The brands that win in future won’t search for a mythical unified audience. They’ll connect many different audiences in many different places, writes the IPA’s Simon Frazier.
There’s an age-old phrase my grandmother once said to me as I grappled with the concept of how long it would take me to save up to buy Tomb Raider 2 back in 1998 at a pocket money rate of £1.50 per week:
Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”.
And I’ll be the first to admit that at the time I didn’t really get what it meant or how that would get me any closer to racing around Venice in a pixelated speedboat, but then she said something that made it all seem clearer:
You’re focussing on the big number of £30 and how big and scary that seems, but you’re looking in the wrong place – if you always focus on just that end goal, you’ll never get there, and you’ll probably be disappointed when you eventually do. What you need to do is break it down and focus on the small amounts you can raise by doing little chores and tasks, and before you know it, you’ll have a lot more than just the £30 you think you need – you’ve then taken care of the pennies and the pounds have taken care of themselves”.
In retrospect, maybe she was just trying to get cheaper lawn-mowing labour. But she was right and, in a way, she taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned: fragmentation breaks things down into manageable parts, and that can only be a good thing.
In recent years, there has been so much discussion of media fragmentation along the lines of ‘mass reach media are dead’ and focussing on short-term, easily deliverable performance metrics due to budgetary pressures and perceptions that broad mass reach media are unattainable and difficult to report on, but I think these narratives really miss the point of what is actually going on.
While media may have shifted from huge broad-reach capabilities in a single medium to smaller, incremental reach gains across many touchpoints, the reality is that audiences have been fragmented all along, and maybe we’ve just been looking at things the wrong way.
Fragmentation is the opportunity, not the problem
As Molly Bruce and I discussed in our latest IPA publication Making Sense – The Commercial Media Landscape 2026 (8th Edition), media consumption has become increasingly dispersed across platforms, devices and contexts, but human needs remain remarkably stable.
The evidence is visible almost everywhere. Television audiences are spread across live viewing, BVoD, SVoD, FAST, Online Video and Social. Audio now spans radio, podcasts and music streaming. News consumption now moves fluidly between publishers, aggregators and creator platforms.
People still want to be informed, entertained, reassured and connected, but they’re simply meeting those needs in more places than before. And despite endless narratives about audiences escaping advertising altogether, in Making Sense 8 we see that commercial media still accounts for 68% of all curated media time among GB adults, up from 66% in 2015.
That means broad reach hasn’t disappeared. It has become cumulative – or, by looking after enough pennies, the pounds will look after themselves.
For years we’ve heard the argument that brands need giant cultural moments to succeed, but increasingly, meaningful growth comes from accumulating lots of little relevant interactions across lots of different places – a great illustrator of this being Tom Roach’s work on Lots of Littles Part 2.
Many narratives interpret fragmentation as evidence that brands should abandon scale and pursue endless micro-targeting. But the real lesson of fragmentation isn’t that mass reach no longer matters – Les Binet remains absolutely right that broad reach is fundamental to brand growth.
The difference is that broad reach is now assembled rather than simply bought wholesale, and the winning plans of the future won’t be either mass or niche. They’ll be mass through niche: building scale by accumulating relevance across many smaller audiences rather than relying on a single large one.
Of course, assembling reach across fragmented environments is often more complex than buying it in a handful of mass channels. Planning, measurement and execution are all harder than ever before, but often complexity is just the price of relevance.
The overlooked superpower of regionality
I started my career working in Newsbrands, and back in 2011 this was a space where the ‘looking after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’ mindset particularly resonated. Not in a financial sense (well, maybe), but through the idea that national resonance often begins with regional understanding.
Brands that understand local nuance are better placed to build meaningful national connections, because they understand what it means to be human in that specific place we call home. Yet the performance-media era often favours immediate scale, virality and short-term metrics over creating assembled niche reach that understands the varied and diverse local identities that make up the collective whole.
This isn’t new news, of course. Industry greats like Rich Kirk, Vicky Fox and Sarah Gale have been saying this for years.
We’ve recently returned from the annual Making Sense Roadshow, taking the findings of the latest publication all across the country, and one of the greatest things we observed was how the cultural rhythms of Newcastle differ from Manchester. Birmingham differs from Bristol. Brighton differs from Edinburgh and so on. The things that make people laugh, care, celebrate and debate often begin locally before they scale nationally, and the same is true for relevance and resonance.
People rarely wake up wondering what happened in Westminster committee room 14B. They wonder whether national changes in legislation will affect their local area, whether the local hospital is expanding, and ultimately what this is all going to do to their disposable income.
Local relevance is where emotional connection begins, yet much of the industry still treats regional audiences as secondary to national scale, where I’d argue the opposite is true.
In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, thinking local first may be one of the best ways to drive long-term growth. Why? Because national culture isn’t manufactured top-down but aggregated bottom-up, strategic approaches need to reflect that to have impact.
Just as rivers become oceans, national conversations are ultimately collections of local conversations and the brands that understand this gain a powerful competitive advantage.They stop treating regionality as a planning complication and start viewing it as a driver of meaningful growth.
Bringing it all back home
Ultimately, the future belongs to marketers who can build broad appeal without flattening cultural nuance and who can achieve scale without sameness.
So, let’s stop talking about fragmentation as though it’s a threat. Mass audiences haven’t disappeared. They’ve always been collections of smaller audiences with different needs, identities and contexts – we’ve just had too much of a desire to put them in a box. The brands that win in future won’t search for a mythical unified audience. They’ll connect many different audiences in many different places.
Or, as my grandmother put it, they’ll be the ones who remember to look after the pennies and have faith that the pounds will look after themselves.
Simon Frazier is the associate director and head of marketing, data innovation and The Making Sense unit at The IPA.
