Naughty, naughty marketers? Or…
Article 13 of 14 in series: The Great Reach Reset
At the WFA Global Marketer Week a few weeks ago, Andrew Tindall from System1 shared some interesting insights. They showed that we are spending more on advertising than ever before, while we are getting less brand growth from it. Yet, the conclusion was that brand building has become more important than ever.
Somewhere along the way, he described the industry as being run by “naughty, naughty marketers.” It’s a great line, and to be fair, he’s absolutely right about the symptoms – the facts don’t lie. But I don’t think the explanation is that marketers have suddenly started behaving badly.
We got very good at the wrong thing
The obvious villian is fragmentation, with more channels, more platforms, and more competition for attention than ever before. That’s all true, but it doesn’t fully explain why effectiveness would decline, because what matters more is how we respond to that complexity.
Over the past decade, we’ve leaned heavily into optimisation. We’ve become much better at targeting, better at driving performance, and significantly faster at proving results, and each of those steps has been entirely rational on its own, but taken together, they come with a trade-off that is easy to miss.
We’ve become extremely good at finding the right people and then finding them again and again, while gradually becoming less effective at reaching people who don’t already know us or aren’t already close to buying.
That matters because, as Byron Sharp has consistently pointed out, brands grow by increasing penetration, and penetration comes from reaching more category buyers, not just a tightly defined audience, but as many buyers as possible, including the light and occasional ones that are easy to overlook.
When we narrow our audiences and increase frequency, we inevitably end up talking more to the same people and less to new ones, and what quietly disappears in that process is incremental reach.
The tricky part: it still looks like it’s working
What makes this particularly difficult is that fragmentation also makes the problem harder to see, as each channel can demonstrate strong performance within its own environment, and each campaign looks efficient when viewed in isolation. So nothing appears obviously broken, but what we rarely see is the overlap across channels.
Marketers rarely see how often they are reaching the same people in different places, and they don’t see how small a share of the total spend is actually reaching someone new, and without that visibility, it’s very easy to assume that everything is working as intended.
This is where cross-media measurement becomes important. Not as a technical upgrade or an industry buzzword, but as a way to answer a very simple question: are we actually reaching new people, or are we mostly reinforcing the same audience again and again? Once you can see that clearly, the challenge becomes much harder to ignore.
Brand building didn’t change. We did.
We often say that brand building has become more important than ever, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Brand building has always been the foundation of long-term growth. What has changed is our ability to execute it properly.
Effective brand building requires scale and breadth. It requires reaching beyond the obvious audience and being comfortable with the fact that not every impression will look efficient in the short term. It is, by its nature, about expansion rather than optimisation. And of course, reach alone is not enough. If what people see is forgettable, rational, or simply doesn’t land emotionally, then even perfect distribution won’t create growth. Creative quality still matters enormously.
But the reverse is also true and often overlooked. Even the strongest creative cannot do its job if it keeps reaching the same people again and again. Without incremental reach, even great creatives struggle to translate into growth.
So when we see declining brand effects, perhaps a better interpretation is not that brand building has become more important, but that genuine brand building has become less common.
So what’s actually going on?
This isn’t really about naughty marketers, and it’s not about some abstract system either. It’s the result of many small, sensible choices made over time. We chose targeting because it delivered short-term results. We chose efficiency because it was easier to demonstrate value. We chose the metrics that were available to us.
Individually, those decisions made perfect sense, but together they have gradually shifted how advertising works. If I had to sum it up simply: We didn’t lose effectiveness – we optimised it away.
And if that’s true, then getting back on track isn’t about reinventing everything, but about rebalancing what we think and what we measure. Because in the end, growth still comes from reaching more people – not just the right people again and again, but more people.
This article is 13 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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