Each speaker challenged assumptions by bringing a different lens to familiar problems. Here are five takeaways from Media Insights that stayed with me:
- Efficiency is Improving, but the Human Condition Less So
In the session, “The World is Watching: Why Understanding Sports Engagement is Key to World Cup Success,” Jason Mander, Chief Insight Officer at GWI, shared data that was both unsurprising and unsettling: face to face socializing is declining.
Despite increased connectivity, people are more isolated. A bright spot is live sports which remains one of the few media experiences still commonly viewed together. For brands, that makes it powerful. For people, it makes it meaningful. Maybe togetherness, not attention, is the real scarce currency.
2. Creators Are Customers, Too
With the presentation, “What Creators Want – How Brands Can Best Tailor Their Marketing Strategy Based on the Voice of the Creator,” Aarti Bhaskaran, Global Head of Ad Research & Insights at Snap Inc., made a compelling case for a shift that brands have yet to fully embrace: Creators are customers too. Campaigns are often designed to extract value from creators rather than enable their success. But when creators thrive, their communities grow stronger, engagement deepens and brands benefit.
3. Language Shapes Reality
“Fragmentation” is one of the most used words to describe today’s media ecosystem. But as Selena Hsu, Vice President, Marketplace & Portfolio Insights at The Walt Disney Company, pointed out, that’s a supplier-side perspective. Hsu gave the presentation, “Media in Motion: Following Audiences Through Time,” along with Ellen Morgan, Director, Content, Consumer & Brand Insights at The Walt Disney Company.
From the consumer’s point of view, however, media doesn’t necessarily feel broken. It feels ambient, fluid and continuous. Language frames how we think. When we change the frame, we change the solutions we design.
4. Mental Models: The Shortest Distance Between Insight and Action
Vita Molis, Head of Namer, B2B Institute at LinkedIn, and Derek Yueh, Partnership Lead, The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, held a workshop on “Storytelling Through Mental Models: How the B2B Institute Builds Mental Models That Stick.” They discussed the mental frameworks people use to understand things.
Decisions often stall not because of a lack of insight, but because those insights fail to land with stakeholders. By using familiar metaphors, they showed how presenting information in a way audiences intuitively understand is clarifying, making alignment easier and action a lot more likely.
5. Optimization Can Reinforce Inequity
Perhaps the most confronting session came from Jason Harvey, Executive Vice President & General Manager at BET+. In his keynote, “Harnessing the Power of Data to Amplify Black Stories,” Harvey unpacked a flawed feedback loop in Black content. The pattern is circular: underinvestment leads to lower visibility, which then “proves” the content is niche or underperforming thus justifying continued underinvestment. Optimization tools can report the outputs but can also be blind to the structure that created them.
Optimization without true consumer understanding not only misses opportunity, it reinforces inequity.
Perspective is Our Advantage
My biggest takeaway from the Media Insights conference sessions I attended was that our most meaningful gains will come from optimizing how we think. In an insights industry and market research community obsessed with performance, the ability to shift perspective to see more clearly is our advantage.
