Marketers love a better ad. But a conversation on Adweek’s Adspeak, recorded live at Brandweek, makes a counterintuitive case: making the work twice as good may not beat making it seen by 100 times more people.
Angela Voss, CEO at Marketing Architects, and Dale Harrison, chief strategy and innovation officer at The Insight Collective, argue that broad, consistent reach is the real engine of market share growth. Their starting point is a simple comparison: a 2x improvement in creative effectiveness cannot overcome a 100x gap in reach.
The surface area of effectiveness
The episode introduces the “Surface Area of Effectiveness” framework. If the business impact of an ad is the creative lift multiplied by the audience it reaches, then even a modest creative improvement becomes powerful when it is applied across a much larger audience. Conversely, a brilliant ad shown to a small slice of the market leaves most potential buyers untouched.
The logic flips the familiar obsession with creative quality. Creative still matters, but as a multiplier of reach, not a substitute for it. That changes where marketers should place their first dollar.
Hyper-targeting ignores future buyers
A central warning is aimed at marketers who narrow their targeting too early. Brand awareness, the guests explain, only has commercial value when a buyer enters the market. The problem is that marketers cannot always tell who will enter, or when. Broad reach builds memory before the need arrives.
In the episode, hyper-targeting is described as “agreeing to pay more to ignore your future customers.” The constant, ongoing force of forgetting also works against brands: unless reach is sustained, memory decays and a competitor is more likely to be recalled at the moment of purchase.
Reach without inflated budgets
Voss and Harrison also address the practical objection: broad reach can look expensive. Their suggested fix is audience-first media buying across linear television and connected TV, with AI used to remove wasted frequency and lower cost. The goal is scale and cost efficiency together, not spend restraint that quietly destroys reach.
For performance marketers, this is a shift in mindset: efficiency is not only about paying less for a narrowly defined audience; it is about paying smartly for the broad audience that will include tomorrow’s buyers.
No single measurement model wins
The duo is equally cautious about measurement. No single model, they say, fully captures television’s impact. Instead, they recommend combining marketing mix modeling, attribution and geographic holdout tests to build a fuller picture of performance. Each method answers a different question, so relying on one can hide both waste and opportunity.
Here are three takeaways for media planners:
- Protect reach first, then improve creative as a multiplier of that reach.
- Resist targeting so tightly that you exclude future category buyers.
- Use multiple measurement methods rather than betting the TV budget on one attribution signal.
For marketers under pressure to justify every line of ad spend, the episode offers a useful rebalancing: budget for the audience you do not know yet, and judge performance with a portfolio of measurement tools.
Source: Adweek
