I’m not a creative. But I respect the multiplier.
Article 7 of 12 in series: The Great Reach Reset
I’ll start with a confession. I don’t know that much about creative craft. In high school, my friends and I used to play a game: one of us would describe a logo, slogan, or commercial, and the others had to guess the brand. The interest was always there. I was fascinated by how quickly a few colours, a sound, or a tagline could trigger recognition. But talent? That was clearly unevenly distributed. I never became the person who could design the logo or write the script. I just admired the people who could.
Fast forward to today, and I still wouldn’t call myself a creative. Yet I work in a world where creatives meet signals, audience data, methodology, and large-scale measurement. My job is to help brands spend their money in the smartest possible ways – to ensure that investments translate into growth. And over the years, I have come to a simple conclusion: Creative is the multiplier of advertising effectiveness – but only when it is given the reach required to enter memory.
Everything I have seen in marketing effectiveness points back to this combination.
The brand that stayed with me
For me, one of those brands is Gillette. It was formed in me, sitting in dark cinemas in Copenhagen many years ago, right around the time my beard began to grow. The line still echoes: “The best a man can get.” There was something about those films – the lighting, the music, the confidence – that made the brand feel like more than a razor. It felt like a step into adulthood.
Still today, I find it surprisingly difficult to imagine switching to something else. That is the power of creative done at scale. It wasn’t just a clever tagline. It wasn’t just media weight. It was the combination – emotional storytelling delivered with enough reach and frequency to encode itself in memory at exactly the right moment in life.
Where emotion enters memory
Creative is where emotion is shaped. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes for years. Occasionally, for a lifetime. We all carry brands in our memory that were built not just through exposure, but through feeling. A soundtrack. A character. A line of dialogue. A visual world.
Research supports this. In ‘The Long and the Short of It’, Les Binet and Peter Field show that emotionally driven campaigns are significantly more effective at driving long-term business growth than purely rational ones. Emotion strengthens memory structures – and memory drives future choice.
That emotional encoding doesn’t happen in spreadsheets. It doesn’t emerge from dashboards or reach curves. It happens in the craft. But – and this is important – creative cannot work in isolation. Emotion requires attention. Attention requires exposure. Exposure requires reach. Without audience, nothing begins.
The bridge between reach and creative
In my world, we talk about reach and frequency. About deduplication. About incremental audiences. About penetration and mental availability. These words may not sound poetic. But they define the stage on which creative performs. In ‘How Brands Grow’, Byron Sharp has consistently shown that brands grow primarily through penetration – by reaching more buyers – rather than by increasing loyalty among existing customers. You cannot build mental availability among people who have never encountered your brand.
If the same people see the same ad repeatedly across platforms, we may be reinforcing memory, but we are not expanding the buyer base. If a brilliant piece of creative reaches only a narrow slice of the market, its emotional power is constrained by scale.
Reach creates the possibility of growth. Creative determines the intensity of impact. One without the other is incomplete. This is why the debate between “media” and “creative” has always felt misplaced to me. It assumes a trade-off where there shouldn’t be one.
The real work is in the bridge and understanding how to expand reach incrementally across platforms. Ensuring sufficient frequency to encode memory. Giving creative the scale it deserves. Respecting the craft enough to measure whether it actually captures attention and generates emotion.
Harness the combination
I may not be a creative. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of scriptwriting, art direction, or editing rhythm. But I deeply respect what creative can do because creative is the multiplier of advertising effectiveness – but only if it is given the reach required to enter memory.
In a fragmented media landscape, growth depends on discipline around reach and frequency. Not only platform reach. Not only reported impressions. True reach across channels.
When strong creative meets real incremental reach, something powerful happens. Attention turns into emotion. Emotion turns into memory. Memory turns into choice and into money.
Focus only on reach, and advertising becomes noise. Focus only on creative, and its impact never travels far enough. Growth comes from harnessing the combination.
This article is 7 of 12 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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