Audience Intelligence is for the long term

By Sam Cousins, National Head of Strategy & Product, Ryvalmedia

Australia has never had more people in work, but it has rarely had more people finding it tough. That’s the tension at the heart of the 2026 HILDA report, released on 23 September by the Melbourne Institute. In case you missed it this is one of the only trended data panels each year where the same 17,000 people are interviewed giving an honest snapshot of real Australians. . At first glance this economic summary would let brands assume audiences are doing OK, but intelligence shouldn’t be a snapshot. The gap between what the averages say and what Australians are actually living, year in, year out, is where compounding audience intelligence lives. Too often we forget the human behind the data point, which is why this insight piece is strategic gold. Some key things I took from the report.

1. Lifestage signals miss the point. Half of 18 to 29 year olds now live with their parents, up from 39% in 2001. Any targeting that assumes independence in that age range may need challenging. Parents in shared households will have more influence over young adults’ purchasing and service decisions, so household targeting needs to adapt for multiple grocery buyers and decision makers.

2. Pressure is permanent. Food insecurity and housing stress are consistent markers of cost of living pressure. Food insecurity hit 17.9% in 2024, up from 13.7% in 2020. This is structural, not cyclical, and creates long term moments for brands to support. Capital city renters are the hardest hit, with around one in four now in housing stress. But pressure isn’t just a big city problem: the biggest long term rise was among regional renters, from 13% in 2001 to 29% in 2024.

Incomes aren’t helping. The median household income dipped 4.3% between 2021 and 2023 and in 2024 was still 3.3% below its 2021 level. Between 2022 and 2023, 54% of people saw their income fall, and people in the bottom income bracket are slightly more likely to stay there than they were 20 years ago. Pressure isn’t just persistent, it’s sticky. Segmenting audiences on circumstance is just as important as segmenting on income or age.

3. Demographic bands hide circumstances. While overall employment hit a record high, more than half of women aged 25 to 44 without a degree aren’t in full time work, and about a quarter aren’t working/or looking for work. It also seems that having a degree also has less influence over circumstance than it did. University educated women earned around $300 a week more than women without post school qualifications in 2024, down from $560 in 2001 suggesting that degrees aren’t providing the stretch in salary as they once did. Other intelligence in the report shows capital city mortgage stress more than doubled from 4.4% to 10% between 2021 and 2024. Brands often target homeowners as a default, but a home loan isn’t always an indicator of affluence or ability to spend anymore.

With so many brands using a standard 25 to 54 bracket, we’re making assumptions about steady jobs, home ownership and rising incomes, and missing the circumstance needed to adapt context and messaging.

4. Fatigue is the new context. Every age and sex group reports lower energy than a decade ago, and among women aged 15 to 24, vitality scores fell from 62 in 2011 to 52 in 2024. The real intelligence opportunity is planning to people’s emotional state, not just where they are, with frequency that respects attention rather than exhausting it.

5. Parents are buying time. Median weekly childcare spend for under fives rose from $74 in 2002 to $190 in 2024, and average hours of paid care per child rose 40% to 26 hours a week. Parents are more stretched than ever, driving need in convenience categories that offer value and giving context to dayparting.

But not all parents are the same. Single parents head about 19% of families with kids under 18. More than a quarter of single mothers are in severe financial stress, and more than half of single parents rent privately, compared with roughly a quarter of couple parents. Single people in general are a missing market often lumped in with generic targeting that need specialist context.

6. Our responsibility as brands. Young people’s mental health started falling around 2011 to 2012, well before the pandemic, lining up with the rise of smartphones and social media (though the data can’t prove the cause). Scams are mainstream too, with about 12.1% of women and 11% of men experiencing cybercrime, mostly scams and identity crime. The environments we fund shape the feeds people live in. Brand safety, adjacency and verified environments are just as important as they have always been and aren’t always digital.

So what does all this mean for brands?

Layering in real circumstances as context for media planning will ensure we are creating campaigns for the real world people are living in. That means stepping outside of targeting the same audiences, optimising to the same metrics and delivering the same messages.

Brands have the opportunity to show true empathy and to create real meaningful experiences for their customers. This has never been more important now that the path to their consumers runs through an algorithm. In practice, that’s creating household-level targeting with life-stage context , or treating value as an always-on strategy. It is knowing where to cap frequency and favour low effort formats, or making dayparting allowances for less pressured moments for families. It is more importantly taking responsibility for where activity actually shows up.

Intelligent brands can’t be passive category players anymore, especially when people have very specific needs. The brands that understand those needs, year in, year out, will be the ones humans remember and machines recommend. Audience intelligence is for the long term.