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Invisible brands don’t sell — why building reach is fundamental to brand growth

Invisible brands don’t sell — why building reach is fundamental to brand growth
Opinion

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, reach and frequency is the foundation that helps navigate this complexity and ensures brand growth.

We all know how complex the media landscape is.

When commercial TV was a one- or two-channel affair, with no competition from the internet, there was a highly bankable relationship between ad investment, audiences, and the likely ROI for running ads on TV.

Now, everyone is a TV channel (more or less). There is a clash between internet users and TV audiences that is in no way helpful to marketing investment planning. Luckily, there are armies of measurement vendors on hand to help marketers better navigate these waters.

But where does one start, and which measurements and metrics should be used? MMM, ACR data, Attention?

The importance of building reach to grow a brand

Reach and frequency is the absolute starting point — the foundation layer on which to build.

From this starting point, we’ve seen customers yield high-utility outputs by layering attention data on top of reach and frequency output, for example. 1+ cover is a measure of how many of the target audience have seen the advert at least once. And maximising 1+ cover is the best ROI you can ever get on a marketing investment.

By building 1+ cover and reaching more people, you create a high potential return on media investment.

That’s because the people who previously didn’t know about your product and could not feasibly buy it are now in the ‘know’, and arguably take up a position in the upper sales funnel.

But don’t just take that from me. Let’s look at a few key points that Byron Sharp made in his book How Brands Grow, first published in 2010.

There are three highly relevant points (all backed by evidence) from Byron Sharp’s book to support the argument about the importance of building reach to grow a brand:

>> Brands grow when they reach more buyers more often and get them to buy more

>> The most effective way to attract new customers is to reach a larger audience

>> Brands need to constantly strive for mental and physical availability to remain top-of-mind with consumers

The first two points are very simple in their argument: tell more people about your product, and more people are likely to buy it. Thus, it is an effective way to attract new customers.

Where streaming comes in

The concept of mental availability can arguably be exploited on emerging streaming channels.

Streaming platforms are exciting places to be, with big-ticket content and relatively low ad loads, presenting brands with an opportunity to stand out compared to a higher ad-load linear TV environment. On the other hand, there may be a more clunky ad placement on the newer platforms, as much of the content wasn’t made with ad breaks in mind.

If you subscribe to Sharp’s views on the importance of building reach to grow a brand, the goal then must be to do that in as efficient a manner as possible.

Oxford University and Kantar conducted a study that supports this idea. In 2021, a thousand media campaigns with varying media mixes were analysed, concluding that the average media plan could be 2.6 times more effective with a different media mix!

The pathway to the analysis and optimisation of media plans is, of course, measurement.

The outcomes marketers can expect

Measuring net reach in this ecosystem is not easy.

With a high prevalence of walled gardens and new content players constantly entering the market, substantial engineering is required by measurement companies to keep pace and, of course, ensure privacy and research standards are constantly met.

At AudienceProject, we have been pioneering cross-media measurement for more than a decade and are confident that our comprehensive and robust platform is ready for the evolving media future.

So, what are the outcomes that marketers can expect to help them in their future media investment optimisations?

We believe that the outcomes are derived from answering the key questions that have always been asked about campaign investments:

>> Who is my campaign reaching?

>> How many people is my campaign reaching?

>> How often is my campaign reaching them?

And crucially — how does each channel contribute to the overall campaign effect?


Martyn Bentley is commercial director, UK at AudienceProject

Roger Gane, CEO, OMG!, on 29 Aug 2024
“Martyn Bentley is correct to identify the importance of reach and frequency in media planning but this not exactly news! I understand that he is mainly concerned with the digital platforms, but R & F has been central to the operation of traditional media, such as radio, for decades. He quotes from a book by Byron Sharp: Brands grow when they reach more buyers more often and get them to buy more and The most effective way to attract new customers is to reach a larger audience Well, yes, hard to disagree with those thoughts, but Mr Sharp does seem to be stating the ‘bleedin’ obvious’! It is recognised that there is a positive correlation between reach or penetration, and volume or frequency of use. Andrew Ehrenberg and others have shown that what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Statistical Law of Double Jeopardy’ is generally true, both for media consumption and for consumer product purchasing. That’s to say it is very difficult to build a high volume of individual purchase/consumption for a product or channel with a relatively low reach. (No doubt there are exceptions for some highly specialist offerings.) Martyn also says that ‘maximising 1+ cover is the best ROI you can ever get’. It used to be the rule that 3x cover equalled ‘effective reach’, but I have never seen any technical justification for this!”

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