We're buying AI to get to know audiences that are already telling us everything, for free, every single day. Nobody's reading it.

Here's the pattern I see over and over. A team, a league, a brand admits the quiet thing: we don't really know our audience. And the response is always the same. Buy something. Another AI platform. Another data tool. Another report about people it has never actually looked at. Spending money on the problem feels like progress. It feels like doing something.

Meanwhile the answers have been sitting right there the whole time.

They're already telling you everything

Think about how much an athlete puts out into the world now. Vlogs. Day in the life videos. Reels, stories, posts, most days. They're literally showing you who they are, what they care about, what they're chasing, what they struggle with, what makes them laugh. Not once. Constantly.

And the fans are right there underneath it, in the comments, in the replies, telling you exactly what they think and feel. You could put a poll on your own socials tomorrow and your audience would just tell you, for free, in an afternoon.

It's all there. Public. Free. Already happening.

And companies ignore it. They scroll straight past the actual person and push their own idea of who that person is instead. They'd rather buy a report that says "24, urban, high disposable income" than watch the athlete's own video where they tell you, in their own words, precisely what they believe. One is the shape of a crowd. The other is the actual human. And we keep picking the crowd.

This isn't "go meet every fan"

Let me be clear, because it's easy to misread this. I'm not saying you have to go and shake every fan's hand or sit across a table from every athlete. Everything's digital now, and that's completely fine. I don't talk to everyone out there either.

The point isn't in person versus online. The point is looking versus not looking. The information is already digital, already public, already free. You just have to actually read it instead of buying a summary of people you never watched.

And to be fair, the bar isn't the same for everyone. If you're an internal commercial team, there's genuinely no excuse. These are your athletes. These are your fans. You should know them better than anyone alive. Agencies sit further from the people by design, so it's harder from that seat, and that's fair. But internal teams? The people are right there. Knowing them is the job.

Why nobody does the obvious thing

So why does everyone reach for the tool instead of the feed that's already open?

Because buying something feels like progress, and looking properly feels like work. Pulling a report is a clean, fast, defensible action. You can put it in a deck. Watching an athlete's last twenty videos and actually noticing who they are, that takes time, and it doesn't come with a logo on the front.

But the problem was never that the information is missing. It's everywhere. The problem is that looking properly takes effort, and buying a tool is easier. So the tool doesn't fill a gap in what you know. It fills a gap in what you were willing to do.

And, same as every time: this isn't me saying the data is useless. It has its place. But no report is going to hand you what someone reveals about themselves in their own words, on their own feed, every day. The data describes them. Their own content introduces them. And you can't build anything real on a description of people you never actually met.

None of this needs a huge rebuild, either. Targets are real and time is tight, I know. But even on your most important partnerships, an hour spent actually watching and reading your own people would beat another report every time. That's the whole ask.

Because skip this, keep treating people as a number you bought rather than a person you looked at, and you end up with exactly the kind of deal everyone's now quietly walking away from.

That's the next one.