Unduplicated reach has become the “advertising obsession of the millennium” according to Eric Faulkner, partner and chairman of Madclarity. Worse still, it’s all “bullshit” and people need reminding again and again and again about your brand, or any brand.
I’ve got the best grandson in the world. I know all grandparents say that, but I don’t care. Our six year old Tankhun is the best.
He was with us all day on Saturday. After he’d exhausted Grandpa with a variety of war games and spelling games at home, long question-filled walks on the beach and finding interesting subjects to draw on his Sketchbook app back at home, we settled down to watch some stuff on Amazon.
He picked one he’d seen before. I asked him why. He said it was great and he’d like to see it again.
It made me think about how often repetition is dismissed in our industry.
Everyday a media planner tells her eager client that they need to advertise to lots of different people.
Well, they don’t say it quite that simply. It’s more like: “We need to maximise our unduplicated reach and minimise frequency wastage.”
Like much of the marketing science bullshit that has replaced original strategic thinking in our industry, this has become a default presumption by many agencies and blindly accepted by their clients.
Worrying about ‘unduplicated reach’ has become the advertising obsession of the millennium.
It’s a fact of human nature and it starts from birth… People need reminding… and reminding.
Yes, I know that you’re all worried about that worst-of-all-things… ‘excess frequency’. But I’m not aware of any research showing that people stopped (or decided to not even start) buying a brand because they saw too many ads for it.
And there are many, many examples of the opposite.
Whether it’s on TikTok or the telly, it’s only when you’ve seen the ad several times, that it starts to work.
And that’s only the ads you see and pay attention to… not the many that float around your peripheral vision and off into the never never land.
Yup, most ‘impressions’ are nothing more than imagination. They’re not real.
A month ago we were talking to a client who was launching a fabulous new product into essentially a new category. The launch had been less effective than hoped.
We discussed the brief, the goals, the strategy, the execution, the research and the learning. There were areas to improve in both creative and media… but nothing was terrible. The problem was the belief that a new brand in a new category had to talk to as many people as possible.
When we explained that effectively reaching less than 20 per cent – or maybe even less than 10 per cent – of their target audience would produce better results… there was a quiet, reflective air in the room.
We explained that if two or three per cent unprompted awareness was the objective, then 70 per cent reach was a rather silly goal. And with a brand that was completely unknown, an opportunity to see (OTS) of two or three over the campaign was way, way too small and they should be thinking about 20 or 30 instead.
So, the next time you’re discussing ‘wasted’ frequency or repetition with your agency… remember your young daughter… or grandson.
