What Is Audience Infrastructure?
Audience Reality Check #11
What should remain after a release or promotional campaign ends?
Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash
The Canada Media Fund’s September report, Beyond Project Funding, opens a conversation we need to have. Released alongside a new $5 million Business Development pilot, it recognizes that screen companies need support beyond individual productions. Audience development is explicitly included in the program. That creates an opportunity to ask what this investment should leave behind.
When a publicly supported project completes its release campaign, what audience capacity remains? Can the next project benefit from the relationships developed along the way, or does the work of finding people who care begin again?
What Makes It Infrastructure?
Audience infrastructure is the lasting capacity to help people find Canadian screen stories and sustain relationships with the audiences who care about them. It can live within a company or serve many media storytellers across a community. Its value grows through continued use and attention.
An independent cinema develops trust with its local audience over years of programming. A maintained newsletter gives people a way to hear about work they’ve chosen to follow. Audience research can inform future decisions, provided someone retains it and knows how to apply it. Each needs people doing the work between releases.
In my last Audience Reality Check, I wrote about audience development as a practice of care. Infrastructure is what makes that care possible over time. Relationships need somewhere to continue, and someone with paid time and the resources to tend them.
Some of It is Already Here
Independent cinemas make this visible. NICE’s September Market Access Barriers report found that independent cinemas earned nearly 60% of Canadian feature film box office in 2025, despite accounting for only 16% of the theatrical market. Its booking research also examined how programmers assess a film’s fit with their audiences.
That knowledge matters to the films passing through a cinema. So does the trust that encourages someone to take a chance on an unfamiliar title. This capacity belongs to the exhibitor, but its benefits extend across Canadian releases. Community screening networks can offer similar continuity, carrying relationships and experience from one film to another.
Digital creators offer another way to think about this. An ongoing audience relationship gives them somewhere to introduce new work and learn from the response. People still decide whether to follow. Caring about one project doesn’t guarantee interest in the next, but a continuing relationship creates an opportunity to invite them.
Learn Earlier. Keep Learning Afterwards.
Screen Australia’s Market & Audience Impact & Insights Initiative offers a useful example of public support arriving while creative decisions can still change. It provides audience research during late-stage development and audience testing at the rough-cut stage. Understanding who might care about a story becomes part of making it.
CMF’s company-level investment and Screen Australia’s earlier audience research suggest a productive direction for Canada. How could we connect that early learning with capacity that continues across projects? Knowledge gained through one project could inform future work, while each new story would still need its own audience understanding.
Some of that learning could also benefit the wider sector. A rolling series of practical case studies could follow audience pathways through different releases, examining where relationships continued and where they broke down. An unsuccessful attempt can teach us a great deal, if there’s space to examine it honestly.
Who Keeps It Working?
Telefilm’s revised Marketing Program already recognizes audience-facing work, including community screenings and personnel maintaining social media activity. The next question is how support attached to individual films can help sustain capacity between them.
Building a channel is only the beginning. Someone needs paid time to maintain it and respond to the people who arrive. Asking our storytellers to absorb that work indefinitely makes continuing relationships depend on spare time that may never materialize.
Public investment should recognize the organizations doing this work across projects, including exhibitors and community screening networks. It should also consider what remains after the immediate activity ends. Reach and revenue matter, but so does whether an organization is better equipped to find and serve audiences next time.
Every story will need to earn its own relationship with the people watching. Audience infrastructure can make the invitation easier to extend and give people somewhere to return. That’s a cultural investment worth making, helping each story leave a more useful path for the stories that follow.