If you’re running a modern media business, you’re probably managing more platforms than staffers who know how to use them. It’s not your fault. Unfortunately, the last decade rewarded speed over coherence. Need email? Add a platform. Need events? Another platform. Need subscriptions, podcasts, video, community, advertising workflow, revenue analytics? Platform, platform, platform.

The result: audience data scattered across seven… nine… 12 systems, depending on how honestly your teams tally it.

And that fragmentation is more than annoying. It’s costing you growth. In fact, if you haven’t started consolidating your tech stack, you’re already behind the media companies who have.

This article makes the case plainly. If you stick with me for the next few minutes, you’ll walk away with one uncomfortable realization and one big opportunity: Consolidation isn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It’s a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

The illusion of scale: When growth introduces chaos, not clarity

At the A Media Operator Summit, Anne Marie O’Keefe of Mansueto Ventures, publishers of Fast Company and Inc., captured something media executives rarely say on stage but often say behind closed doors: Your audience doesn’t experience your brand in silos, but your systems do.

She described the reality for most publishers: event attendees, newsletter readers, subscribers, podcast listeners, and site visitors are often the same people, but the data lives in isolated systems that don’t talk to each other. That forces teams to do what she jokingly called “human API work.” This includes tasks like exporting lists, cross-referencing spreadsheets, manually stitching together audience profiles, and hoping nothing breaks.

It’s the media-industry equivalent of rebuilding your car’s engine every time you want to drive it.

And if you’re honest, your organization might be doing the same thing.

The activation gap no one wants to talk about

Here’s where the numbers get uncomfortable: Publishers love to say they’re “data-driven,” but the wheels tend to fall off the moment execution begins.

In our Omeda State of Audience Report 2025, an overwhelming 85% of publishers said that audience data is a competitive advantage. Yet only 9% rate their approach as very effective. It’s not a data shortage. It’s an activation problem.

Most teams analyze data (64%). A fast-growing share even has a defined strategy (57%, up from 35% last year). But when it’s time to act?

• Only 45% update strategy based on audience insights.
• And just 36% use data to personalize experiences or develop new offerings.
  

That gap between what publishers know and what publishers do is precisely where consolidation becomes a competitive divider. That’s because:

• You can’t activate data you can’t see.
• You can’t personalize when your systems don’t talk.
• And you definitely can’t innovate when your audience identity lives in a dozen places.

The cost no one calculates: Lost time, lost precision, lost revenue

Media leaders tend to underestimate what fragmentation steals from them because it’s not a single line item. It’s death by a thousand inefficiencies.

Here’s what’s typically hiding in the operational fog:

• Time lost to manual data stitching: Most teams spend dozens of hours per week reconciling lists instead of building products.
  
• Missed precision in marketing and monetization: When you “spray and pray” because you don’t trust your data, you burn your list, annoy your audience, and weaken revenue performance.
  
• Redundant systems that quietly compound costs: Many publishers duplicate functionality across 5+ tools, often paying twice for capabilities they can’t fully use.
  
• Slow product iteration: You can’t launch new programs quickly when everything requires yet another data transfer, integration, or workaround.
  

You won’t see these costs called out as a single line item on the P&L. But they do show up in slipping speed, sluggish innovation, and missed revenue — all at a moment when the most successful media brands are winning by moving fast.

Consolidation is not shrinking. It’s scaling

O’Keefe made an important distinction: “Consolidation does not mean getting smaller.” If anything, fragmentation is what keeps organizations small (creatively, operationally, and financially).

Consolidation means something very different:

• One audience identity instead of 12 competing versions
• One workflow instead of a labyrinth of partial solutions
• One source of truth that unlocks lifetime value, not one-off transactions

Unified systems don’t limit growth. Rather, they enable it by reducing the friction between your ideas and your execution.

When media companies begin to centralize audience data, they don’t just improve internal coordination. They unlock entirely new revenue pathways: smarter product bundling, better targeting, and a clearer view of which companies were ready for deeper engagement.

For a brand with multiple lines of business such as events, editorial, subscriptions, commerce, communities that’s oxygen.

Why now? Because the stakes just changed

We’re in a moment where the companies that win are those who can activate their audience data the fastest. Not collect it. Not warehouse it. Activate it.

AI, personalization, above-average CPMs, and long-term subscriber value all depend on precision, and precision depends on consolidation. The executives who delay will be overtaken not by bigger competitors, but by more focused ones.

Meanwhile, the cost of inaction is growing: silos get deeper, tech debt compounds, expectations rise, and teams get burned out trying to glue everything together manually.

There’s a reason you keep hearing stories about publishers going from seven systems to one or two. They aren’t chasing minimalism. They’re chasing momentum.

There’s a way out, but you need to lead it

If consolidation were easy, everyone would have done it already. This is where the culture piece matters.

You don’t need to lecture your teams about silos, and you don’t need a reorg to realign incentives. What you need is what O’Keefe described: a shared principle that the audience sits at the center of the business. Once teams rally around serving the same human being (not their departmental KPIs), the path becomes clearer.

From there, consolidation becomes less a technical project and more an operational liberation: Move faster, decide faster, monetize smarter.

Omeda is one platform publishers use to consolidate audience data, and it’s a critical step toward a unified view of their audience. But what matters even more is committing to a consolidation strategy that gives your organization a single engine instead of a garage full of mismatched parts.

Tech consolidation and the bottom line

If your business is still running on disconnected systems, you’re not just maintaining the status quo, you’re losing ground. Consolidation isn’t a trend and it is not optional. It’s the foundation for any media company that expects to grow audience value over time.

And whether you choose to tackle it this quarter or this year, the companies that already made the shift have one thing in common: They stopped letting their tech stack dictate the pace of their ambition.

You can too.