Packing a punch: How spending smart beats spending big

Opinion – The Indie Leader – AMI 

The chair of the Alliance of Media Independents’ Effectiveness and Planning group unpacks the themes and talking points from the association’s debut event.

It’s often repeated that advertising is an ever-changing ecosystem in an uncertain economy. But none of us can afford to fall into the trap of sitting in our advertising echo chamber and lose the connection to what our purpose is: to use everything in our armoury to drive real outcomes for our clients. 

As chair of the Alliance of Media Independents’ Effectiveness and Planning group, I sit alongside a collective of over 40 media agencies. The discussions we are having aren’t just about how we invest every pound effectively in an advertising budget, but about how advertising investment drives sustainable growth for businesses. Every pound our clients invest has to pack a punch.

When we asked AMI members’ clients, whose spending ranged from as little as £240k to £15m, what marketing effectiveness meant to them, they replied: growth. Growth in customers, growth in awareness, growth in market share, growth in profitability.

We know that you can’t achieve growth without investment. But economic uncertainty can foster a culture of short-termism where clients chase quick, cheap wins that are detrimental to long-term growth.

AMI’s pool of member clients was split 50/50 between prioritising long-term value vs. short-term results. However, 83% said that they believed they could invest more in brand activity.

The great news for our clients is that they aren’t hampered by legacy baggage. They are the disruptors and innovators. They are grounded in performance and have well-oiled acquisition machines. They can make faster decisions and move more quickly.

So, what barriers are they facing? What would make the greatest contribution to drive change? These questions inspired our first Alliance of Media Independents event: Media Effectiveness: Packing a Punch!

The extraordinary cost of dull

Our morning kicked off with Adam Morgan, founder of eatbigfish, who explained that, as an industry, we have all chased new ideas around mental availability, emotion, neuroscience, distinctive brand assets and now AI as tools to predict effectiveness at scale.

All of these are, of course, important for understanding the complex ways advertising works in the long and short term. But at the core of advertising effectiveness, a KPI of ‘don’t be dull’ hasn’t ever been that wrong, has it?

Emotion builds brand growth, but according to System1, 52% of all advertising fails to evoke any feeling. If people feel nothing, they do nothing. Brands simply cannot afford to be dull. 

Attention is not a nice-to-have; attention is a must-have

Effective advertising is a combination of factors. We’ve already explored the impact of creative, but dull media also plays a significant role. If brands are focused on delivering powerful business outcomes like profit, market share and long-term growth, then attention matters.

In a session with Peter Field, Heather Dansie, insight director at Newsworks, and Shazia Ginai, global VP at Lumen, Field revealed that attention matters even more to challenger brands.

In a little-known 2009 research paper, Nielsen concluded that FMCG challenger brands need advertising that is 3.5 times more effective than brand leaders to level the playing field with them: to balance out all the scale economies and inbuilt physical and mental availability advantages that leaders enjoy.

According to Field, attention science shows that both mental availability and ad memory scale with the duration of attention that an ad earns. So, challenger brands really need to focus on achieving greater attention per pound spent to close this gap. That means not just less dull creative work, but using less dull media.

However, when the panel combined ad investment data collected by AA/WARC with ad spend defined as high- or low-attention by Lumen and tracked it over time, the trend was clear. A decade ago, over 70% of spending was in high-attention channels; today, that investment is 30%. On the other hand, the investment in low-attention media in 2015 was 32%. Today, that figure is 70%.

Not all environments and eyeballs are created equal. The panel made a rallying call to stop chasing ‘cheap’ and invest in quality. Investing in trusted environments that demand and deliver attention will deliver the attention multiplier our clients need to succeed.

Driving brand outcomes through impactful measurement

So far, we have been on a journey of clients, media and attention. Measurement closes the loop. The brands that are growing today are those that clearly understand what is driving business outcomes.

Joel Woodage, head of independent agencies at Ozone, Eleanor Hill, director of digital performance at MediaLab and Matt Whelan, managing partner – measurement solutions at The Specialist Works, shared how indies can turn good measurement into a competitive advantage.

By embedding advanced measurement techniques such as econometrics and Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) into planning and pitching, agencies are demonstrating what drives both short- and long-term growth – to make brands’ investments work hardest.

The panel discussed setting expectations and giving license for rigorous experimentation. Measurement needs to be dependable, stakeholders love a forecast and the ability to de-risk investment, but we must also evaluate and prove the risk of not investing for the long term.

As Dan Larden, head of media at ISBA, pointed out, flat budgets, swings in growth strategy, and increased CMO churn within brands aren’t just challenges facing agencies but also those our clients face within their own marketing departments.

Larden, along with clients from Hidden Hearing, HolyMoly! and Workspace, spoke about how marketers can win in the boardroom by speaking the CFO’s language, using repeatable, comparable measurement frameworks, and anchoring marketing in long-term value creation.

For Larden, marketing cases land when they’re framed like any other investment decision: grounded in scenarios, cash flow logic and risk, not optimism.

Guiding our clients to their next phase of growth

Our community of AMI indies is full of talent who understand what brands need to grow their business. Not least of which is a bit of bravery. Each day presents a new opportunity for our clients, and every step they take is a step into new territory, whether that be product development, distribution, creative, or channel.

We have a responsibility to support them on these exciting journeys by understanding the trials and tribulations they may face and using our talent, expertise and bravery to guide them into their next phase of growth.

Jamie Hewitt is MD of MI Media and chair of the AMI’s Planning and Effectiveness Action Group. AMI members write regularly for The Media Leader in 2026 as part of our new Indie Leader series.