189 years later, advertising still comes down to trust and incremental reach
Article 12 of 15 in series: The Great Reach Reset
Last week at WFA Global Marketer Week in Stockholm, I attended a presentation by Taide Guajardo, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, who opened with a simple statement that stayed with me: 189 years.
189 years of building brands and advertising. A reminder that while our industry constantly reinvents itself, some companies have been refining the same core principles for generations.
It made me think. When a company like P&G, after nearly two centuries, still defines success through a few fundamental ideas, the more interesting question is not what has changed, but what hasn’t.
P&G talks about understanding real life, building real superiority, and investing in real people. There is something striking in how little that has to do with how we often describe modern advertising today, where the conversation is dominated by platforms, formats, optimisation tactics, and increasingly complex measurement systems trying to make sense of an increasingly complex reality.
We don’t lack data. We lack transparency.
Consumers today move seamlessly across media, shifting between screens, platforms, and contexts without friction. Our ability to understand them, however, has not evolved in the same unified way. Instead, we capture fragmented snapshots of the same individual depending on where we observe them: one version on TV, another on digital platforms, and yet another in retail media. Each is shaped by its own logic, measured by its own metrics, and evaluated according to its own definition of success. Individually, these systems may appear precise, but together they lack transparency.
Fragmentation has consequences. When our view of reality is divided across systems, measurement follows, and over time, that erodes trust. Not because data is lacking, but because confidence in how it connects is. The questions start to surface more frequently: can this be compared to that, have we already reached these people, and what is actually driving incremental reach?
Growth is not about reach. It is about incremental reach.
At the center of this sits a concept that has always been critical, but has become surprisingly difficult to observe clearly in today’s ecosystem: incremental reach. Not just reaching people, but reaching more people. Growth has never come from reach in isolation, but from expanding the audience over time.
This also sits at the core of Byron Sharp’s concept of mental availability, where growth comes from being easy to think of in buying situations, which in turn depends on broad and consistent exposure across large audiences.
As Taide Guajardo noted during her presentation:
“Building mental availability has become harder, because consumers are always in motion, constantly scrolling and switching across media.”
The challenge is that if you cannot see incremental reach across media, you cannot know whether you are actually growing your audience or simply increasing frequency. What follows is a system where optimisation becomes increasingly effective within individual channels, while visibility across them remains limited. The result is an environment that improves local performance, but struggles to drive overall growth.
The next advantage will not come from more data
This is where the connection back to those 189 years becomes both clear and slightly uncomfortable. The principles themselves remain unchanged, but the conditions under which we try to execute them have become significantly more complex.
Understanding real life requires seeing people as they actually are, not as fragmented reflections within disconnected systems. Building real superiority requires confidence in what truly drives impact, not just what is easiest to measure. Investing in real people requires trust in the underlying data that allows decisions to be made with conviction. Right now, all three are under pressure, not because the principles are wrong, but because the system makes them harder to apply in practice.
So perhaps the real lesson after 189 years is not that advertising has become more advanced, but that it has become more fragmented. And that the next real competitive advantage will not come from more targeting, more data, more optimisation, or even more AI, but from something more fundamental: a shared and trusted view of reality across media.
Because until we can see reach as it actually happens across channels, we are not truly optimising advertising, but rather optimising fragments of it, and that distinction matters more than ever in a world where growth depends on understanding the whole rather than the parts.
Which brings me back to Stockholm. 189 years.
If that is what it takes to learn that advertising is ultimately about understanding real people, building something meaningful, and reaching them in a way that actually drives growth, then perhaps the real challenge today is not complexity, but trust. And in a fragmented media world, trust is becoming the most valuable advantage of all.
This article is 12 of 15 in our series: The Great Reach Reset
About this article series
In a fragmented media landscape, reach is no longer a simple KPI - it is a strategic growth lever. In this article series, AudienceProject explores why advertisers are not failing at reach, but at measuring it properly, and why incremental, deduplicated cross-media reach has become essential to driving penetration, controlling frequency, and unlocking sustainable growth.
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