The starting point
Marion Wyss, Poool's CMO, got in touch with one question: what format would set their marketing and communication apart from their competitors. Poool sells the engagement and conversion journeys that publishers run on their own audiences, in a market where everyone says roughly the same thing.
The answer was not decided at the start. It came out of the mission itself: a media of their own, with a community around it.
Mission one. The Audiencers
Phase 1. Interviews
Thirty targets qualified before a single call, on who asks, who runs it, how close they already are, and the arguments for and against approaching them.
- 16
- brands
- 8
- media
- 4
- vendors
- 2
- consultants
Phase 2. Two documents
- Key learnings, what the thirty conversations agreed on
- Two personas: a subscription lead inside a media company, and a marketing director inside a brand
- Two more people mapped around them, the one who defends the budget upstairs and the one who feeds the brief
Handed over and walked through with the founder, the CMO and the content lead in the room.
Phase 3. Two workshops
Two sessions of three hours. The first fixed the brand platform, the second the editorial identity. Everything below came out of those six hours.
Help media and brand professionals make the right decisions to convert and retain
- The tone
- shareable precise decisional self-assured
- The name
- The Audiencers
Decisional was the hard one: every piece has to leave the reader knowing what to do with it. The name came out of a shortlist of sixteen, on one criterion: it had to name the community being addressed, not the traffic it might bring.
Phase 4. The hand-over
Identity
- Personas and their two satellites
- Promise, tone and name
- Objectives and the KPIs behind them
Editorial
- Three families: Decisions, Operations, Inspirations
- Formats scored on appetite and on ease, then ranked
- An annual calendar built on that ranking
Distribution
- Newsletters in French and English, each with a named editor
- Four LinkedIn pages and a paid budget
- Micro-events, and a system to put readers in touch
And what was ruled out, in the same session
- No podcast
- No Twitter as a central channel
- Medium for teasers only
- Brands treated alongside media, not media alone
Mission two. A market that was not ready
A few weeks later Marion and Maxime came back with several ideas for a second mission. We settled on one: find out whether the product could be sold outside media, to buyers who were not publishers.
- 100
- market interviews of thirty minutes, on what those buyers actually expect.
The answer was no, or not yet: the market was not mature enough and it was too early. What the study did do was point at where the effort belonged instead, accelerating sales to media across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada.
Outcomes
N°1
community of its kind for publishing professionals
More than 15,000 members across six groups in two languages, and a festival that has run at least ten editions in six cities. The micro-event format written down in the workshop became the Audiencers' Festival, and every edition sells out within hours.
Three decisions from 2022 are still on the site
- the promise, word for word, as the site's description
- the three families, as the site's three categories
- the name
From 3,000 to 14,000 monthly visitors
And 95 business meetings generated. Internal figures from the time.
Audiencers is one of the three parts of the Darwin CX deal
On 4 March 2026, Poool signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Darwin CX. The announcement sets the combined company out in three: Poool's front end, Darwin's back end, and Audiencers as the expertise layer, backed by that community of more than 15,000 professionals.
The Poool and Darwin CX teams met at an Audiencers festival.
In 2022, Quentin helped us imagine, build and launch The Audiencers, a bilingual brand media that has since become the main community for media professionals in France and beyond. With Quentin, nothing is ever bullshit, nothing is ever gratuitous. One of those rare people who can change the trajectory of a journey, with the intelligence, humility and warmth of a true mentor.
Marion Wyss
CMO, Poool
I have rarely worked with individuals as talented as Quentin. He possesses two abilities that are typically not found in the same person: simplifying the most complex matters, and creating and executing an action plan with exceptional efficiency.
Maxime Moné
Founder and CEO, Poool