Your audience is changing. Is your board?
Keld Reinicke, founder of Veo Technologies and chairman of TriBand and TEN-4, on why most boards don't actually know where their audience has moved — and why that's the board's job, not marketing's.
Keld Reinicke didn't take the Board Summit stage to sell Veo Technologies, the sports-tech company he founded a decade ago. He is also chairman of the video game studio TriBand, which he co-founded, chairman of the digital media agency TEN-4, and a board member of a media foundation in Copenhagen. Across all of those boardroom tables, he said, he keeps running into the same blind spot: most boards are dangerously out of touch with the people who keep their companies alive. Fixing that isn't marketing's job. It's the board's.
Built on a bet nobody backed
Reinicke's origin story for Veo has become well known: an idea to build a system cheap enough to record every football match in the world, back when the technology was more commonly described as machine learning than AI. Financial board members warned him to stay out of hardware. He built it anyway — and said Veo only knew it had "made it" when Amazon's CTO flew to Copenhagen just to ask how they'd pulled it off.
The audience knows best
Reinicke's team assumed they understood how young people engaged with football — until they didn't. One female content creator in Belgium, posting videos with her boyfriend, generated more engagement than Premier League, La Liga, and the World Cup combined. That single surprise reshaped Veo's product decisions around what audiences actually wanted to watch, not what executives assumed they wanted.
The battle for audience attention
Reinicke pointed to Power, the Danish electronics retailer, as proof of how fast audiences are moving: a company selling fridges and TVs less than a year ago now produces its own football show — and sold it to Disney. Traditional broadcast is shrinking as YouTube absorbs deals once reserved for TV, he noted, citing FIFA's new YouTube tie-up struck just before the World Cup.
"The audience is bigger than the market"
Using Novo Nordisk's shift from diabetes to obesity treatment as his example, Reinicke argued that "the audience is bigger than the market" — a company's real audience can outgrow the market it thinks it serves. Boards, not just marketing teams, need to track that shift actively. His parting warning: AI's effect on corporate storytelling hasn't produced a backlash yet, but it will.
