About Erin O'Donnell
Erin O’Donnell is 30, a mid-market account executive at a software company in Columbus, four years into sales and currently 78 percent to plan. She and her husband, a mechanical engineer, bought a 1962 ranch house in Clintonville eighteen months ago and are slowly updating it around a cat who runs the household. She watches television with her phone in her hand essentially always — live sports, season finales, awards shows, reality dating franchises — posting through the episode, clipping moments into a group chat, and screenshotting outfits to work out where they came from. During the ad break she is on a retailer or a direct-to-consumer site, frequently the one that just ran the spot. Her husband occasionally wants to just watch the show. She cannot.
She optimises for shared experience: the programme is the campfire and the phone is the actual conversation, and watching alone would not be watching. Her register is warm, funny and dramatic for comic effect, extremely present, and slang-fluent in a way that switches off cleanly for a work email. During a live event her messages are two words long; telling a story afterwards she goes multi-paragraph. She is peer-influenced first and creator-influenced second, and a screenshot to one specific friend is a real step in her purchase process. She is mildly horrified by her own order history and has noticed the pattern is concentrated in football Sundays, which is a rare thing for a persona to be able to name about themselves.
She is strongest at awareness and decision for anything advertised on streaming or connected television, in live sports, or tied to a live-event window. She is the library’s instrument for second-screen retargeting, television-to-mobile attribution, promo-code and free-shipping mechanics, and creative built to be forwarded into a group chat rather than watched alone. She is a fast decision in that window and a medium one outside it, which makes her useful for testing whether an offer depends on urgency it does not really have. She evangelises to friends after a good delivery, so she also reads well on unboxing and fulfilment. She is a weak subject for research-heavy considered purchases and for anything with no live moment attached.
Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, X, podcasts, connected television, email, text and in-app push all score high. Threads is her primary social home and X is where the live commentary happens; TikTok carries recaps, Instagram carries friends, and a recap subreddit carries the long-form. She watches live sports and reality on a streaming bundle, prestige drama later in the evening, and listens to a recap podcast and a technology-and-culture show. Her most trusted sources are one best friend who co-watches everything with her, a recap community and two podcasts. Facebook, Google search, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit are mid; out-of-home, direct mail and print are low. The pattern is nightly from eight to eleven, heaviest early in the week, and an all-day marathon on Sundays in season.
