The last few weeks has seen the Media Voices team head out and about to various industry events, from a Local News event with Google to the PPA Festival and Newsrewired, as well as running our own Publisher Podcast Forum and Awards. 

We were proud to be media partners for the PPA Festival, where Peter and Esther spent the day catching up with industry friends and listening in on all sorts of sessions to do with audience-building.

In this special episode from the PPA Festival, we've focused on how publishers are future-proofing audience relationships.

There are rising challenges from an economic recession, advertising slowdowns, uncertainty about subscriptions growth and the yet unknown impacts of AI advances which are pressuring publishers. The only way to ensure success is to deliver real value to your audience.

The businesses that succeed will be those that prioritise reader relationships. We spoke to a range of publishers at the Festival and sat in on sessions on the Audience stage to find out how they plan to future-proof those audience connections.

This episode features the following experts:

• Sajeeda Merali, CEO, PPA
• Amanda Wigginton, Customer strategy, data and insight specialist
• Sarah Ebner, Executive Editor & Head of Newsletters, Financial Times (session extract)
• Mark Alker, Founder, SingletrackWorld
• Ed Garcia, Head of Retention, Immediate Media (session extract)
• Clare Wain, Marketing Director, NEOM Organics (session extract)
• Seema Kumari, Senior Director of Consumer Marketing and CRM at Hearst UK (session extract)
• Tony Hill, Marketing & Events Director, Mark Allen Group (session extract)
• Alix Fox, Writer, broadcaster and sex educator (session extract)