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I’ve sat in a lot of rooms where someone pitches a ‘big idea’. Usually it’s a format. Sometimes it’s a title. Occasionally it’s a deck with a mood board. What it almost never starts with is the audience.
That’s the wrong way around and I think it’s why so much branded content quietly dies on arrival.
The best original content I’ve worked on, and the best I’ve consumed as a viewer or listener, didn’t begin with a creative spark. It began with a behavioural one. Someone noticed how an audience was already paying attention to something, and built into that gravity rather than against it.
Take SNAP, the podcast series we recently launched at AO Originals about John McEnroe’s default at the 1990 Australian Open. The instinct in a sports content team is to chase the highlight, the big match, the trophy moment.
But we already knew, from years of watching how tennis fans actually engage online, that the stories travelling furthest weren’t the wins. They were the ruptures. The arguments at changeovers. The press conferences that went sideways. The moments where the sport stopped behaving like sport and started behaving like drama.
That’s a behavioural insight, not a creative one. The creative work comes after. Once you know your audience leans in for complication and contradiction, then you can ask what format suits it, what voice it needs, how long it should be and where to release it. SNAP is a four-part narrative podcast because that’s what the behaviour pointed to. Not because someone in a meeting said, ‘Let’s do a podcast!’
I think a lot of content teams have this backwards because the incentives are backwards. Briefs come down asking for a campaign, a series, a format. Almost never do they come down asking, ‘What is our audience doing right now that we should pay attention to?’ So creative teams generate ideas in a vacuum, polish them, ship them and wonder why they bounce.
Two examples from outside my own world prove the point. The Rest Is History didn’t succeed because Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook had a clever format. It succeeded because they noticed a behaviour that publishers had largely ignored. Adults wanted to learn history the way they learn from a good dinner party guest, through digression and personality, not through the tidy structures of a documentary. The format followed the behaviour. Patagonia’s content has worked for two decades for the same reason. They figured out that their audience wasn’t watching outdoor films to be sold gear. They were watching to feel something about the places they loved. So Patagonia made films about those places. The brand sat in the background. The behaviour came first.
The counterexample, and it’s a big one, is almost every brand podcast launched between 2018 and 2022. The format was hot, the budgets were available and the agencies were pitching hard. So thousands of them got made. Most of them assumed an audience would show up because the content existed. Almost none of them did the harder work of asking whether their audience was actually listening to podcasts about that subject, in that voice and at that length. The graveyard is enormous, and most of the headstones say the same thing: great idea, wrong starting point.
The pattern I’ve come to trust is simple. Before we greenlight anything at AO Originals, I want to know three things. What is the audience already doing? What emotional or cultural itch is going unscratched? And what platform behaviours, not platform features, are we designing for?
If a project can answer those three, the creative work that follows tends to be sharper because it’s anchored to something real. If it can’t, the creative work tends to drift, because it’s anchored to a hunch.
None of this means killing big ideas. It means earning them. The teams I admire most spend more time watching their audience than they do brainstorming for them. They treat audience behaviour as a primary creative input, not a downstream metric to chase after the work is made.
The shift sounds small. It isn’t. It changes who gets to speak first in the room. And in my experience, the room that lets the audience speak first makes much better content than the room that doesn’t.
Xavier Muhlebach is the head of Original Content at Tennis Australia
Image: Supplied
Read more: Thinking of starting a video podcast? Read this first
