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The Marketing Architects
Reach More, Waste Less: The Math Behind Smarter TV Advertising
00:17:52
Reach beats creative. That's the contrarian truth most marketers miss. A 2x better creative won't beat 100x greater reach. And yet brands keep choosing frequency over breadth, hyper-targeting over scale. This week, we're sharing a special recording...
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's Elena.
- [00:02]
B
This week you're going to hear a.
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A
Special episode of the Marketing Architects podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Angela spoke with Dale Harrison at Brand Week. They did a talk on reach and how reach is the most powerful force in marketing. How that insight shapes how we buy, plan and measure tv. There's a lot of great marketing effectiveness knowledge in here. It's short and sweet and I hope you enjoy it. And I also hope that you have a very happy holiday and safe times with your friends and family this week. Enjoy Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
- [00:43]
C
I want to start with this idea of reach primacy, which is a bit of a contrarian view. And the idea is that reach, not creative, is the strong force in marketing. One of the things we know is that the level of ongoing reach is the metric that corresponds most closely with share of market. The idea is that no one buys a brand that they don't remember or that they don't know. And so a lot of what we have to do in marketing is to reach as large a fraction of future buyers as possible. If we think about campaign effectiveness, it's really driven by two factors. It's how effective the creative is at persuading a single individual times the number of people that are are exposed to that creative. And one of the things that we see is that there is much broader ability to expand reach than there is to expand the creative effectiveness. So, you know, a 2x better creative is not going to beat 100x greater reach. And you know, this is one of the challenges with smaller brands is the struggle to be able to reach a larger part of their of their future buyers. And one of the things we can see, there's a notion called the surface area of effectiveness, and that's this idea that we've got a certain level of creative effectiveness. How persuasive the ad is times the number of people we can put it in front of. And one of the things that we see is that with large reach, even small improvements in creative effectiveness have a magnified effect simply because we're spreading that out over many more potential future buyers. Where if you're a smaller brand or you have smaller reach, even significantly large improvements in creative effectiveness tend to have little impact simply because they're reaching so few people. And so this is really an argument for the importance of trying to achieve as broad a reach as possible. Now, again, broad reach doesn't mean everyone on the planet. It means the largest fraction of potential future buyers. And then this leads to this idea of reach consistency. Reach is not a one and done. Reach is an ongoing process where we need to continuously reach people over time. And the reason why is there's this notion called brand recall at purchase. So brand awareness only has commercial value when the buyer comes in market. So the buyer's not in market. And we know that, you know from the 95, 5 rule that most buyers are not in market at any given point in time. And so that level of brand awareness is only useful when they come in market and they're able to recall you at the time of purchase. And what this, this brand recaller purchase does is it puts us in the consideration set. And we know that about 90% of final purchase decisions come from that initial consideration set. So, you know, a buyer comes in market, they typically will have a small number, two, three, four, maybe five brands that will come to market. And it doesn't mean that they won't discover something along the way once they're in market. But typically, let me say, most of the buying, 90% of the final purchase decision comes with that initial consideration set. So it becomes very important that we be able to reach these buyers well ahead of when they come in market. But the problem here is brand memory. Reach is what is implanting the brand memories or refreshing the brand memories. But those memories are being forgotten. And so we're in this kind of dynamic equilibrium between reach and forgetting. So this is one of the reasons that reach is not a number, reach is a rate. So it doesn't make sense to talk about reaching your entire market. Because if most of those people have forgotten before they come in market, it doesn't matter that you reached them a year ago or two years ago. So what matters is that you reach them often enough and consistently enough that when they do come in market, you're going to be able to come to mind. And again, they don't have to be top of mind. What matters is to simply come to mind. Because once you come to mind, you then have a reasonably good chance of being able to be chosen. Reach is an ongoing process where you're attempting to reach buyers and plan to refresh those memories. But at the same time, you're fighting against the fact that they're forgetting and the forgetting is occurring continuously. If anyone has looked at MMM studies, the concept of Adstock is essentially capturing and measuring this rate of forgetting that occurs. And if you've seen ad stock curves, what you realize is that rate of forgetting occurs relatively quickly. I Mean within a matter of depending on the product and the product category. You know, it's a matter of days or weeks or a few months. Which is why we need to continuously be trying to achieve relatively broad reach with continuous always on campaigns. So what you end up with is this kind of dynamic equilibrium between your rate of reach and your rate of forgetting. The problem is forgetting is constant. So whether we're reaching the audience or not, the audience is constantly forgetting. So in order to fight against that, the reach also needs to be constant. This is really the kind of the underlying rationale for this idea of always on broad reach. And again, broad doesn't mean everyone who can fog a mirror. Broad means your market, your potential future buyers. But the more people you can reach that are potential buyers, the more likely they will will still have the ability to recall your brand at the time they come in market. And for B2B, this becomes really important because the inter purchase periods tend to be very long. For many B2B products, the Inter purchase period can run years. And so that ability to continuously be in front of people so that you're in their head at the time that they come in market becomes critical. And there are actually some ways to model the dynamics of this process between implanting and refreshing memories and, and then people losing memories. There are specific dynamic models that have been developed that look at this. And one of the things that you see is that as you start to do brand marketing, what you're going to do is you're going to reach an equilibrium where some fraction of the market at any given time will be able to recall your brand as they come in market. Higher level of reach means a larger fraction of the market. A lower level of reach means a lower level. And there's a time lag. There takes time to be able to to reach enough people that you've got a high level of recall and then to be able to continuously re reach them before they forget. This is an example of one such model. So we're looking at four brands here. They're all starting from essentially zero and they're all marketing at different levels of reach based on their market share and essentially based on their budget. And then what this shows is a point where they turn off marketing for a period of time. You see that brand recall start to drop back down and then they turn it back on and it comes back up. So there are time delays on this. You can't instantaneously be able to have the entire market recognize you and remember you. It takes some period of time to reach enough people to have an effect.
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B
Thanks, Dale. Yeah, I feel like in the marketing world there's been such a growth of data and technology. The growth of digital reach has maybe become kind of a dirty word and we're trying to bring it back. You got to help us. I'm Angela Voss, CEO at Marketing Architects. Marketing Architects is a TV only ad agency. We handle both linear and connected television and are really known for disrupting traditional practices, bringing greater accountability to the channel. We have a podcast we launched a couple of years ago. The marketing architects and content like Dale has talked about today. You've been a guest on a podcast, Appreciated having you is what we talk about every single week, a couple of episodes a week. Just what ultimately drives growth and reaches a key topic that we're discussing. Often just by show of hands. I'm curious. I actually can't see you, so maybe you have to yell at me. Who knows who Byron Sharp is? Any familiarity with Ehrenberg Bass and how brands grow. Yay. Awesome. We came across Byron Sharp, Gosh, the ipa. Just a whole body of marketing effectiveness data, science based strategies that were driving growth for brands back in 2016. And it really kind of changed how we thought about television. We were performance marketers at the core for many, many years. And this body of evidence, there's a lot of divisive debates, hyper targeting versus broad reach, reach versus frequency, light buyers versus heavy buyers. And so wanted to just take a moment to talk about how those concepts kind of relate to television. So starting with reach and continuing Dale's voice on here, Linear and CTV are very different channels to us as marketers. But in terms of how consumers view them, they're very similar. Traditionally, linear was the broad reach channel that everyone would go to to build a brand. And with the growth of tech and ctv, it's been very tempting to approach the channel very similar to digital. And I think we have to remember what the evidence shows, similar to what Dale was speaking to, is that our audience targets need to be thought of as broader than they are today. A lot of times digital marketers are coming into television with a very niche or hyper targeted approach to trying to drive growth for their brand. But often secondary growth targets, non or light buyers, are essential to driving growth for brands. And so we want to think kind of beyond that. Bullseye target. Many brands launch TV when they've run out of Runway in digital and they're very used to traditional digital targeting methods. And we just need to recognize that the spaces are very different. If we over target or Hyper target. We're really limiting reach for those buyers that might be so essential to growing the brand. Often brands are sort of mindfully avoiding reaching potential customers because they're too narrowly targeted. And so that becomes a prohibitor for growth. B2B brands are notorious for this. Sorry if there's B2B brands out here, but we're one as well, you know, really trying to find that buyer, whomever that buyer is. The reality is that on average 6 to 10 people are involved in making a B2B buying decision in some capacity. And so having influence with a broader set is really important. Most brands additionally are driven in terms of growth by light buyers. Many brands, buyers only buy one to two times a year. And yet we become a bit obsessed with heavy buyers. You know, how do we find them, how do we build lookalites off of them? The reality is they're just incredibly important for growth. Coca Cola released some data that half of all Coke buyers buy just one or two cans or bottles per year. It's pretty crazy when you think about the breadth and the scope that provides for them in terms of scale. So the targeting lesson here is to think outside the bullseye. And I think we can't talk about reach without also talking about frequency. And this is something that comes up, you know, is it better for me to limit my reach and get more frequency with a smaller set of consumers, or should I broaden that target and just hit them once or twice? And the answer to that is that your response rate is going to drop with every additional frequency you have. And so ideally we would reach everyone once. With the realities of marketing, it's very hard to do that today. And we've all experienced the over frequency that exists on ctv. And that's just evidence of marketers not following empirical data and practices that will ultimately drive growth. Now I think a lot of brands might go, yes, I would love to reach more audience, but I don't have the budget. And so I think cost needs to be a part of this discussion. We today are all potentially working with less budget, you know, just constrained by the realities of the marketing world. And so what is this discussion? I think TD gets a bad rap in terms of the cost of the channel. It's just thought of as very expensive. And of course the super bowl is evidence of that. Ad prices have been climbing since it started. In 2025, the average 32nd Super bowl spot was $8 million. And in 26 it'll be something similar, maybe slightly more. And you might be thinking, well, this is Linear television. But what about connected television? And in terms of absolute costs into the channel, yes, your cost might be less, but CTV is actually a higher priced channel based on cost per thousand of audience. It is ridden with fees, middleman fees, layered tech fees, ad distribution fees, et cetera, and premium targeting costs. And so it inflates that base inventory price beyond a level that many marketers can afford. So how do we think about trying to reduce costs in the television space? Thinking about it, everything works at zero. Everything works at zero. So really what this is about is just not accepting some of the, I think, bias in the space related to the cost of inventory and working harder to bring that cost down. So how do we do that? First of all, access the full landscape. Too many brands are limiting their media plans to too few of networks or publishers, and that's really just agreeing to pay more to reach an audience that you could otherwise reach for less. And the difference there is just audience based buying versus programming based buying. So think audience first and then I think secondly, the landscape has just gotten so fragmented and complex that humans cannot manage the buying process any longer. And so when you think about traditional ways of buying, we've got the Scatter Marketplace, we've got upfronts, of course those still exist, but there are new ways. AI based buying is here, it's been here for a while. We built a platform back in 2018 that procures media inventory at a fifth the cost of the Scatter marketplace. And so that gives our clients scale and efficiency, which ultimately leads to reach and growth for them. Lastly, I just want to touch on measurement as I think that when you talk about reaching, many marketers go to a place of, well, then it's not accountable. We're only talking about reach, we're talking about frequency, we're talking about TRPs, we're talking about impressions, and I'm accountable to driving sales. And so that is definitely not what we think in terms of measurement. TV is a tough channel to measure. We surveyed over 300 marketers and found that linear ranked as the number one hardest channel to measure. Connected television was the third hardest channel to measure. So these are not contests that we're looking to win, but that's where we are. TV is a full funnel channel and that's part of the complexity is it is a king of brand building awareness. And yet it also drives sales today from consumers that are in market for your product or service. And that's really how you should think about measurement is you're going to need multiple models for our clients. We stand up no less than 10 per client. Everything from spot based attribution, ACR technology, placer data for foot traffic, MMM, etc. We should be having multiple ways to triangulate performance across every single campaign. No single model is going to tell you what television does and I would be very wary of in platform roas that gets kicked out. Definitely take a view of incrementality. Geo Holdouts is a great way to do this just to ensure that ultimately at the end of the day you're triangulating performance and trying to nail down what ultimately we think television is doing. A lot of opportunity in the channel. We just have to harness the right strategies and tactics to get us there. Recapping some of what we talked about today, pursuing reach over tight targeting I often like to say that hyper targeting is agreeing to pay more to ignore your future customer set. So that's not something we want to do. Take a harder look at media cost and look at potentially new ways to bring costs down, especially in the TV channel. And then number three, all models are wrong. Some are very useful and so deploy multiple models to understand your campaign performance. Really appreciate everyone joining us today. We do have an activation area set up outside in the main hall with some popcorn. We would love to see you Otherwise Connect on LinkedIn. Dale, thanks for joining us today.
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A
Certainly, that's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing architects.