This post expands on David’s recent interview with The CMO Wire.
Culture moves in days. Most marketing teams move in quarters.
That gap is where brands lose. A trend has to get big enough to show up in a dashboard, then survive an approval chain, then get built into a campaign. By the time it ships, the audience has moved on and the brand shows up to a party that ended last week.
I talked about this with The CMO Wire recently, and the core of it comes down to three tests. You can run them on your own brand this week, before a single campaign goes out the door.
Why “Audience First” Is Usually Just a Slogan
Almost every brand I meet describes itself as audience first. It’s in the brand deck. It’s in the CMO’s keynote. It’s on the careers page.
Then you look at how the team actually operates. The calendar is locked through Q2. Every dollar is assigned to a named campaign. Nothing goes live without the CMO’s sign-off. That brand can be audience aware. It can study its audience closely. What it can’t do is respond to its audience in the moment, because nothing in the structure allows it.
Sharp creative will not fix that. A timing problem rooted in how the org is built needs a structural fix. So here is how to check yours.
Test 1: The Calendar Test
Pull up your marketing calendar for next quarter. Is every slot already spoken for?
To be clear, you need a calendar. Product launches, tentpole events, and seasonal moments deserve real planning. As I told The CMO Wire:
“Of course you have to have a calendar with some set dates and things on it. But if that is the only way you are operating in 2026, then you are not operating on the conversation.”
The fix is to design open space into the plan on purpose. Mark windows with no campaign attached. Treat them as real commitments, the same way you would treat a launch date, so they don’t quietly fill up with someone’s pet project.
Pass: Your calendar has planned, protected windows for moments that haven’t happened yet. Fail: Every week is assigned before the quarter starts.
Test 2: The Budget Test
Now look at the money. Is any of it held in reserve with no campaign attached?
Most budgets are fully allocated at planning time. That feels responsible. It also means that when a real moment breaks in your community, the only way to fund a response is to pull money from something already in flight, which takes meetings, which takes time.
There’s a second trap here. Teams that do keep a reserve often spend it chasing whatever is already viral. Massive engagement numbers on a trending post usually mean the moment is over. The early signal lives in smaller, faster places: the comments, the group chats, the creator streams where the conversation starts.
Catching that signal takes two things:
- Real-time social listening from people who are actually embedded in those spaces, beyond what a dashboard can show.
- Ongoing community management, so your team is already in the room when something starts to move.
Pass: There is money set aside with no campaign attached, and the team knows how to spot moments early. Fail: Every dollar is assigned, or the reserve gets spent on things that already peaked.
Test 3: The Approval Test
This is the one that exposes the most brands. When a moment breaks, who can say yes?
“If it is just the CMO or the executive, the company is not audience first; it is hierarchical.”
The people closest to your community see moments first. Community managers, social leads, and creators who are native to the space know when something is real and when it’s noise. If they have to escalate every call to an executive who doesn’t live in that community, the moment is gone before the answer comes back.
That’s why I push brands to bring endemic creators on as consultants. Let culture come up from inside the community instead of being guessed at in a conference room.
Pass: The people closest to your fans can approve spend inside guardrails set ahead of time. Fail: Every reactive idea waits on the CMO.
What This Looked Like at Twitch
At Twitch, we didn’t discover culture in a marketing conference room.
“That came out of our chat feature, it came out from our moderators, it came from our streamers.”
That’s how creator co-streams of Thursday Night Football started. Streamers were already watching games with their communities and talking over them. We built a program around what the audience was already doing, and it grew viewership 73% year over year. ESPN’s Manningcast later took the same idea mainstream. You can read the full story in the Thursday Night Football case study.
None of it would have happened if the idea had to start in a quarterly planning deck.
The Trend Deck Problem
A lot of teams think they’ve solved this with a weekly trends report. They haven’t.
“If your only exposure to where culture is going is through corporate mechanisms, let’s say a weekly trends deck, you are a follower, and you’re always going to be six to eight weeks behind the people who live in that community.”
Trend decks are useful for context. They make a poor early warning system. By the time something is big enough to make the deck, the community has usually moved on.
You Can’t Fake Your Way In
Passing these three tests doesn’t give a brand permission to show up anywhere it wants. Audiences can tell when a brand is trying too hard.
“We’ve all been at the party when someone shows up trying way too hard, and everyone’s thinking, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’ That’s the brand in the room.”
When you enter a new community, treat your existing playbooks as hypotheses. The lifecycle program that worked in your last market is a starting point to test.
“The quickest thing you can do to fail is think that you have the answer because you’ve gotten it one time before or 10 times before.”
Stay curious. Run small experiments. Expect the first version to be wrong. Nobody gets it right on the whiteboard the first time.
The Hidden Blocker: Your Data
One more thing tends to slow brands down, and it’s less visible than a locked calendar. Many teams hold a lot of useful customer data and can’t put it to work. Consent flows are incomplete. The backend schema that would connect the data to marketing tools was never built.
Think of it like a toolbox. You can own great tools, but if they’re thrown in a pile, you can’t grab the right one when you need it. If you want to move fast on a moment, your growth and lifecycle infrastructure has to be organized before the moment arrives.
How to Run the Three Tests This Week
- Audit the calendar. Count the weeks next quarter with no campaign attached. If the answer is zero, block some out and protect them.
- Audit the budget. Find out how much money has no campaign assigned. If it’s zero, agree on a reserve and the rules for spending it.
- Audit the approval chain. Write down who can approve a reactive idea today and how long it takes. Then decide who should be able to, and set the guardrails.
- Audit your listening. List the people on your team who actually live inside your community. If the list is short, consider bringing endemic creators on as consultants.
If you want a structured way to do this, it’s the same place every ABCT® engagement starts: an honest Audit of how the team actually works, before anyone writes a plan.
The Bottom Line
“The best moment your brand will have next year hasn’t happened yet. Leave money for it, and give the people closest to your fans the authority to spend it. You won’t regret it.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What does audience-first marketing mean?
Audience-first marketing means a brand’s planning, budget, and decision rights are built to respond to what its audience is doing right now. A brand earns the label through how it operates: a calendar with room for unplanned moments, budget held in reserve for them, and approval authority held by the people closest to the community.
How can I tell if my brand is audience first?
Run three tests. The calendar test: is every slot in the plan already filled? The budget test: is there money reserved with no campaign attached? The approval test: can the people closest to your community say yes without waiting on an executive? If the answer to all three points to locked plans and top-down approval, the brand can only react to moments after they pass.
How much marketing budget should be held in reserve for reactive moments?
There is no universal number. The right reserve depends on how fast your category moves and how often moments break in your community. The principle that matters is that the reserve exists, has no campaign attached at the start of the quarter, and can be spent quickly by people close to the audience.
Why are trend reports not enough to keep up with culture?
By the time a trend is big enough to show up in a corporate trends deck, the people inside that community have usually moved on. According to David Hampian, teams whose only exposure to culture is a weekly trends deck run six to eight weeks behind the community. Real-time listening from people embedded in those spaces closes that gap.
Who should approve reactive marketing spend?
The people closest to the community: community managers, social leads, and endemic creators brought in as consultants. Executives should set the guardrails and the reserve size up front, then hand day-to-day authority to the team that can see moments as they form.
Want to know whether your marketing org can move at the speed of your audience? Book a strategy call and we’ll run the three tests on your calendar, budget, and approval chain together. As a fractional CMO, I help growth-stage brands build the structure that lets them show up for the moments that matter.