Moving Down the Funnel: How Media Companies Can Facilitate Direct Buyer-Seller Connections

Talk to many event operators and they’ll tell you that one of the new lines of business at their shows is one-to-one meetings. It has become a hallmark of some of the biggest festivals out there, in part because it more closely links the buyer and seller, helping the event to prove it drove business.

But for media companies, we’ve historically struggled to do the same thing with our advertising products. Think about it… we might host a webinar, but those 100+ leads go into a CRM and hopefully our clients’ marketing teams are able to nurture those people into prospects for the sales team. Or we sell a white paper download and an SDR calls up a lead and tries to get them a demo, irrespective of where in the buying cycle that reader is.

It’s not that these tactics aren’t relevant. On the contrary, as part of a full funnel marketing campaign for your sponsors, it matters a lot because it helps to gather the necessary intent data to help inform the likelihood of the reader becoming a customer of your customer.

What if we could do more, though? What if we could take the one-to-one meetings that event companies have been pushing hard coming out of the pandemic, but turned them into a year-round activation?

This thought started coming to me over the last couple of weeks as I continued thinking about my interview with Mark Shashoua, CEO of Hyve.

In November 2025, Hyve bought HGAN, which has no events component to it. Instead, it’s a two-sided marketplace that connects “health innovators and organizations evaluating new healthcare solutions from first meetings to successful outcomes.” In other words, it’s a year round meetings program.

When Shashoua was on the show, he described it simply:

So one is brokerage, which is a business that we bought in the healthcare sector called HGAN. It’s a health growth advisory network. And effectively what they’re doing is taking the connections, meaning that they have access to all the chief medical officers, chief benefit officers. That’s the gold dust for the medical industry. And they will have solution companies come to them and say, we want access to those people and can you help facilitate the meetings, help us shape the presentations and actually help us to get into all these different types of the gold dust.

It’s a brilliant business. Solution companies pay a ton of money to get meetings with the chief medical officers or the chief benefit officers. These same folks are in the market for those solutions, but they need a trusted party to help facilitate the right connections at the right time. That’s where HGAN factors in.

Media companies can do this too.

Fundamentally, this is a more advanced play on your 1st-party data. You not only know who is reading your content, but you also know what they are reading. However, what makes a “brokerage” business like what Hyve has built so impactful is that the meetings, theoretically, are only with people who are actively in the market for something.

So, with a webinar or lead generation, we use a semi-passive activity of content consumption to inform whether the viewer/reader is in the market. With a meetings business, we need more active data to help inform it. In other words, we need to be explicit: dear reader, are you in the market for something?

I would think about this as a three step process.

First, we’re not getting rid of any of the sponsorship offerings that we provide today. We need this for intent data. So, if a reader reads an article or downloads a white paper, we want that for intent insights. Someone who reads a dozen articles about a customer data platform, for example, is more likely in the market for a CDP.

Second, based on a user’s activity, when they hit a certain threshold of “passive” intent, we’re going to shoot them an email and ask them point blank: “Are you in the market for X?” where X is the thing that your sponsor offers. Not everyone is going to answer, but when it’s a very simple, yes/no binary question, I suspect the response rates will be meaningful.

The nice thing about this is that it’s sort of a set it and forget it type of marketing automation. You, effectively, create a journey with rules that say:

If a reader consumes X number of articles or downloads Y number of white papers; Then, send them an email asking if they are in the market.

Third, if someone says yes, gather more data. I’ve started to notice event companies experimenting with voice surveys where the attendee talks about what their objective is for attending the event. AMO has partnered with Markus AI to do this at the AMO Summit. You can turn this on its head and ask the person who said “yes, I’m in market” what their objectives are for this piece of software. People are remarkably forthcoming on audio (not so much video because they’re looking at each themselves).

This is where AI comes in. Using an LLM, you can analyze that voice note to determine the person’s intent. What is their business, what are they looking for, etc.

That information is then shared with the sponsor. Not with actual data about the company, but instead, anonymized insights. For example, if AMO did this, it might be something like:

• Director of Audience Development
• Consumer media company
• $50m+ in revenue
• Needs a customer data platform that seamlessly integrates with a paywall provider and an email service provider to build more advanced marketing segments

If the company says that they’re interested in that person, you reach out to the audience member, get their permission to book a virtual meeting and voila, you’ve connected a prospective buyer and seller. This is the double opt-in required to make this really work and keep trust high.

The value here is two-fold. First, your readers are being introduced to companies they want to meet. Second, you’re delivering prospects to your sponsors far lower in the funnel. Someone who has proven intent based on consumption and then explicitly says that they’re in the market for software or services is, inherently, a hot lead.

This doesn’t replace sponsorship

Now… The problem with a model like this is that all sponsors are going to want access to this product and will ignore everything else. That’s a mistake for their marketing campaigns and detrimental to your business.

So, I wouldn’t allow every company that spends with you to access this “brokerage” until they’ve reached a certain scale of spend with you. If they’re already running brand and demand gen campaigns with you, this can be an incremental add on that runs throughout the year while the standard marketing campaigns run. Shashoua described their model as an annual fee plus a percentage of what’s signed.

It’s not a replacement to their marketing, it’s one step farther. And the reason for that is two-fold. First, it’ll gut your business because they’ll pull their spending. This is a complement, not a replacement. Second, it’ll hurt them because branding matters to making these connections. A no-name company that no one knows is unlikely to get many introductions. They’re trying to skip the hard work and leverage your brand entirely.

There are also dangers to this model. As you continue to grow, there is an incentive to loosen the requirements to making an introduction. Perhaps you bypass the “are you in the market?” question because you want to deliver volume. Don’t do that. The reason this works is explicitly because the companies that are paying for meetings know that the person is absolutely in the market.

To start, I wouldn’t jump head first into a fully automated system. Instead, pick a few of your best sponsors, reach out to some of your most active readers and see if connections make sense. If that works, you have something that can scale.

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