What’s Next for Media Operators: Lessons from A Media Operator Summit

Last updated: November 12, 2025

The tone across media has shifted — and nowhere was that clearer than at A Media Operator Summit. Heading into 2026, operators are prioritizing sustainability over speed, and execution over experimentation. The focus now is on building disciplined, profitable businesses that can weather market changes. As the event’s founding sponsor, Omeda has had a close-up view of how that mindset is shaping the next phase of growth.

The Big Email List is Finally Dead

Nobody was bragging about database size this year. The talk was all about engagement depth. How many people open, click, and come back?

As one attendee said, “I’d rather have 10,000 engaged subscribers than 100,000 who ignore us.” The math finally caught up with the truth: reach without relationship is just noise.

That shift is why Omeda’s audience platform was built around engagement, not vanity metrics. Our clients measure audience health through behavior — frequency, recency, conversion — not just subscriber count. That’s how you build sustainable audience growth.

Learn more in our guide: Smaller Lists, Bigger Wins

First-party Data Infrastructure is Table Stakes

Nobody was saying “we should collect more emails.” They were comparing notes on identity resolution, behavioral tagging, and lifecycle automation. The sophistication level has jumped dramatically.

Some media companies know their audience at the user level, complete with behavioral history. Others are still sending bulk emails and hoping for the best. That gap is growing fast and it’s defining who wins.

This is where Omeda fits squarely in the conversation. Our unified customer database connects every channel interaction — web, email, events, subscriptions — into a single audience record. That’s what enables real personalization and automation across the audience journey.

AI Got Real

This wasn’t a hype fest. No chatbot demos or “generative revolution” talk. Instead, attendees shared practical use cases: automated content tagging, predictive churn models, and dynamic segmentation at scale.

The question everyone asked: does it improve margin or not? If it doesn’t drive efficiency or revenue, it’s not worth doing.

At Omeda, we’re seeing the same shift. Clients are using automation and AI features to tag content, predict churn, and optimize engagement — the quiet, operational work that scales outcomes, not headlines.

Monetization Discipline is Back

The “throw stuff at the wall” era seems over. Publishers are auditing their revenue streams, cutting low-margin products, and defending pricing.

We heard from one publisher who killed three revenue experiments this quarter because the unit economics didn’t work — something that would’ve been heresy a few years ago.

While Omeda doesn’t set your pricing model, we do help you understand what’s profitable. With audience analytics and behavioral data, you can see which segments convert, renew, and engage — and where to stop spending energy.

Events are No Longer Marketing

Jacob Donnelly has built A Media Operator into a full-fledged media business, not a brand exercise. The conversation this year was about events as core revenue and community drivers.

That’s not Omeda’s space directly but it’s closely connected. Every great event strategy starts with knowing your audience. Omeda data helps event teams identify high-value segments, tailor invites, and keep engagement strong long after the event ends.

Learn more in our guide: How to Put Your Event Data to Work

Operators Over Personalities

This year’s stars weren’t big-name thought leaders. They were the operators who know deliverability rates, CPM optimization, and workflow automation cold.

We love that energy because that’s who Omeda was built for. Our clients are the hands-on practitioners who make audience growth, automation, and monetization happen behind the scenes.

Trust is the Only Real Moat

In an era where AI can generate infinite content, trust is the one thing that can’t be automated. It’s earned through consistency, transparency, and respecting your audience’s preferences.

That’s another place Omeda plays a quiet but critical role. By managing consent, preferences, and data integrity in one platform, we help media brands maintain audience trust at scale.

Putting It Into Practice: A Conversation with Mansueto Ventures

One of the most memorable moments of the AMO Summit came during our CEO James Capo’s interview with Anne Marie O’Keefe, COO of Mansueto Ventures — the company behind Fast Company and Inc.

Anne Marie spoke about her team’s transformation over the past two years and how they’re rebuilding the business around a single, unifying principle: connection. Whether it’s advertising, membership, or events, every part of the company is focused on understanding and serving the same audience across all channels.

As she put it, “People don’t think, I’m an Innovation Festival attendee, not a website reader. They think about Fast Company as one brand experience. We needed to put all that data together so I can recognize these users across everything we do.”

That’s exactly what Omeda enables — bringing together subscription, event, and behavioral data to create one unified audience view. For Mansueto Ventures, consolidating systems isn’t about shrinking. It’s about scaling intelligently, “building a program engine,” as Anne Marie described it, so every interaction builds a deeper relationship with the reader.

She also noted that her editors are eager to get into the platform and see audience data firsthand — something still rare in many organizations. “Our editors are so excited about any opportunity for us to grow our relationship with the reader,” she said.

The conversation captured what we heard throughout the event: the media companies winning today are the ones connecting their data, aligning teams around their audiences, and making every decision measurable.

🎥 Watch the full interview with James Capo and Anne Marie O’Keefe on YouTube.

Less Flash, More Fundamentals

This year’s AMO Summit made one thing clear: the media operators winning today aren’t chasing the next big thing. They’re operationalizing what they already have — their first-party data, their audience relationships, and their internal focus on margin and efficiency.

We’re proud to work with many of those operators already. And we’re excited to keep helping media brands turn first-party data into smarter, more sustainable growth.

Talk to our team to see how Omeda helps media operators activate their data for better audience engagement and monetization.

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