Association of Online Publishers

Brands that stand for something: How to unlock audience loyalty

Date: 19 Mar 2026 , 9:00 - 12:30
Charlotte Street Hotel, London

Our CRUNCH series continues to be supported by our TAB partner Google

Audience growth and development have long been the bread and butter of a digital publisher. But as the landscape continues to become increasingly crowded, it’s more important than ever for publishers to take a strategic approach to strengthening communities and promoting meaningful engagement that cuts through the clutter. And a publishing brand that stands for something – and that consistently delivers on that brand promise – is essential for long-term audience growth and retention.

At AOP CRUNCH, we discovered how publishers had doubled down on strategies to build brand loyalty and re-establish themselves as trusted environments for both audiences and advertisers.

Topics included:

Why brand love should be considered a strategic priority for digital publishers rather than a soft metric
Embracing brand legacy and heritage to deliver meaningful engagement with your audience
Proven strategies to nurture trust and find your creative point of difference
What you need to identify priority areas for content and product development to service the evolving needs of your audience base
How to leverage audience interaction events to enrich data and build engagement
Building direct relationships with your audience across multiple platforms and touchpoints

CRUNCH is a series of four events where publisher members can come together with their contemporaries and the industry for

Collaboration to progress key industry issues
Inspiration and learning
Networking

Bitesize

Here are just a few of the key highlights from the conversations:

Your audience has to be at the heart of every decision, even if that sometimes means deprioritising commercial interests. Protecting and nurturing your most loyal audiences is vital to developing a sustainable proposition, and sometimes that means turning down commercial opportunities to preserve a seamless, non-intrusive user experience.
Emotion builds connection which builds retention. Look for areas where you can develop micro-communities around key pillars which your audience have an emotional response to, whether that’s their hometown, a sports team, or nostalgia for a specific era.
An engaged audience is the most valuable asset a publisher has, but we need to shift success metrics from quantity to quality. Pageviews are still key in terms of ad revenue, but metrics such as monthly engaged users are a much better indicators of how strongly your audience engage with you.
Develop opportunities for your audience to engage beyond passive news consumption. Interactivity - such as gamification, comment boards, or opportunities for live participation - helps to create high attention environments, which in turn fosters a stronger sense of community, belonging, and shared values.
Publishers need to think more broadly about what data can be used to enrich their audience profiles. Quizzes, calculators, and polls all provide invaluable data into offline behaviour and purchasing intent that you otherwise don’t have access to, and these insights allow you to deliver relevancy at scale with your advertising campaigns.
We need to look outside our industry to discover how other sectors are building loyal audiences. Aviation, gaming, and sports all have extremely loyal audiences, and we should be looking at which of their tactics can be applied to digital publishing.

Featured Speakers