by Charlie Swift, General Manager, Adstra Services
Most subscription conferences tell you what happened. SubSummit tells you what’s next and this year, the conversation is one Adstra has been in the middle of for a while now.
I’ll be at SubSummit in Kansas City, May 13-15, and here’s what I’m watching for.
Acquisition Is Back But the Playbook Has Changed
There’s a version of subscription growth that relies almost entirely on a proven, known audience. Work the list you have, understand and model the subscribers you are engaging through data enhancement, re-engage the lapsed subscriber, and retarget your site visitors. That playbook works — until it doesn’t. That pool of people is shrinking every day, and the brands that will lead in the next five years are already investing in the unknown: finding the next best customer, not just recycling the last one. I expect the most useful sessions at SubSummit to be the ones that get honest about the acquisition problem and what’s actually working to solve it.
This is exactly the argument we make in our latest whitepaper. Filtering toward a “perfect” audience doesn’t grow your business, it shrinks it. Expanding to like-minded audiences, the ones who look and behave like your best subscribers, is where audience growth and ROI finally align. We’ll have copies at the show. Download it here: Adstra | Audience Expansion.
AI Is on Every Agenda. The Conversations Around It Are Getting Better.
What I’ve noticed at conferences like SubSummit is that the AI conversation has matured. A year ago, it was all positioning. Now, practitioners are showing up with real tests: faster audience identification, cheaper messaging validation, better signal-to-noise across channels.
AI should be accelerating your ability to find new audiences, compress the time between hypothesis and proof, and let the data do more of the heavy lifting. The subscription space is particularly well-suited for this; the closed-loop relationship between subscriber behavior and campaign outcome gives AI something real to work with.
Your Site Is Already Telling You Who Your Next Subscriber Is
Most subscription brands are investing heavily in finding new audiences while underutilizing the intent signals already coming through their own site. Every visit to a pricing page, every abandoned trial, every lapsed subscriber who comes back to browse, those are people who already know you. They’re not cold, they just haven’t converted yet. The question is whether you can identify them. That’s where Conexa comes in. By tagging the site and running those behavioral signals through Conexa’s composable identity resolution, anonymous visitors get matched to known profiles and that data feeds directly into services execution. The result is campaign targeting that’s grounded in demonstrated interest, not just modeled probability. You’re not guessing at who might subscribe next. You’re starting with the people who already showed you they might.
What I’ll Be Focused On
At Adstra, we’re in the business of helping subscription brands answer two questions: Who is your next best customer? And how do you reach them in a way that drives measurable growth? That means identity resolution of anonymous customers you are engaging with, audience strategies that expand rather than contract, and campaign execution that ties back to real results. SubSummit is where those questions are being asked by 1,600+ executives who are serious about the answers.
If you’re going to be in Kansas City, come find me. The best conversations at these events never happen on stage.