I want desirability…
Article 8 of 9 in series: The Great Reach Reset
I was at a customer meeting a few weeks ago in Milan, and we were deep in the weeds of “reach strategies” – you know, all the standard marketing talk: incremental reach, cross-platform deduplication, diminishing returns, reach and frequency curves, and all that highly technical jargon that seems to dominate our modern industry.
We spent a good chunk of time discussing how fractured and messy the media world is now. It’s so easy for any large brand to look at their reports and think they’re reaching a massive number of people, but that’s only because every platform reports its own siloed numbers. Trying to figure out your true, unique audience across all of them – TV, streaming, social, etc. – is, frankly, a nightmare of spreadsheets and estimation.
Then, the customer, a global advertiser, said something that completely reframed the conversation: “Honestly, I don’t really care about reach – I want desirability”, she told me, leaning back.
I only care about desirability
Desirability. I absolutely love that word. It’s a single term that cuts through all the quantitative noise and forces a moment of qualitative clarity. I reckon that no CMO ever stands up in front of the board and announces: “Great news, team! We successfully increased our deduplicated reach by 6%”. That sentence is meaningless to the CEO or to the board. What they actually should be talking about is:
- Demand generation: Are people actively searching for and finding our product?
- Brand preference: Are we the first brand people think of, or is it a competitor?
- Brand strength: How resilient are we in a downturn or against a new challenger?
- Sustainable growth: Are we bringing in new users who will stick around?
“Desirability” wraps all of those powerful, big-picture goals into one simple, compelling concept. And she was totally right – it’s the true objective.
Byron Sharp is focused on the big picture – not just reach
It’s an industry tradition to boil down Byron Sharp’s famous research, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, to one tactical instruction: go for maximum reach. But that simplification misses the entire, elegant point of his work. Sharp’s real focus isn’t reach; it’s penetration – the percentage of buyers who have purchased your brand at least once. And the way you get penetration is through mental availability.
And mental availability, at its core, simply means making sure your brand is easy to notice, easy to recall, and easy to choose at the moment of purchase. This is achieved by ensuring broad, consistent exposure to as many potential buyers as possible. So, for Sharp, reach was never the goal itself. It was simply the mechanism, the tool, used to build mental availability. The real goal is to make your brand impossible to ignore. That is what ultimately creates desirability on a massive, market-moving scale.
The tricky thing: We can’t put a number on desirability
Here’s where it gets tricky, and where the struggle is real for every marketer. We can’t just look up a “Desirability Score” on a real-time dashboard. We have plenty of metrics we can measure: impressions, reach, on-target percentage, brand impact (awareness, preference, consideration), website traffic and conversions, and sales volumes, etc.
But desirability itself is a complex, almost emotional feeling – a blend of preference, trust, and magnetic appeal. You can’t simply pull it from a spreadsheet or calculate it using an easy formula (even though our Data Science team would come pretty close if we gave them the task, I reckon). Yet, marketers still have to make critical, multimillion-euro decisions every single day: where to allocate the next euro, how much to invest in a specific channel, and if that investment is actually building incremental reach or just burning frequency.
So, the fundamental question shifts: If we can’t measure desirability directly, what is the best, most reliable leading indicator? That’s where the right kind of reach comes back into the picture.
The trap: Repetition, not reach
Most large brands genuinely believe they are expanding their reach and connecting with new people. The dashboards are telling them this. The truth is that many are only creating a whole lot of expensive repetition.
They allocate their budget across TV, various streaming services, a handful of social media platforms, and online video, with each channel optimising in its own bubble. Every platform reports success, and everyone claims they delivered massive “reach”. But without independent cross-media measurement, no one truly knows:
- How many unique people actually saw the campaign across the channels?
- How much overlap there was between Facebook and YouTube, or between linear TV and YouTube?
- How much of the total budget generated incremental reach, meaning, it reached someone new for the very first time?
- And, crucially, at what point the frequency stopped being effective and just became annoying, wasteful spending?
This is a dangerous trap. When you’re just hitting the same small group with the same ad again and again. Sure, they might remember you better, and your brand recall might slightly tick up within that cohort. But you are not bringing in new customers, and if you’re not expanding your buyer base, you absolutely are not scaling desirability.
Incremental reach is not the finish line – it’s the starting block
Desirability scales when more potential buyers know you, recognise you, and actually consider you. It has nothing to do with showing the same few, loyal people an ad ten times instead of six. Desirability doesn’t grow through saturation and repetition. It grows through expansion, by adding new names to your mental availability list. And, of course, the creative that you reach them with.
And for expansion, you need true incremental reach. Not the massive numbers that individual channels want to report. It has to be the deduplicated, cross-platform incremental reach. This is the prerequisite. It’s the metric that proves you are reaching a new person. Because if you can’t confidently measure whether you are reaching a new person today, you can’t confidently say you are building mental availability for tomorrow. And without solid evidence of reach and mental availability, hoping for desirability to just magically appear is nothing more than a wish-based strategy.
This article is 8 of 9 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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