Without audience, nothing begins

Partner content

Reach is the prerequisite. Creative is the multiplier, writes the CEO of Audience Project.

Recently, I came across a post from Julien Rosanvallon, deputy CEO at Médiamétrie, after he spoke about attention at a France Télévisions conference. What caught my attention wasn’t a new metric or a new model, but something much simpler. He described advertising effectiveness as a layered structure: audience at the base, then attention, and then emotion.

He summed it up in one clear statement:

Without audiences, there is no attention, no emotion, and no effectiveness.”

It struck me because, in many modern marketing discussions, we tend to jump straight to the top of that structure. We talk about emotional storytelling, brand love, attention metrics and creative excellence. All of that is important. But none of it can exist without the foundation. Reach may not be the most exciting topic in marketing, but it remains the starting point.

Byron Sharp’s work has consistently reminded us that brands grow through penetration. And penetration is fundamentally about being present in the buying universe – not just among loyal customers or high-intent audiences, but across the category.

You cannot build mental availability among people who have never encountered your brand. In that sense, reach is not the objective, but the prerequisite.

It is also sometimes argued – and Nielsen’s earlier research has also shown – that creative quality remains the single largest driver of short-term sales lift. I do not disagree. Strong creative matters enormously. But the question is not which lever contributes most within a campaign.

The more fundamental question is what determines whether growth is even possible in the first place. Creative determines how strongly you influence the people you reach. Reach determines how many future buyers you have the opportunity to influence at all.

These are not contradictory perspectives; they operate at different levels of the system. Creative explains the variance in performance within exposure. Reach explains the size of the growth opportunity itself. And in a fragmented media environment, ensuring incremental reach across the market has become both more difficult.

Scale inside one channel is not the same as scale in the market

The challenge is that, in today’s fragmented media environment, reach is harder to interpret. Every channel reports strong numbers. Every campaign appears to deliver scale. On the surface, it can look as though growth is simply a matter of investing enough. But scale inside channels is not the same as scale in the market.

If the same audiences are repeatedly exposed across multiple environments, what appears to be reach may actually be duplication. And while frequency can reinforce memory, it does not expand the buyer base on its own.

If we are serious about penetration, what matters is incremental reach – the ability to extend exposure beyond the same pool of consumers.

Creative multiplies reach, but cannot replace it

This is where the conversation about creatives becomes essential.

As Rosanvallon points out, reach alone does not create effectiveness. It creates the possibility of effectiveness. Attention and emotion are what turn exposure into memory, and memory into future choice.

Great creative amplifies that process. It increases the likelihood that an exposure is noticed, processed, and retained. In that sense, creative multiplies the value of reach.

But creative cannot compensate for the absence of scale. And reach cannot compensate for weak creative. That is why the debate between reach and creative is misplaced. They are not competing priorities. They are interdependent components of the same system.

For CMOs and brand leaders, the real challenge is not choosing one over the other. It is understanding how the audience, attention, and emotion connect to drive effectiveness – and ensuring that reach genuinely expands the future buyer base, not simply reinforces familiarity within a limited group.

Without audience, nothing begins. Without incremental reach, nothing grows. And without strong creative, nothing endures.

In my opinion, we can debate attention models and creative awards all we want. But if the audience is not growing, neither is the brand. Growth begins with reach.

Thomas Honoré is the chief executive officer at Audience Project