From Reach to Relevance: Strategies for Driving Impact in Today’s Digital Landscape
Dentsu call it “the algorithmic era”—the current fast-paced media environment, in which effective marketing strategies are more crucial than ever for brands seeking to engage their audiences meaningfully. In it, simply casting a wide net is no longer sufficient to capture consumer attention. To succeed, marketers must focus on maximizing every micro-moment opportunity—those fleeting instances when consumers are most receptive to interaction—through the right channel, without worrying about wear-out.
Intrigued? You need to find innovative approaches that prioritize quality over quantity, emphasizing the importance of understanding consumer behaviour and creating tailored experiences for your brand to stand out.
Want to prepare for the many opportunities to drive impact in these exciting but also challenging times? Here are some insights from recently released research compiled to help you win:
Maximize every micro-moment opportunity. According to Will Swayne, Global Practice President, Media, Dentsu, media is playing a growing role in our lives, fast becoming 100% addressable, 100% shoppable, and 100% accountable. This is the so-called algorithmic era of media, which is believed to open many opportunities for brands to drive impact in 2025. In the 15th edition of the annual media trends report, The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends, Dentsu media experts share trends expected to deliver impact in consumers’ lives, for the businesses’ bottom lines, and for society in 2025.
According to the report, 81% of consumers declare that the best way for brands to stand out and earn their loyalty is to surprise and delight them in unexpected ways. Brands can bring value to individuals where they are and fit naturally in their daily lives if they maximize every micro-moment opportunity. To do so, brands must ensure their content and data are easily discoverable, use personalization where possible, and be consistent in messaging over time and across environments. How exactly? According to Dentsu, micro-moments are now emerging through platforms that have taken over personal and professional communications with huge reach across smartphone users.
Mind the channel: Not all reach is equal. An exciting academic debate has emerged over the last days. At the heart of the debate is the following claim: Optimising media for reach alone no longer works because all reach is not equal – and used bluntly won’t deliver business outcomes. By stating this, Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, of University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, is directly challenging the core work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Professor Byron Sharp’s most famous book, How Brands Grow, suggesting it is a misnomer and based on flaws within Andrew Ehrenberg’s earlier work – primarily static markets and a requirement not to differentiate. Thomaz claims it’s actually about how big brands keep big market share, not how they got there. He also says that few in academic circles take concepts like mental availability seriously. “There is a missing dimension,” per Thomaz. He’s out to prove it with a peer-reviewed paper that analyses 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker, combined with Amplified Intelligence’s own validation regression on 41,000 ads.
The research makes the following point: the traditional focus on reach is flawed. True mental availability is so much more than reach. Channels portfolio matters and can be optimised synergistically for short-term and long-term business outcomes. That’s because there are distinct category nuances that apply to each channel, i.e. not all channels are equal in their impacts. Reach is important, and you still need that scale. However, you also need [to optimise to] the business outcome. Thomaz thinks it’s “really bad to waste your money on people who will never buy you”. Further details on this insightful paper can be found here.
“I’m seeing that 1 per cent of campaigns are actually getting exceptional money, while the vast majority are choosing to get some really mediocre outcomes.”
Felipe Thomaz, Associate Professor, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Consistency compounds creativity. Did people even see your ad? If so, did they register it and internalize the message? Mark Ritson calls it “perhaps the most important insight of the marketing year”: System 1’s latest research containing data from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), showing that creative consistency leads to stronger advertising, stronger brands and greater profits. According to System 1, it is the “secret sauce for ad success”, once again proving that campaign wear-out is a myth.
The research analysed 56 brands across digital and TV for 13 consistency features over five years. That includes 4000+ ads tested with System1’s Test Your Ad with over 600,000 respondents to understand how consistency impacts creative quality, impacts brand strength and what brand and business effects their campaigns create.
Among others, this research reveals several important aspects:
- The powerful effects of keeping ads on air longer (creative wear in)
- Campaigns from consistent brands create 27% more very large brand effects, as reported in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. This leads to consistent brands being more famous and popular in YouGov brand data.
- Consistent brands are stronger brands – they report more very large business effects in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. They even report double the very large profit gains.
If you are interested in why ads do not wear out over time, you can also check our previous publication here.
Source: Compound Creativity
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