audience infrastructure helps people understand why it matters.
This is where Canada’s screen policy conversation still needs to go further. Discoverability asks whether people can find a story. Desire asks whether they want it.
A film can be prominently placed on a homepage and still mean nothing to the person scrolling past it. A series can be correctly tagged and still fail to connect. A documentary can be available on a platform and still never enter the conversations, classrooms, communities, newsletters, podcasts, festivals, watch parties, social feeds, and search pathways where its audience already is.
Culture does not move through availability alone. It moves through meaning, emotion, identity, trust, timing, conversation, and community.
Canada Needs Audience Infrastructure
Audience development cannot be treated as the final marketing step after a work is finished. Marketing matters, but audience development is a deeper strategic practice. It asks who a story is for, where those people already gather, what they care about, what language they use, what context they need, and what pathways might carry the story toward them with meaning.
The point is not to force every story through the same release model. The point is to understand what kind of audience relationship each story needs. That requires infrastructure.
Audience infrastructure means the systems, research, practices, data, relationships, training, metadata, and community pathways that help Canadian screen stories reach people with meaning, momentum, and measurable learning.
Without this learning layer, every release remains an isolated experiment. With it, Canada can begin to understand how stories actually move through today’s fragmented media environment.
The CRTC has opened an important door by recognizing that discoverability, metadata, measurement, and visibility matter. Now Canada needs to walk through that door with a larger ambition. Not just to make Canadian stories available. Not just to make them visible.
To make them desired.