Know What You Own: New Rules of Audience Building by Kate Parker
Why owned audience is the only marketing asset that still appreciates — and why the GTM leaders building it now are opening a gap their competitors can’t close.
Hi — Asad here. The tech job market has gotten a bit strange recently. Usually when the economy’s good, demand is up and layoffs are down, and when things are rough, it’s the other way around. Right now we’re getting both at once, and it’s worth exploring why.
Start with layoffs: 92K across tech this year, with Big Tech doing most of the cutting. They’re pinning it on AI because that’s the word Wall Street gets hot and heavy for. Except I don’t think it’s AI efficiencies so much as ZIRP-era inefficiencies that are finally catching up. But I digress.
Now, flip to the other side, where demand is through the roof. LinkedIn has 349K open tech roles in North America, and broader job board data puts it closer to 530K. We feel this in our business every day. Companies hire us to find them the best GTM folks in the market, and landing those people has never been harder. Top performers are fielding 10+ opportunities a week, GTM offer acceptance rates have dropped to 45%, and it gets hotter every month.
And then there’s Carta’s data, which is saying something totally different. They track actual hiring at startups, and they’re showing hiring roughly matching departures — basically flat for several quarters now.
So, layoffs are up, demand is up, hiring is flat. It didn’t add up to me at first either, but then it did.
See, tech companies aren’t hiring the way they used to. They’ve adjusted two things: how many people they need at each stage, and the bar for who clears it. Plenty of them want to hire; they just won’t compromise on quality. We see it in our own business, too. Companies are spending less on internal recruiting and more on specialized headhunting because they want an edge on the best people. And they want that edge because, in the Age of AI, a B player is actually a C player, and that’s a more dramatic shift than most of us realize.
Now, on to Kate Parker, setting us all straight on marketing in this evolving marketplace.
What Do You Actually Own?
Nearly 60% of consumers have already replaced traditional search engines with generative AI for product research. Half of them have made a purchase based on what the AI told them.
None of that activity shows up in your media plan. A growing share of your customers’ decisions are happening in spaces you can’t buy into, attribute, or reliably measure.
I talk to a lot of GTM leaders across marketing, sales, and RevOps. Every one of them knows AI is changing discovery. Fewer have sat with what that means: the assets that used to drive growth are increasingly rented. The ones that will drive growth next are owned. But most org charts, budgets, and metrics are still optimized for the rental model.
The question most leaders haven’t confronted: What do you actually own?
Most of Your Marketing Assets Are Rented
GTM leaders already know the conversion funnel is an imperfect lens. The sharper point is that nearly every input to it is rented.
Paid media is rented attention. SEO was rented distribution, and the terms just changed with AI Overviews. Third-party data is rented identity. Retargeting pools are rented intent. The email list you call “owned” is, too: governed by deliverability algorithms, inbox placement rules, and provider economics you don’t control. Even your pipeline forecast is partially rented, built on third-party firmographics that degrade the moment a vendor changes its data source.
Every one of these assets can be repriced, deprecated, or algorithmically throttled by a platform whose incentives aren’t yours. And it’s happening on every front at once: signal loss, AI-mediated discovery, rising CAC across paid channels. The rent is going up, simultaneously, everywhere.
Audience is the one marketing asset you actually own — not as a tactic to add to the plan, but the foundation underneath it.
What Counts as “Owned”
The term has gotten slippery, so it’s worth being specific.
An owned audience is a direct relationship with a known person, captured with their consent, that you can activate without platform permission. For example:
A newsletter subscriber you email directly.
A community member active in your private Slack or Discord.
A loyalty program member whose purchase history and preferences you know.
A buyer who has opted into SMS for restock alerts.
You hold the relationship, not the platform.
What owned audience is not: followers on a social platform you don’t own (rented); lookalike audiences (rented identity); retargeting pools (rented intent); or anyone you can only reach by paying a third party to put you in front of them.
Your Real Asset Base
The test is simple. Beyond your existing customer base: if every ad platform went dark tomorrow, who could you still talk to? That number is your real marketing asset base. For most companies (F500 brands and Series B alike), it’s a fraction of what their media plans imply.
There’s a harder truth underneath this, where most owned-audience strategies quietly fall apart: A direct relationship is only durable if the consent and permission layer are real. You have to know what each person has opted into, across which channels, for which purposes, and you have to be able to prove it. Without that, you’re building on sand. Identity degrades, consent doesn’t travel between systems, and preferences break the next time a regulation changes. The asset evaporates before your eyes.
The Cost of Moving Slowly
We recently surveyed 250+ executives at Global 2000 companies in partnership with UserEvidence; of those, 45% reported they’ve already lost customer trust and loyalty because of how they’ve handled consent and preference data. Meanwhile, 40% have experienced mass opt-outs, and 60% have faced regulatory action. These are the consequences facing companies that haven’t invested in meaningful, direct lines to their customers.
They’re also early signals of a larger shift. Three forces are converging that explain why owned audience is the asset that appreciates while everything else gets repriced.
First, AI-mediated discovery is reshaping the top of the funnel, and the terms are uncertain. In March, Criteo joined OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads pilot as the first adtech partner. But pricing models, ad formats, attribution, and what a “placement” even means in a generative environment are all in flux. The smart move is to learn the new channel as it matures, while doubling down on earned presence in the open web (i.e., the content that LLMs train on and cite). As AI floods channels with “slop,” the brands that cut through publish work worth paying attention to. That’s an owned-audience game, and it’s where the compounding advantage is being built while the paid side gets figured out.
Second, signal loss is repricing rented identity. Cookie deprecation, iOS changes, a patchwork of state privacy laws, and data broker deletion regimes like California’s Delete Act are moving the cost of third-party identity up and reliability down. Consented first-party data is becoming the only identity layer that will survive the next few years intact. Cisco’s 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey found that more than 75% of consumers won’t buy from companies they don’t trust with their data. The audience built on real consent is becoming the only durable addressable-media asset you have.
Third, AI is collapsing product differentiation windows. Development cycles are faster, distribution is more accessible, and whatever advantage you bring to market today can be replicated faster than ever. When the product window shrinks, the relationship advantage compounds — and relationships need a channel to maintain them. McKinsey’s Next in Personalization research found that faster-growing companies derive 40% more revenue from personalization than their slower peers. This is what durable defensibility looks like in an AI-native market, and increasingly, what sophisticated investors are underwriting for.
But capturing this advantage takes more than deciding to invest in it. Our survey found that 64% of enterprises can’t deliver experiences that align with what customers have told them they want. The audience on paper and the one you can actually reach are two different things, and the gap is wider than most GTM leaders realize.
Closing it requires building the connective tissue underneath: a single view of what every customer has permitted, enforced consistently across systems, so that when teams ask “can I use this data?” they get an instant, authoritative answer for every channel and purpose. That makes meaningful personalization possible, first-party data actually usable, and agentic AI safe enough to turn loose on customer data.
The Practical Shift
Three places to push, regardless of whether the shift is led by marketing, sales, or RevOps:
Budget. Build a line item for owned-audience development (content, community, editorial, first-party data infrastructure) and treat it as an asset investment, the way a CFO frames CapEx vs. OpEx. The ROI horizon is longer, but the asset sits on a balance sheet nobody else can reprice.
Metrics. Measure the size, engagement, and defensibility of your owned audience as a leading indicator of everything the funnel will eventually show: subscriber growth, repeat engagement, direct traffic, branded search, and share of voice in AI outputs. These numbers tell you what’s coming.
Talent. The skills that built rented-audience machines (performance, paid, attribution) aren’t the skills that build owned ones, which is an editorial, product, community, and data-governance discipline. Most marketing orgs are staffed 90/10 in the wrong direction, and fixing that is a multi-year rebuild — exactly why the leaders who start now will open a gap that’s hard to close. It’s also why the GTM Engineer role has emerged: connective tissue between owned-audience systems, first-party data, and the motion itself.
What’s Left Is What You Own
The honest pushback comes in two flavors. One, owned-audience investments don’t fit quarterly measurement cycles, and operators rarely have the mandate to wait for compounding returns. Two, the next dollar has a known return in paid and a fuzzy one in audience. Both are fair, and both are pricing in a world that’s already ending.
The brands figuring out how to fund and measure owned audience through a quarterly lens are buying a durable advantage at a discount, precisely because most of their competitors won’t. This isn’t a choice between performance marketing and audience-building, but rather, a rebalancing of what you consider an asset vs. a cost, and a recognition that the ratio has to change before the economics force it to.
Because every marketing plan is, implicitly, a portfolio of assets. For the last 15 years, most of those assets have been rented, and the model worked: rent was cheap and the landlords were stable. Neither of those things is true anymore. The rent is going up. The landlords are changing the terms. And a new class of landlord — LLMs that mediate an increasing share of consumer discovery — doesn’t take your money at all.
The GTM leaders who will have the most leverage over the next five years are the ones quietly moving budget, metrics, and talent toward the assets they actually own. Everything else is someone else’s to take away.
Kate Parker is president of data compliance company Transcend. Previously, she was a senior strategy leader at Google and Uber. Kate has driven results and inspired change throughout her career; now at Transcend, she’s helping Fortune 500s and high-growth startups like Robinhood and Hims unlock growth by integrating trust and control into their data foundations, so they can confidently move AI initiatives forward.
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