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Episode 149
The Fragmented Media Challenge
44% of marketers say media fragmentation is one of their biggest concerns. But is it really threatening effectiveness—or just exposing weak planning?
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob tackle the fragmentation debate head-on. They explore why reach hasn't disappeared, how creative consistency beats endless platform optimization, and why the smartest response to complexity is simplicity. Plus, hear why doubling down on what works might be better than chasing every new channel.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Why 44% of marketers worry about media fragmentation
• [05:00] Mass reach moments and the obsession with live sports
• [09:00] Creative consistency across channels: IKEA as a model
• [12:00] Why narrowing targeting actually shrinks growth potential
• [15:00] Planning fundamentals that prevent fragmentation chaos
• [18:00] The importance of reinforcement over reinvention
Resources:
WARC Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Transcript
Angela: When marketers hear fragmentation, they start slicing the audience into smaller and smaller segments, adding these micro channels and chasing high intent targets, and I think that's smarter. But what they're really doing is shrinking their reach and concentrating spend on people that may have been likely to reach anyway. And that's the opposite of what drives growth.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Back with thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root opinions in data research and drives business results. Today we're talking about an increasingly popular topic in marketing effectiveness. How can marketers put effectiveness first in an increasingly fragmented media environment? I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do with research. And today's is from an episode of the Eat Your Greens podcast that I listened to recently. Definitely highly recommend that show, if you like this one. And they were covering their latest content release, which was the Marketer's Toolkit.
And in that they had some research and they found that 44% of marketers globally say media and audience fragmentation are one of their biggest concerns, second only to short-termism. They covered that in this podcast they had on, Grace Kite and Tom Roach as guests, and they discussed why fragmentation isn't just about more channels. It's about money moving away from these high reach environments into smaller, lower moments. So we've used to be highly concentrated in a few big placements, especially television, is now more spread out across search, social, YouTube, digital video, creators, audio and platforms that demand endless versions of creative. So that's less attention per placement, less per channel, and a growing risk that marketing is gonna become disconnected. The research also challenged the idea that fragmentation automatically harms effectiveness.
Kite introduced this phrase, lots of little, which I liked, and the notion was that while individual media moments might be smaller, they can still add to something powerful if you orchestrate them well. The research shows that channels work better together than they do alone. We've talked about that on this show too. So multiple small moments of attention can compound effectiveness in ways that matter. It depends less on chasing these new channels and more on how can you plan smartly across the channels that you have. So the real question isn't whether, you know, is media fragmented? The answer is yes. It's are we as marketers responding to that without losing effectiveness along the way? And that's what we're gonna talk about today. So I wanted to start with just this fragmentation challenge in general, 'cause I've been hearing this more and more. But I was curious, have you also in conversations with brands? And do you think it's a big deal right now? Is it impacting marketing effectiveness?
Angela: I would say it's definitely a topic you hear about in conference events, et cetera. Obviously podcasts, you know, media that's out there that we all consume to some degree in client conversations. My take though is it's not nearly, I think, as big of a deal as people make it out to be. This is mostly a planning and buying inconvenience, but not a fundamental threat to effectiveness. I think the mistake is thinking that because media channels have multiplied, marketing suddenly needs to become highly targeted, highly personalized, and spread across endless micro placements in your ecosystem.
Fragmentation doesn't change the core fact that brands grow by reaching more buyers in the category, and most categories still aren't made up of tiny neatly segmented audiences. They're broad, and so the growth task is still penetration, which I think is part of the point that was being made on that podcast.
Rob: Yeah, I would definitely say that all the time in the Category Entry Points club, but I don't find myself talking about it a lot on a day-to-day basis. But you can definitely see how fragmentation doesn't necessarily kill effectiveness, but it exposes whether or not you even have a plan. So if you're in a big channel like television, you can get away with being pretty sloppy and still win just by the sheer volume of how many people you're talking to. You can't get away with that when your media is fragmented across the whole ecosystem. You get a lot of messages that start to contradict each other or compound the fact that you aren't working from a plan and it really exposes that you've got some orchestration work to do.
Elena: Yeah, so it's more of a messaging and planning and messaging issue than a real threat to reaching your audience. I'll say one thing that's come up when people are talking about fragmentation is there's this panic around reach declining, and big moments are reaching a mass audience becoming more expensive and harder to achieve. I think that's why everyone feels like right now, we're all obsessed with live sports because it's like that's the last, you know, it's like the last option for reaching large audiences when we used to have these bigger viewing moments. At least that's kind of the narrative. So Angie, I'm curious, do you think that it is harder to achieve that mass reach or just achieve reach in general today? Or is that more of a planning problem?
Angela: I mean when you look at the data, there's no real proof that reach has disappeared in the US. But what has changed is that it's no longer concentrated in a few obvious places. And so that makes it feel harder, especially if you're used to planning in a linear channel-by-channel way. Americans are still spending enormous amounts of time with media, more than they were actually. Video consumption in particular has been remarkably stable over time. It's just spread across linear TV, streaming, on demand, different devices, et cetera.
But to your point, where things have gotten harder is just planning that reach well. Fragmentation breaks your shortcuts maybe that you had where you can't just buy one network or one platform and assume that you've covered the market. Reach now accrues cumulatively across channels over time, and that just requires more discipline.
Elena: So I think TV becomes a topic of focus in this debate, which obviously we're experts in TV. So kind of love that. But it comes up because people are saying like, when you think of these big mass reach moments, TV comes to mind. But if so, reach is still our goal, what role do you think that a channel like TV should be playing when there's more fragmentation?
Angela: Yeah, that's really TV's game, right? If there was one game in TV, it would be reach. It's one of the few channels that can still deliver broad, relatively efficient reach very quickly, and that's exactly what that growth requires. So for any channel, the question is, does it reach lots of category buyers? For many brands, the answer is yes, and when it does, it's extremely valuable because it helps keep that brand mentally available to a broad market. But TV isn't the only reach channel anymore, and you shouldn't treat it like it's the whole plan. The role it plays hasn't changed. It helps you get noticed by lots of people who might buy now or later, and that's ultimately what matters. And that's the strength of the channel.
Elena: I also think there's a misunderstanding too, like sometimes marketers think that everyone's viewing habits have like become hard to predict or gone to streaming. And really there are still really large audiences watching even just traditional linear TV. One side of fragmentation and the challenges behind it is media planning and media buying, am I reaching my audience? And another side is creative. And how do you deal with all these new places you need to have your creative shown. So Rob, creatively, what do you think fragmentation threatens?
Rob: Did you say fragmentation? Fragmentation is a really hard word to say. Can we just call it something else? Like, no, like Frailey Rock, remember Frailey Rock? You don't know what that is. Okay. I think that creatively, Frailey Rock really impacts meaning and memory. When moments get tiny, when they get small and they get spread out, it's hard to really warm up your message and to explain your value proposition. So brands need to be recognizable and emotionally clear, or else it just disappears for customers. So brands that struggle are the ones where every execution is like a new idea. And the ones that are winning are building on the memory over and over, just in different places.
Elena: So Grace Kite talks about that. She has that phrase, oh, lots of little, and says it can add up to something big. But what do you think like practically is the creative version of that idea? What does doing lots of little well actually look like in practice?
Rob: I was just talking about like really that idea of consistency instead of reinvention is what hurts. And there's brands that are amazing at creating really effective ecosystems, whether it's something that's tiny or something that's big. They just had that consistency. And I've always been a fan of IKEA for this. Because really when you look across all of their channels, print, out-of-home, social, long form brand all the way to like signage and instruction manuals, they really keep their ecosystem tight. They can convey that practical, human experience. It's a little bit awkward, but it's deeply empathetic to your real life and at home. They just do a great job making you feel that across all their touchpoints, whether it's TV or it's table tents.
Elena: So one thing that makes this tough for marketers is these platforms, and I know this firsthand, just from the digital advertising that we do for the agency, they do push you to constantly refresh creative and rotate and they warn you about ad fatigue. They encourage all these different versions. So the platforms are kind of pushing you into certain creative practices. What do you think there? Like do you think that that is necessary in order to have, you know, creative performance in digital? Do you think it's more like platform driven pressure or how do you think marketers should approach that?
Rob: I kinda think it's a cop out to blame the platform. Platforms want you to win. They win if you scale. They don't win if you just bet a little money and then don't come back to the casino. So I'm gonna actually take their side on this one and go look, they're just saying, your creative sucks. It's got fatigue and it's not working anymore. Put something new on there. And then instinctually we're like, well, we gotta go do something really big and something really new. And really we should just, rotation, I should say, can hide it. It really can't hide weak creative.
Changing the creative is really not the same as improving your creative. So I would just have people take another look at what are the assets they are testing? Is it big enough? Don't, yeah, of course the platform's gonna say it ain't working, so do something new. They're optimizing to a number, but it's really the creative that's gonna be driving the difference in that number.
Elena: I agreed. I also think it depends on your goal. Like, for example, when we're running advertising for a TV agency on LinkedIn, we know that people aren't probably gonna click on ad and say, I wanna hire you as a TV agency. So if LinkedIn is showing us, oh, your click through rates are terrible, you should change your creative. I'm thinking, no, we're fine. You know, we're gonna stick with what we've got for sure. So I think it also comes down to like, what's the goal? And you're right, like these platforms, they wanna push towards clicks and those types of outcomes, but yeah, you've gotta think about what's also best for your brand. And when media starts to fragment, most marketers respond by, you know, we have to be on this new channel or that new channel. Like, remember when TikTok came out, everybody was freaking out. How do I get my brand on TikTok or more targeting, you know, we need to get more specific with who we're actually reaching. Why are those moves typically the wrong ones?
Angela: Simply because it usually means you're reaching fewer people instead of more. You know, when marketers hear fragmentation, they start slicing the audience into smaller and smaller segments, adding these micro channels and chasing high intent targets, and I think that's smarter. But what they're really doing is shrinking their reach and concentrating spend on people that may have been likely to reach anyway. And that's the opposite of what drives growth. As we talk about all the time, it's penetration by getting more category buyers to know them and buy them. That requires broad reach.
So the moment you respond to fragmentation by narrowing targeting, you're reducing the number of buyers that you're gonna reach and you're gonna reduce your chance of growth. Adding more channels can also be a mistake because you treat it like a checklist. Okay? Now we need to be on TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, influencers, retail media. But being in more places doesn't necessarily mean that you're building more reach. It often just means that your budget is getting spread more thin. Your creative becomes inconsistent if you're not doing it well to Rob's point, and your brand becomes harder to recognize and remember.
Elena: So media is fragmenting, like we know that's true, and attention is coming in these shorter, more distributed moments. Reach and frequency is hard enough, I think, to think about for one channel. How should marketers think about it in this world of fragmentation?
Angela: Yeah, you know, the fact that attention comes in shorter, more distributed moments doesn't change the fundamentals. People aren't sitting down to carefully process your message, as gut wrenching as that is to a marketer. You know, they're noticing brands in passing, briefly, repeatedly, across time, and that's exactly why you need consistent branding and repeated exposure, because mental availability is built through that accumulation. But marketers often get distracted by the idea that shorter attention means they need to maybe cram more persuasion into every ad, or they need constant novelty to, to Rob's point, fight that fatigue.
But that just really misunderstands how brands grow. You don't need people to pay deep attention. You need them to recognize you quickly and think of you when they're ready to buy. So that frequency is about the brand showing up repeatedly across the market over time. We know that reach trumps frequency in terms of growth, but if you obsess over eliminating any and all duplication, you also may end up under delivering frequency and weakening those memory structures, which are important as well.
Elena: In the beginning of the show, we were talking about how this fragmentation is maybe more of like a planning challenge than actually like going to harm marketing outcomes. So from, you know, thinking as like a marketing leader, from a leadership side of things, what's a planning discipline that you think maybe marketers need to bring back or apply to avoid this fragmentation just kind of turning into chaos in their plans?
Angela: Yeah, I feel like it's pretty boring, but it's just focusing on the fundamentals. Planning for that broad reach, keeping the brand distinctive. Stop mistaking complexity for something like strategy. Fragmentation turns into chaos when leaders let planning become a collection of channel decisions and targeting tweaks, instead of a simple growth plan. Most brands just need more clarity.
Who are the category buyers? Are we reaching enough of them? Are we easy to recognize? Are we consistent over time? Like those are really the important questions that matter. And then too, I think leadership also needs the discipline to resist the constant push to optimize based on those short term metrics. That's where chaos can really come from. You start chasing whatever looks good this week, swapping creative, shifting budgets, adding segments, testing endless variations. And that activity might feel productive in the moment, but it often is reducing the reach and destroying your consistency over time.
Elena: Measurement gets harder it seems like, as media fragments, even though I think a lot of these platforms, like they make measurement seem easier. So what signals do you think marketers should look for or trust when they are looking at this holistic plan now if they have all these different channels?
Angela: Yeah, I think when media fragments, we should be trusting fewer signals. That should be kind of running in the back of our heads. The signals I would advise to trust the most are the ones that are closest to those real business outcomes and least tied to a single platform. Things like sustained sales growth, penetration, looking at your share movements, even broad demand signals like search lift over time.
You know, those aren't perfect, but they're directionally honest. They tell you whether the brand is becoming easier to choose, easier to find, not just easier to click, and I'm much more cautious and I think we all should be with highly granular platform level metrics. You know, in fragmented plans, those metrics tend to reward that short-term activation and penalize brand effects simply because brand effects take longer to show up across your business.
And it doesn't necessarily mean the plan isn't working. I think to your point, Elena, you're like, oh, I don't know that short-term clicks for Marketing Architects is what we're after. Of course, we all love leads, but we need people to know who we are when they're ready to launch television. And so we can't get overly focused on those things that we perceive as immediately attributable to the business.
Elena: Yeah. Exactly. Just 'cause you could measure it doesn't mean it's necessarily gonna matter. So if marketers could take, you know, one thing away from this, what do you think is that thing? What's like a mindset shift they might need to make to stay effective as media fragments? And Angela, we can start with you.
Angela: Sure. Yeah. I would say, um, coherence will help you beat that complexity that's in your head related to fragmentation. You know, the brands that win are the ones that are gonna stay coherent. They're showing up repeatedly with the distinctive cues in as many categories as possible, as consistently as possible over time.
Rob: And if you have the big idea, the job isn't to invent, it's to reinforce. To stop chasing the new idea and start building systems, you know, become a systems thinker.
Angela: Oh, I love systems.
Rob: I love systems. Should we have a podcast just about systems? Nothing to do with marketing, but just
Elena: Yeah. We're so boring, Rob.
Rob: Maybe.
Elena: Yeah. Um, one thing I was thinking about is when I was thinking about like our clients, the clients we work with and ones that are most kind of successful in their marketing strategy. And I think what I personally think about fragmentation, I imagine like these brands having like a million different channels. But I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, our most successful customers, most of their budget's going towards TV. So like, even though yes, like media's fragmented, you could reach people at all these different places, they're on, like that doesn't mean your plan has to be overly complicated. There are still places that are better to reach people with a clearer message.
So I mean, not to just advocate for TV, but whatever channel is best for your brand. I also don't think there's anything wrong with that, with having a simpler plan. You know, simpler marketing. You don't have to Chase every new channel and be everywhere at once. I think that you can also double down on what's working, 'cause some channels just work better than others for advertising.
Angela: I think that's great advice.
Elena: Alright, kind of fun wrap up here. For you personally, what is the most like niche media channel or content you consume?
Angela: There are subgroups on LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, that probably don't make sense to reach me on. They're much easier and probably more efficient ways to reach me than knowing my, I don't know, dance mom groups or whatever you'd pay, you know, 25 to $50 CPMs for. So that would be mine.
Rob: I was gonna do mom groups, but apparently Angela already did that, so sorry, Rob. Mine is a little cutting edge and sure shocking. It counts. Okay. I am not sure it counts yet, but ChatGPT recently released this thing called Pulse, which is basically like reading a morning report, right? It's a media channel that's tailored exactly to things that I've obviously done with ChatGPT. And it's super interesting and helpful and scary as all hell. And they don't have yet but we all know that's coming. Come on, Sam. We all know it's coming. It's creepy good. Have you guys used it at all?
Elena: Not yet. I have not.
Angela: I have not.
Elena: I've heard of it, but I haven't.
Angela: Is it creepy because it knows you so well? It's creepy because of what you're searching in ChatGPT, like why is it creepy?
Rob: Yeah, it is actually generated. You get it on the pro account, and it's expensive overnight while you're sleeping. ChatGPT is doing all this research on all this stuff with it on, and then it's creating this report that's highly tailored to your individual interests, things that you've asked about it makes some great insights. You're like, wow, okay.
Angela: Love it.
Elena: That's cool. If anyone's ever seen that like early adopter curve, Rob is like the first person standing. He is the start of the early adopter curve.
Rob: So it's just, you know, I need something to compensate somehow.
Angela: OpenAI hasn't even hit the published button yet, and somehow Rob actually has access to it.
Rob: Well, it's a good one.
Elena: So mine is live broadcast on Outside TV. I don't think there's a huge audience watching that. And they do have advertising and their frequency is so bad. Like I will see the same spot, I'm not even joking, maybe 20 times, 'cause these races are long, you know, they can be eight hours for a full Ironman. And man, I mean, I will see the same commercials over and over and over again.
Angela: Brutal.
Elena: But yeah, probably a niche, not a lot of people watching a live stream of Ironman. Not a lot of Dunkin' Donuts. No, no it's not. But maybe an opportunity to diversify a little bit. Put Marketing Architects ads in there.
Angela: I was thinking the same thing.
Episode 149
The Fragmented Media Challenge
44% of marketers say media fragmentation is one of their biggest concerns. But is it really threatening effectiveness—or just exposing weak planning?
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob tackle the fragmentation debate head-on. They explore why reach hasn't disappeared, how creative consistency beats endless platform optimization, and why the smartest response to complexity is simplicity. Plus, hear why doubling down on what works might be better than chasing every new channel.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Why 44% of marketers worry about media fragmentation
• [05:00] Mass reach moments and the obsession with live sports
• [09:00] Creative consistency across channels: IKEA as a model
• [12:00] Why narrowing targeting actually shrinks growth potential
• [15:00] Planning fundamentals that prevent fragmentation chaos
• [18:00] The importance of reinforcement over reinvention
Resources:
WARC Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Subscribe on
Enjoy this episode? Leave us a review.
Transcript
Angela: When marketers hear fragmentation, they start slicing the audience into smaller and smaller segments, adding these micro channels and chasing high intent targets, and I think that's smarter. But what they're really doing is shrinking their reach and concentrating spend on people that may have been likely to reach anyway. And that's the opposite of what drives growth.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Back with thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root opinions in data research and drives business results. Today we're talking about an increasingly popular topic in marketing effectiveness. How can marketers put effectiveness first in an increasingly fragmented media environment? I'm gonna kick us off, as I always do with research. And today's is from an episode of the Eat Your Greens podcast that I listened to recently. Definitely highly recommend that show, if you like this one. And they were covering their latest content release, which was the Marketer's Toolkit.
And in that they had some research and they found that 44% of marketers globally say media and audience fragmentation are one of their biggest concerns, second only to short-termism. They covered that in this podcast they had on, Grace Kite and Tom Roach as guests, and they discussed why fragmentation isn't just about more channels. It's about money moving away from these high reach environments into smaller, lower moments. So we've used to be highly concentrated in a few big placements, especially television, is now more spread out across search, social, YouTube, digital video, creators, audio and platforms that demand endless versions of creative. So that's less attention per placement, less per channel, and a growing risk that marketing is gonna become disconnected. The research also challenged the idea that fragmentation automatically harms effectiveness.
Kite introduced this phrase, lots of little, which I liked, and the notion was that while individual media moments might be smaller, they can still add to something powerful if you orchestrate them well. The research shows that channels work better together than they do alone. We've talked about that on this show too. So multiple small moments of attention can compound effectiveness in ways that matter. It depends less on chasing these new channels and more on how can you plan smartly across the channels that you have. So the real question isn't whether, you know, is media fragmented? The answer is yes. It's are we as marketers responding to that without losing effectiveness along the way? And that's what we're gonna talk about today. So I wanted to start with just this fragmentation challenge in general, 'cause I've been hearing this more and more. But I was curious, have you also in conversations with brands? And do you think it's a big deal right now? Is it impacting marketing effectiveness?
Angela: I would say it's definitely a topic you hear about in conference events, et cetera. Obviously podcasts, you know, media that's out there that we all consume to some degree in client conversations. My take though is it's not nearly, I think, as big of a deal as people make it out to be. This is mostly a planning and buying inconvenience, but not a fundamental threat to effectiveness. I think the mistake is thinking that because media channels have multiplied, marketing suddenly needs to become highly targeted, highly personalized, and spread across endless micro placements in your ecosystem.
Fragmentation doesn't change the core fact that brands grow by reaching more buyers in the category, and most categories still aren't made up of tiny neatly segmented audiences. They're broad, and so the growth task is still penetration, which I think is part of the point that was being made on that podcast.
Rob: Yeah, I would definitely say that all the time in the Category Entry Points club, but I don't find myself talking about it a lot on a day-to-day basis. But you can definitely see how fragmentation doesn't necessarily kill effectiveness, but it exposes whether or not you even have a plan. So if you're in a big channel like television, you can get away with being pretty sloppy and still win just by the sheer volume of how many people you're talking to. You can't get away with that when your media is fragmented across the whole ecosystem. You get a lot of messages that start to contradict each other or compound the fact that you aren't working from a plan and it really exposes that you've got some orchestration work to do.
Elena: Yeah, so it's more of a messaging and planning and messaging issue than a real threat to reaching your audience. I'll say one thing that's come up when people are talking about fragmentation is there's this panic around reach declining, and big moments are reaching a mass audience becoming more expensive and harder to achieve. I think that's why everyone feels like right now, we're all obsessed with live sports because it's like that's the last, you know, it's like the last option for reaching large audiences when we used to have these bigger viewing moments. At least that's kind of the narrative. So Angie, I'm curious, do you think that it is harder to achieve that mass reach or just achieve reach in general today? Or is that more of a planning problem?
Angela: I mean when you look at the data, there's no real proof that reach has disappeared in the US. But what has changed is that it's no longer concentrated in a few obvious places. And so that makes it feel harder, especially if you're used to planning in a linear channel-by-channel way. Americans are still spending enormous amounts of time with media, more than they were actually. Video consumption in particular has been remarkably stable over time. It's just spread across linear TV, streaming, on demand, different devices, et cetera.
But to your point, where things have gotten harder is just planning that reach well. Fragmentation breaks your shortcuts maybe that you had where you can't just buy one network or one platform and assume that you've covered the market. Reach now accrues cumulatively across channels over time, and that just requires more discipline.
Elena: So I think TV becomes a topic of focus in this debate, which obviously we're experts in TV. So kind of love that. But it comes up because people are saying like, when you think of these big mass reach moments, TV comes to mind. But if so, reach is still our goal, what role do you think that a channel like TV should be playing when there's more fragmentation?
Angela: Yeah, that's really TV's game, right? If there was one game in TV, it would be reach. It's one of the few channels that can still deliver broad, relatively efficient reach very quickly, and that's exactly what that growth requires. So for any channel, the question is, does it reach lots of category buyers? For many brands, the answer is yes, and when it does, it's extremely valuable because it helps keep that brand mentally available to a broad market. But TV isn't the only reach channel anymore, and you shouldn't treat it like it's the whole plan. The role it plays hasn't changed. It helps you get noticed by lots of people who might buy now or later, and that's ultimately what matters. And that's the strength of the channel.
Elena: I also think there's a misunderstanding too, like sometimes marketers think that everyone's viewing habits have like become hard to predict or gone to streaming. And really there are still really large audiences watching even just traditional linear TV. One side of fragmentation and the challenges behind it is media planning and media buying, am I reaching my audience? And another side is creative. And how do you deal with all these new places you need to have your creative shown. So Rob, creatively, what do you think fragmentation threatens?
Rob: Did you say fragmentation? Fragmentation is a really hard word to say. Can we just call it something else? Like, no, like Frailey Rock, remember Frailey Rock? You don't know what that is. Okay. I think that creatively, Frailey Rock really impacts meaning and memory. When moments get tiny, when they get small and they get spread out, it's hard to really warm up your message and to explain your value proposition. So brands need to be recognizable and emotionally clear, or else it just disappears for customers. So brands that struggle are the ones where every execution is like a new idea. And the ones that are winning are building on the memory over and over, just in different places.
Elena: So Grace Kite talks about that. She has that phrase, oh, lots of little, and says it can add up to something big. But what do you think like practically is the creative version of that idea? What does doing lots of little well actually look like in practice?
Rob: I was just talking about like really that idea of consistency instead of reinvention is what hurts. And there's brands that are amazing at creating really effective ecosystems, whether it's something that's tiny or something that's big. They just had that consistency. And I've always been a fan of IKEA for this. Because really when you look across all of their channels, print, out-of-home, social, long form brand all the way to like signage and instruction manuals, they really keep their ecosystem tight. They can convey that practical, human experience. It's a little bit awkward, but it's deeply empathetic to your real life and at home. They just do a great job making you feel that across all their touchpoints, whether it's TV or it's table tents.
Elena: So one thing that makes this tough for marketers is these platforms, and I know this firsthand, just from the digital advertising that we do for the agency, they do push you to constantly refresh creative and rotate and they warn you about ad fatigue. They encourage all these different versions. So the platforms are kind of pushing you into certain creative practices. What do you think there? Like do you think that that is necessary in order to have, you know, creative performance in digital? Do you think it's more like platform driven pressure or how do you think marketers should approach that?
Rob: I kinda think it's a cop out to blame the platform. Platforms want you to win. They win if you scale. They don't win if you just bet a little money and then don't come back to the casino. So I'm gonna actually take their side on this one and go look, they're just saying, your creative sucks. It's got fatigue and it's not working anymore. Put something new on there. And then instinctually we're like, well, we gotta go do something really big and something really new. And really we should just, rotation, I should say, can hide it. It really can't hide weak creative.
Changing the creative is really not the same as improving your creative. So I would just have people take another look at what are the assets they are testing? Is it big enough? Don't, yeah, of course the platform's gonna say it ain't working, so do something new. They're optimizing to a number, but it's really the creative that's gonna be driving the difference in that number.
Elena: I agreed. I also think it depends on your goal. Like, for example, when we're running advertising for a TV agency on LinkedIn, we know that people aren't probably gonna click on ad and say, I wanna hire you as a TV agency. So if LinkedIn is showing us, oh, your click through rates are terrible, you should change your creative. I'm thinking, no, we're fine. You know, we're gonna stick with what we've got for sure. So I think it also comes down to like, what's the goal? And you're right, like these platforms, they wanna push towards clicks and those types of outcomes, but yeah, you've gotta think about what's also best for your brand. And when media starts to fragment, most marketers respond by, you know, we have to be on this new channel or that new channel. Like, remember when TikTok came out, everybody was freaking out. How do I get my brand on TikTok or more targeting, you know, we need to get more specific with who we're actually reaching. Why are those moves typically the wrong ones?
Angela: Simply because it usually means you're reaching fewer people instead of more. You know, when marketers hear fragmentation, they start slicing the audience into smaller and smaller segments, adding these micro channels and chasing high intent targets, and I think that's smarter. But what they're really doing is shrinking their reach and concentrating spend on people that may have been likely to reach anyway. And that's the opposite of what drives growth. As we talk about all the time, it's penetration by getting more category buyers to know them and buy them. That requires broad reach.
So the moment you respond to fragmentation by narrowing targeting, you're reducing the number of buyers that you're gonna reach and you're gonna reduce your chance of growth. Adding more channels can also be a mistake because you treat it like a checklist. Okay? Now we need to be on TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, influencers, retail media. But being in more places doesn't necessarily mean that you're building more reach. It often just means that your budget is getting spread more thin. Your creative becomes inconsistent if you're not doing it well to Rob's point, and your brand becomes harder to recognize and remember.
Elena: So media is fragmenting, like we know that's true, and attention is coming in these shorter, more distributed moments. Reach and frequency is hard enough, I think, to think about for one channel. How should marketers think about it in this world of fragmentation?
Angela: Yeah, you know, the fact that attention comes in shorter, more distributed moments doesn't change the fundamentals. People aren't sitting down to carefully process your message, as gut wrenching as that is to a marketer. You know, they're noticing brands in passing, briefly, repeatedly, across time, and that's exactly why you need consistent branding and repeated exposure, because mental availability is built through that accumulation. But marketers often get distracted by the idea that shorter attention means they need to maybe cram more persuasion into every ad, or they need constant novelty to, to Rob's point, fight that fatigue.
But that just really misunderstands how brands grow. You don't need people to pay deep attention. You need them to recognize you quickly and think of you when they're ready to buy. So that frequency is about the brand showing up repeatedly across the market over time. We know that reach trumps frequency in terms of growth, but if you obsess over eliminating any and all duplication, you also may end up under delivering frequency and weakening those memory structures, which are important as well.
Elena: In the beginning of the show, we were talking about how this fragmentation is maybe more of like a planning challenge than actually like going to harm marketing outcomes. So from, you know, thinking as like a marketing leader, from a leadership side of things, what's a planning discipline that you think maybe marketers need to bring back or apply to avoid this fragmentation just kind of turning into chaos in their plans?
Angela: Yeah, I feel like it's pretty boring, but it's just focusing on the fundamentals. Planning for that broad reach, keeping the brand distinctive. Stop mistaking complexity for something like strategy. Fragmentation turns into chaos when leaders let planning become a collection of channel decisions and targeting tweaks, instead of a simple growth plan. Most brands just need more clarity.
Who are the category buyers? Are we reaching enough of them? Are we easy to recognize? Are we consistent over time? Like those are really the important questions that matter. And then too, I think leadership also needs the discipline to resist the constant push to optimize based on those short term metrics. That's where chaos can really come from. You start chasing whatever looks good this week, swapping creative, shifting budgets, adding segments, testing endless variations. And that activity might feel productive in the moment, but it often is reducing the reach and destroying your consistency over time.
Elena: Measurement gets harder it seems like, as media fragments, even though I think a lot of these platforms, like they make measurement seem easier. So what signals do you think marketers should look for or trust when they are looking at this holistic plan now if they have all these different channels?
Angela: Yeah, I think when media fragments, we should be trusting fewer signals. That should be kind of running in the back of our heads. The signals I would advise to trust the most are the ones that are closest to those real business outcomes and least tied to a single platform. Things like sustained sales growth, penetration, looking at your share movements, even broad demand signals like search lift over time.
You know, those aren't perfect, but they're directionally honest. They tell you whether the brand is becoming easier to choose, easier to find, not just easier to click, and I'm much more cautious and I think we all should be with highly granular platform level metrics. You know, in fragmented plans, those metrics tend to reward that short-term activation and penalize brand effects simply because brand effects take longer to show up across your business.
And it doesn't necessarily mean the plan isn't working. I think to your point, Elena, you're like, oh, I don't know that short-term clicks for Marketing Architects is what we're after. Of course, we all love leads, but we need people to know who we are when they're ready to launch television. And so we can't get overly focused on those things that we perceive as immediately attributable to the business.
Elena: Yeah. Exactly. Just 'cause you could measure it doesn't mean it's necessarily gonna matter. So if marketers could take, you know, one thing away from this, what do you think is that thing? What's like a mindset shift they might need to make to stay effective as media fragments? And Angela, we can start with you.
Angela: Sure. Yeah. I would say, um, coherence will help you beat that complexity that's in your head related to fragmentation. You know, the brands that win are the ones that are gonna stay coherent. They're showing up repeatedly with the distinctive cues in as many categories as possible, as consistently as possible over time.
Rob: And if you have the big idea, the job isn't to invent, it's to reinforce. To stop chasing the new idea and start building systems, you know, become a systems thinker.
Angela: Oh, I love systems.
Rob: I love systems. Should we have a podcast just about systems? Nothing to do with marketing, but just
Elena: Yeah. We're so boring, Rob.
Rob: Maybe.
Elena: Yeah. Um, one thing I was thinking about is when I was thinking about like our clients, the clients we work with and ones that are most kind of successful in their marketing strategy. And I think what I personally think about fragmentation, I imagine like these brands having like a million different channels. But I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, our most successful customers, most of their budget's going towards TV. So like, even though yes, like media's fragmented, you could reach people at all these different places, they're on, like that doesn't mean your plan has to be overly complicated. There are still places that are better to reach people with a clearer message.
So I mean, not to just advocate for TV, but whatever channel is best for your brand. I also don't think there's anything wrong with that, with having a simpler plan. You know, simpler marketing. You don't have to Chase every new channel and be everywhere at once. I think that you can also double down on what's working, 'cause some channels just work better than others for advertising.
Angela: I think that's great advice.
Elena: Alright, kind of fun wrap up here. For you personally, what is the most like niche media channel or content you consume?
Angela: There are subgroups on LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, that probably don't make sense to reach me on. They're much easier and probably more efficient ways to reach me than knowing my, I don't know, dance mom groups or whatever you'd pay, you know, 25 to $50 CPMs for. So that would be mine.
Rob: I was gonna do mom groups, but apparently Angela already did that, so sorry, Rob. Mine is a little cutting edge and sure shocking. It counts. Okay. I am not sure it counts yet, but ChatGPT recently released this thing called Pulse, which is basically like reading a morning report, right? It's a media channel that's tailored exactly to things that I've obviously done with ChatGPT. And it's super interesting and helpful and scary as all hell. And they don't have yet but we all know that's coming. Come on, Sam. We all know it's coming. It's creepy good. Have you guys used it at all?
Elena: Not yet. I have not.
Angela: I have not.
Elena: I've heard of it, but I haven't.
Angela: Is it creepy because it knows you so well? It's creepy because of what you're searching in ChatGPT, like why is it creepy?
Rob: Yeah, it is actually generated. You get it on the pro account, and it's expensive overnight while you're sleeping. ChatGPT is doing all this research on all this stuff with it on, and then it's creating this report that's highly tailored to your individual interests, things that you've asked about it makes some great insights. You're like, wow, okay.
Angela: Love it.
Elena: That's cool. If anyone's ever seen that like early adopter curve, Rob is like the first person standing. He is the start of the early adopter curve.
Rob: So it's just, you know, I need something to compensate somehow.
Angela: OpenAI hasn't even hit the published button yet, and somehow Rob actually has access to it.
Rob: Well, it's a good one.
Elena: So mine is live broadcast on Outside TV. I don't think there's a huge audience watching that. And they do have advertising and their frequency is so bad. Like I will see the same spot, I'm not even joking, maybe 20 times, 'cause these races are long, you know, they can be eight hours for a full Ironman. And man, I mean, I will see the same commercials over and over and over again.
Angela: Brutal.
Elena: But yeah, probably a niche, not a lot of people watching a live stream of Ironman. Not a lot of Dunkin' Donuts. No, no it's not. But maybe an opportunity to diversify a little bit. Put Marketing Architects ads in there.
Angela: I was thinking the same thing.