Marketers trapped in the ‘Efficiency Doom Loop’: Autopilot on, growth off
Partner content
Never before have marketers known so much about their target audiences. Yet advertising budgets continue to follow the same old patterns. A study by The Trade Desk and PA Consulting reveals how habit and risk aversion shape media planning, and why this has become a barrier to brand growth.
Advertising likes to see itself as an industry built on creativity, innovation and experimentation. Yet when it comes to media investment, marketers often default to the familiar.
Despite having more data, better measurement, and more advanced technology than ever before, many media plans still follow the same pattern year after year.
But how much appetite for innovation does the industry really have? When it comes to allocating advertising budgets, that creativity often disappears. Social media, in particular, has become a default allocation in many media plans, rarely challenged despite changing consumer behaviour.
The audience has already moved on
There are, of course, good reasons why social media plays an important role in almost every media plan. These platforms offer enormous reach and provide metrics that make it easy to track short-term campaign performance. But does that justify the large share of advertising budgets they now command?
A look at how people actually consume media suggests there is reason to question it. After all, more than 60% of digital media consumption happens on the open web, across streaming TV and audio, podcasts, and gaming.
To put that into perspective: The platform where people spend the most time is not Instagram. It’s Netflix. The platform with the greatest unique reach and the least audience overlap is not YouTube. It’s Spotify. The media environment that generates the highest ad recall is not creator content; it’s live sports. Yet only around a third of digital advertising budgets currently flow into the premium open internet.
The path of least resistance
So why is there such a wide gap between media consumption and advertising spend? Our study offers a revealing explanation.
Media planning decisions are often driven as much by psychology as by performance; in fact, 75% of respondents favour social media because they are particularly familiar with these channels. 68% of respondents believe that reducing social media budgets feels riskier than keeping them unchanged, even when strong alternative channels are available.
A further 72% of respondents said that channels whose impact is easier to measure are often given more credit for business success. Put simply, marketers often mistake what is measurable for what is effective. Yet the availability of metrics alone tells us little about how much a campaign actually contributes to long-term brand growth.
Trapped in the efficiency loop
What starts as a sensible decision can quickly become a vicious cycle. Marketers who favour familiar channels receive exactly the metrics they need to justify their decisions.
Those measurable successes reinforce confidence in the existing strategy. The result? Even more money flows into the same channels next time. This is known as the “Efficiency Doom Loop”, a trap that companies often struggle to escape.
The problem is that a campaign can deliver excellent short-term results while contributing little to a brand’s long-term growth.
Low-cost reach, clicks and conversions are not ends in themselves. Brands that repeatedly target the same audiences and existing demand risk losing sight of potential new customers.
And those that focus primarily on optimising what is easy to measure may overlook the very advertising effects that only become visible in business results months later.
AI: An accelerator for bad decisions
As artificial intelligence becomes more widely used, this development could become even more pronounced. AI makes media planning faster and simplifies many processes, but it does not automatically challenge the decisions behind them.
AI won’t fix flawed planning assumptions. It will simply scale them. The wrong audiences, the wrong metric, and the wrong media mix can now be optimised faster than ever before.
The real challenge for marketers is to ask the right questions. Which audiences are we currently failing to reach? Which channels genuinely contribute to business success? And where are we relying on assumptions we haven’t challenged for far too long?
Switch off the autopilot
Even marketers who answer these questions honestly are unlikely to abandon social media altogether. Nor should they. The aim should be to give each channel its rightful place in the media mix based on its particular strengths.
That requires a willingness to explore new advertising environments, experiment with different approaches, and regularly challenge what has long been taken for granted.
The greatest risk facing marketers today isn’t making new decisions. It’s making the same decision repeatedly while consumer behaviour keeps changing.
Brands that want to grow must challenge assumptions, rethink where they invest, and ensure AI is helping them make better decisions, not simply faster ones.
Phil Duffield is the VP Northern Europe at The Trade Desk