A home-run conversation with Ben
Article 2 of 14 in series: The Great Reach Reset
After publishing my thoughts on why brands shouldn’t be trapped in the last-click Illusion, I had a follow-up conversation that made the topic feel even more relevant. It wasn’t a customer meeting. It wasn’t a conference keynote. It was simply a 1:1 with my colleague
My conversation with Ben was one of those conversations that remind me why the best strategic thinking rarely happens in big meeting rooms. It happens when smart people challenge each other, ask uncomfortable questions, and refuse to accept lazy answers.
Ben has a natural challenger approach. He doesn’t just nod along when something sounds right. He pushes. He tests assumptions. He asks the one question that forces you to clarify what you really mean.
And in this case, the question was simple: If reach is the foundation of growth, why do so many brands still struggle to execute reach strategies properly?
It’s a deceptively simple question. But it goes straight to the heart of modern marketing.
Byron Sharp is right, but execution has become harder
We discussed the research from Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and the conclusion is clear: brands grow by increasing penetration. And penetration comes from reaching as many category buyers as possible. Not just your “core segment.” Not just your high-intent audience. Not just the people who clicked yesterday. But the entire buying universe.
Byron Sharp calls it building mental availability: ensuring that when people enter the buying situation, your brand comes to mind easily and naturally. That mental availability is not created through precision targeting. It is built through consistent, broad exposure over time.
Reach is not a media metric. It is a growth strategy.
The incrementality problem: The trap CMOs can’t ignore
In our conversation, Ben made another sharp point: Most marketing teams aren’t struggling with reach as an idea. They’re struggling with building and proving incrementality.
And that is exactly the problem. Building reach is hard because you can end up spending money without actually building reach if you just hit the same people. As the reach curve flattens for a given channel, each new person reached costs too much.
Performance marketing has conditioned the industry to believe that value is what can be tracked directly to a click. But clicks often capture the end of the customer journey, not the cause of demand. A conversion is rarely created in a single moment. It is often the result of months of mental priming. A brand investment may have done the heavy lifting long before the last click ever happened.
So when CMOs ask, “What is incremental?”, they are asking a question that cannot only be answered with platform dashboards. Incrementality is not something you assume. It is something you must measure. And without measurement, brands risk optimising the wrong thing.
Why maximum reach is hard in a fragmented media world
If Byron Sharp’s conclusions are so clear, why does the industry still struggle? Because the media ecosystem is fragmenting.
In the past, broad reach was almost built into the system. A TV campaign would naturally deliver mass exposure. You might not have perfect targeting, but you did get penetration. Today, brands operate across a complex and fragmented landscape:
- TV
- Streaming
- Online video
- Social platforms
- Digital publishers
- Retail media
- Games
- Chats
- Audio
Each channel reports its own reach. Each channel reports its own frequency. Each channel claims success.
But none of them shows the full picture. And that is where the illusion begins. Because what looks like “mass reach” inside a channel can actually be:
- the same users being hit again and again,
- across multiple channels,
- with no visibility into overlap,
- and no control of true campaign frequency.
Ben described it perfectly: You can think you are buying reach, but you may actually be buying repetition.
The real waste isn’t broad reach – it’s blind frequency
There is a widespread fear among marketers that broad reach equals waste. But in reality, the most common waste today is not reaching too many people. It’s reaching too few people too often.
And it happens because measurement is siloed. One platform optimises for view-through rate. Another for engagement. Another for completion rate. Another for cost-per-click. But none of those KPIs guarantees that the campaign is building incremental reach across the category.
The result is a familiar pattern:
- Heavy frequency against the same group of users
- Limited incremental reach
- Over-crediting of performance channels
- Under-investment in brand-building
- And ultimately: stagnating market share
If the goal is revenue growth, this is a structural problem.
Cross-media measurement is not reporting – it’s the strategy layer
This is where my discussion with Ben became even more interesting. Because we weren’t just talking about marketing theory. We were talking about what it takes to execute it. And the answer is measurement.
Not “measurement” in the sense of dashboards. But measurement as the strategic capability to understand:
- How many unique people did we actually reach?
- How much overlap exists between platforms?
- What was the true cross-platform frequency distribution?
- How much of our investment drove incremental reach vs repeated exposure?
- What is the relationship between reach and sales impact over time?
This is also why marketing mix modelling (MMM) has regained attention. But as Ben pointed out, having worked many years with MMM at Nielsen, MMM is only as useful as the quality of its inputs. If you feed an MMM with spend and raw impressions, you are modelling noise.
If you feed it with deduplicated, cross-platform reach and frequency, you are modelling reality. And that is the difference between an academic model and a strategic tool, Ben pointed out.
The modern growth formula: Reach + Proof
The best part of the conversation with Ben was that it led to a very simple conclusion. The future is not “brand vs performance”. It is not “reach vs efficiency”. It is not “upper funnel vs lower funnel”. The modern growth formula is “reach + proof”. Reach builds mental availability. Proof protects investment. And measurement connects the two.
Because in the end, the most dangerous situation for a brand is not under-investing in performance. It is under-investing in reach because you cannot prove its value. And that is exactly what last-click attribution has done to marketing: it has created a system where only the easy gets funded, even if it is not the true driver of growth.
Final reflection
I want to thank Ben for a genuinely strong conversation – not just because he brought sharp insights, but because he brought the right mindset. The challenger mindset. At AudienceProject, this is a fundamental corporate value: Guts – or as we say – Courage above Comfort, exemplified by the willingness to ask: Does this really hold up in the real world?
That is the kind of thinking the marketing industry needs more of. Because Byron Sharp’s research is not new. The insights are well documented. What is new is the media reality. The fragmentation. And what we need now is the ability to execute broad reach strategies with confidence, precision and proof. Not by targeting fewer people. But by reaching more people – and measuring it properly.
This article is 2 of 14 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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