/nav-logo-desktop.webp "Marketing Architects"){kind=logo}
Episode 162
Does Targeting Work on Mass Marketing Channels?
Over half of marketers are targeting sub-segments rather than all potential buyers. And 62% aren't even targeting people over 45, a group that accounts for 50% of consumer spending.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob tackle one of the most debated questions in marketing: how do you actually reach the right people on mass channels like TV? They dig into why narrow targeting can quietly shrink your business, how creative can do more of the targeting work than your media buy, and what it really looks like to transition from performance digital to TV.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Les Binet and Will Davis research on budget vs. ROI
• [03:00] Why narrow targeting creates a "death spiral"
• [06:00] Why TV's business impact has increased as media fragmented
• [08:00] How creative can target more effectively than media selection
• [10:00] How a linear TV buy actually works
• [14:00] Brand building vs. activation
• [17:00] How to transition from performance digital to TV
Resources:
2025 IPA Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Transcript
Rob: I think the shift for folks coming from a digital world is going from who is this ad for, to what moment is this ad for. What category entry points are right? Tie your brand to a buying situation and you’ll show up in memory when that moment hits, no matter who that person is.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I’m Elena Jasper, I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I’m joined by my co-hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello. We are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Today we are going to tackle a question that comes up constantly in marketing, especially when brands are invested in channels like TV, out of home, maybe radio.
If the whole point of mass reach media is to reach everybody, how do you actually make sure you’re reaching the right people? Or maybe the better question — does targeting even mean what we think it means? And I’m going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. I chose findings presented at the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October of last year, 2025.
This was by Les Binet and Will Davis, the Chief Data Officer at Media Lab Group. We have chatted about this research before on the podcast, but it fits so well that I just had to run it back. Their presentation was called “Go Big or Go Home.” And what they did was they analyzed the IPA databank and found that budget was eight times more important than ROI.
When it comes to driving marketing effectiveness, ROI only accounted for 11% of the variation in profit payback. Budget accounted for 89%. But when they surveyed 500 senior marketing decision makers, 65% believed ROI was the most important factor compared to 35% who said budget. The research also revealed that over half of marketers — 56% — are targeting sub-segments of customers rather than all potential buyers.
And we’re just saying, like, not all people — just all potential buyers of their product or service. 62% of marketers were not even targeting people over 45, despite the fact that that cohort accounts for 50% of consumer spending. Binet warned that this narrow targeting, combined with a narrow media mix biased toward digital performance and ROI, is creating what he calls a “death spiral” where budgets, campaigns, and profits all get smaller and smaller.
No good. And the takeaway from all this is that fewer than half of CMOs actually maximize reach, based on that data. But the data also shows that advertisers need 30 to 60 million exposures to drive a statistically significant sales uplift, with 200 million to a billion exposures required for major results.
So broad reach and big media investments are really not optional. They are essential.
Angela: Ange, does that disconnect between what the data continues to show about targeting versus what marketers believe surprise you? Why do you think that so many brands default to narrow targeting even when the evidence continues to say otherwise?
I think it confirms something that we’ve watched play out with clients for years, and I think the disconnect makes complete sense when you think about the incentive structures that marketers are working within. Digital performance channels made measurement feel safe. You could point to a cost per click, a conversion rate, a ROAS number, and use that to justify that spend to your CFO.
And the converse to that is mass reach media demands a different kind of confidence. You have to believe that building a big audience creates downstream profit, even when the attribution model can’t draw that straight line from impression to sale.
I think that belief requires trusting the research maybe more than you trust your own dashboard, and most marketing teams are evaluated on metrics that reward precision. So precision is what they end up optimizing for, even when the evidence says broad reach is what actually moves the needle on profit.
Elena: Les Binet — we love that he talks a lot about the evidence behind why tight targeting might not be entirely effective in all cases. But another thing he talks about, which we also love, is the idea that mass media actually works better than ever today. And he has found that the TV impact on business effects has actually increased over time. Which I also think, if you did a survey, would probably be even more dire about — do marketers actually believe that? Because I don’t think the majority of marketers think that’s true.
I think most marketers think that the effects have actually gotten weaker. Rob, why do you think they’ve actually gotten stronger?
Rob: I mean, it’s counterintuitive, right? I mean, everyone assumed that as media fragmented, TV would lose its juice — lose its power. But it’s actually been the opposite. Everyone was running these tiny targeted digital pockets. TV becomes really one of the few places that you can really build your brand at scale.
It’s like everyone sort of left the big stage to go perform in little coffee shops, but the big stage is still there. It’s the biggest screen in the house. Right? I’d add that the rest of the ecosystem gets rewarded by you going to television as well, which is kind of the double bonus of it, right? Your search lifts, your other channels work harder. Retail takes notice. So TV is doing all this invisible work that really works for the rest of your marketing as well.
Elena: Right, you’re saying the fact that fewer brands buy TV, or there’s more competition in the digital marketplace, that could be helping the brands that do choose to continue to invest in a channel like TV.
Rob: Absolutely. I mean, even when we were doing the Hurricane, which was years ago — no one was advertising canes on television. It was all very targeted, niche things. And so what a great stage for us to go on when no one else was there. And it just — it seems counterintuitive, like I said — but we were able to own it.
We were able to launch into retail faster than anyone else and actually create a brand in a category that had none.
Elena: Well, let’s talk about targeting — my favorite topic. Digital marketing, as Ange kind of walked through, trains us to think a certain way about targeting, and we get caught in this machine of picking exactly who sees our ad and being able to measure that and feeling good about the certainty. When you’re buying channels like TV, even radio or out of home, you can’t hand-select the individuals you’re going to reach.
And while that can be uncomfortable for marketers who grew up in digital, the research all points to that being actually a good thing. So Ange, as someone who’s been buying radio media and then TV media for a long time, when a brand says, “I only want to target my ideal customer,” what’s the problem with how they’re usually thinking about doing that?
Angela: Yeah, I think the assumption is that their ideal customer is already defined and already exists in this tidy segment. Most brands come to us in television with a profile — demographics, psychographics, behavioral data potentially — that represents their current buyer, and then they want to reach more of those same people.
But we know from a plethora of research all saying the same thing that growth almost always comes from light buyers, new buyers — people who are in the category occasionally, or have never tried your brand at all. And those people may look nothing like your core customer profile. So when you target narrowly toward that existing base, you’re sort of watering the plants that are already growing and ignoring the whole rest of the field.
And that’s the beauty of mass reach media. It’s valuable because it puts your brand in front of people who were maybe never on your list, and some of those people could become your best customers. You identify new segments and new growth opportunities. So it’s kind of the challenge to yourself of — who’s the anti-target? And how could you create relevance with those people?
Elena: I like that. Who is the anti-target? Rob, one concept that’s come out of Ehrenberg-Bass that kind of bends my brain a little bit when they start talking about it — but it makes sense in the end — is that you should actually be thinking strategically about how your creative can do more of the targeting work than your media selection.
But typically marketers focus 80% of their time on how they’re going to target through media versus focusing on how to have a creative message that can target for them. What would that look like in practice for a brand?
Rob: I love this one, because digital really taught us that targeting is a media problem, right? You pick the segment, you serve the ad, you’re done. But creative — like you mentioned — it can actually do that job, and in many ways better than third-party data sets can. If you think about the people your ad is relevant to, they’re going to self-select, and everyone will still get exposed to the brand at the same time. The people watching it will see themselves — see the opportunity for themselves — in the ad.
For example, Stuffies, back in the day — we started out just targeting kids and moms, but we were on television and we recognized through that that grandmas were actually the biggest buyers. So had we been niche targeting, we would have completely missed that opportunity. Definitely, I think creative has the opportunity to cast that net into your audience so you can see who your product truly resonates with.
Elena: Yeah. And then also when we realized that grandmas were responding to the ads, we didn’t just start targeting them, right?
Rob: Absolutely. And we adjusted the creative and recognized that grandma was there. But again, we weren’t just buying super niche grandma advertising, because moms saw the value in that as well. And the kids saw how cool the product was.
Elena: Alright, let’s get a little bit tactical with this targeting discussion. Everybody should know by now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast, that we’re a TV agency. And I think there’s a misconception that with different types of television — like linear — you cannot target at all.
So a lot of brands say, “I don’t even want to go there. My audience isn’t watching, or I can’t reach them effectively.” So they say, “I don’t want linear.” And then now CTV has come up, and a lot of the positioning around it is “TV, but like digital — I can handpick exactly who I want.” Spoiler alert: neither are exactly true. So Ange, could you walk us through how a TV buy actually works in terms of reaching the right audience? What levers do media buyers have within a mass reach channel like TV?
Angela: Yeah. I think it’s really common to think about TV like digital, like you’d said. And I’m going to focus on the linear levers a little bit more than the CTV. But before going there — yes, it’s a digital environment, but one of the key pieces that we need to remember when we’re talking true CTV is we’re talking about a screen on a wall and we don’t know who’s in that room.
And because of that, CTV becomes a lot more like linear than people might think. Yes, you have zip targeting you can do, demographic, behavioral. We can argue about whether or not some of that data is accurate enough to even care about. But that’s just a really important thing to keep in mind.
I think related to linear, be thinking of the levers a little more like a dial than a scalpel. We think “scalpel” in a digital environment. In linear TV, you’re making choices around networks, day parts, time of day, programming context. A sports viewer skews a little differently than a daytime talk viewer, potentially.
And placing your brand in the right environment might create a soft relevance. But the honest truth about how audience data works in television is it’s built on ratings — Nielsen or others — which are statistical estimates based on panel data. You’re buying probabilities, you’re not buying a guarantee.
And so when a buyer says, “We’re reaching adults 25-54,” that’s a modeled projection across millions of households. And that doesn’t mean it’s not useful — it’s directionally useful and can help inform strategy — but it’s a far cry from the individual-level precision that people might think of in the CTV space.
And that’s actually fine, because of one of the pieces of research that we haven’t talked about today, but we’ve talked about on many of the other podcasts. At any given moment, on average, roughly 5% of your potential customers are actively in market for what you sell. The other 95% are living their lives, watching TV, going about their day, and they have no intention of buying right now.
So if you design your media strategy purely around finding the people ready to buy today, you’re competing ferociously for a tiny slice of the audience and completely ignoring everyone else. Mass reach media earns its value by working on that 95% — building those memory structures that you mentioned earlier, Elena, creating familiarity so that when someone does enter the market, maybe six months from now, a year from now, your brand is already a part of their consideration set.
Elena: Speaking of future buyers and reaching people outside of your target customer — Rob, I know we just talked about how you can use creative to target on a channel like TV. However, I want to talk a little bit about creative strategy in general, because if you know your ad is going to air broadly, sometimes it seems like brands can go too far with very targeted messages that a lot of people just don’t understand, versus going too broad. How do you thread that needle? How should creative be built to make sure that it works on TV but also lands with the correct buyers?
Rob: I’d say the first thing is that building for broad reach doesn’t mean watering it down. The best mass reach creative is actually super specific — but specific in different ways. Clear story, strong emotional hook, distinctive brand assets you can’t miss. The sharp focus is in the story, not in the demographic filter.
I think the shift for folks coming from a digital world is going from “who is this ad for?” to “what moment is this ad for?” What category entry points are right? Tie your brand to a buying situation and you’ll show up in memory when that moment hits, no matter who that person is.
Elena: Now, sometimes when we talk about targeting on the podcast, we can sound a little bit like absolutists, and I want to be clear that targeting isn’t bad. It has its place. The question is, when and how do you use it? So Binet and Field have talked in the past about targeting being effective for that short-term activation bucket — the short side of the “long and the short.” Could you explain what that means and how you think a brand should decide to use targeted media alongside their mass reach channels?
Angela: Yeah, the framework draws a clear distinction that I think is really helpful between brand building and activation, and maps it pretty directly to how you think about targeting. Brand building is that long game. That work requires broad reach, it requires emotional resonance. Activation is different. It’s for people that are already in market, already considering a purchase, and you want to push them — nudge them across that finish line — maybe with an offer, a reminder, a call to action. Targeted digital is well suited for that, because you can find in-market signals: search behavior, site visits, category engagement. And you can serve them a timely message.
I think the mistake brands make is running their activation creative as if it were brand building creative, because they know they need a brand and they’re trying to do two jobs at once. Which isn’t necessarily wrong, especially in television, because you are reaching both in-market consumers and out-of-market consumers. But they might be using that targeting budget to do awareness work, which is wrong.
The right structure is mass reach building the audience over time, and targeted activation converting those people who are ready to buy. Both have a role. The ratio just needs to reflect where the brand is in its growth stage.
Elena: Yeah, so Rob, speaking of that — I’ve seen this before on TV, where brands will take their best-performing activation digital creative and put that on television. What’s the problem with that, and how should creative be different if you’re running certain creative on digital versus a mass reach channel like TV, radio, or out of home?
Rob: Angela really hit all the great points on this one. It really becomes a question of what your focus is going to be in the messaging. When you’re in a mass reach channel, the creative is about being memorable, emotional, distinctive — really celebrating all those assets that are built to last.
And the amount of time you’re going to spend on the activation stuff is going to be far less than what you’re doing in digital. Digital is that place where you’re meeting them in that buying moment. And that’s not where you’re going to be hitting them with your television campaign. So definitely much more time spent on the brand building work. That is going to be important both in the near term, as Angela was saying, but really important for the long term.
Elena: So to wrap us up here — I think a lot of times brands build up on digital, which makes a lot of sense. And then eventually they realize, “Oh crap, we’ve got to do something different.” So Ange, this happens frequently at Marketing Architects — a brand comes to you and says, “Hey, we’ve been spending most of our budget on performance digital, and we want to start investing in TV or another sort of mass reach channel to balance this out.” Where would you recommend they start in that transition?
Angela: I think the first conversation is just getting clear on what problem they’re trying to solve. To your point, most brands in that situation have hit a ceiling. Their performance channels are delivering diminishing returns, customer acquisition costs are climbing, and they can feel growth stalling — even if they’re still showing a positive ROAS, things are just getting harder. So we start by grounding them in the role that TV should play in their marketing ecosystem.
TV builds reach and brand equity over time. It’s fueling the top of the funnel so that your performance channels can work harder downstream. Then I think we look at the math. Binet’s research says you need tens of millions of exposures to move the needle statistically. So when we think about what a realistic budget commitment looks like and what time horizon to hold that investment accountable to — those are things we really have to get clear on before we launch.
For a lot of brands, starting with a test market or a seasonal window might make sense — just enough to actually measure something, with enough weight, but contained enough to still feel manageable. You’re not having to put millions and millions into television in order to understand whether or not it’s working.
And we build a really clear measurement expectation upfront. Not super precise, but — on what time horizon should we be looking for what signals? A scorecard. We say, “All measurement models are wrong. Some are very useful.” That’s where that comes from.
What incrementality data are we going to be looking at? When is it going to come back? How are we going to interpret it? Because the worst outcome is pulling TV after eight weeks — maybe because the ROAS looks different than what they see in paid search or paid social — before those compound effects of TV have had a chance to show up.
Elena: Yeah, really a worst case scenario — when your brand is ready to invest in something like TV, you’re ready to add brand building, and then you don’t set it up right from the start and it goes kaput. Not a fun feeling. To wrap us up here — this was a hard question. I thought, I don’t know why, but it was hard for me.
What is a brand you feel like found you, even though you were never their target audience? And I say this was hard for me because I feel like most of the brands I use — like they feel like mine. It’s like I feel like I was their target. I’m curious what you guys thought of.
Angela: Okay, this was hard for me too, so that makes me feel better that you said that. I came up with Liquid I.V. Because I would imagine their target audience is like hungover 20-year-olds and endurance athletes — like Elena and Rob a little bit too. I’m neither one of these people, but the brand was everywhere.
I can’t point back to actually where I learned about it. But I now travel with Liquid I.V. like it’s prescribed to me, so.
Rob: Delicious.
Elena: It is delicious. You should try LMNT, Ange.
Angela: I’ve heard of LMNT, but I have not tried it yet.
Elena: I have one right here. Oh my gosh.
Rob: Classic runner. You just have an LMNT right next to you. That’s so funny.
Angela: Oh, I’ve got one that’s pretty near and dear to my heart right now. You know, my wife and I are empty nesters — we have two kids in college — so we’re home alone. We have been adamant our entire lives that we would never own a van. The van is depressing and sad and makes you want to cry.
Rob: They have to drive around in a van. And yet — after the fact, our kids moved out — we bought a van! We bought a VW Buzz, and it’s hilarious because they definitely were not targeting two empty nesters when they came out with that product. But you know what — the brand is joyful, it’s retro.
It makes people happy when they’re driving it down the road. It’s electric, which appeals to my nerdiness. So yeah, I’m definitely not the target audience for that vehicle, but we love it.
Elena: I think that now, seeing the van, Rob — and knowing you — it seems like it was meant for you.
Angela: It really is. I agree. I thought that too. Right when he said it, I was like, it feels perfect for Rob.
Rob: I just don’t think the van category was going after empty nesters, but they got me.
Angela: Dog parents maybe?
Rob: That’s true. We do have two Goldendoodles and a little Morkie.
Elena: So this one was tough for me. And I know I’ve mentioned this brand recently on the podcast, but mine is Sleep Number. Because if you look up Sleep Number and kind of their target audience and their advertising, they say that they target 35- to 54-year-old homeowners.
And I actually bought a Sleep Number when I was right out of college, living in an apartment. And I honestly don’t know why. I was trying to think of like, why did I do that? I think my parents might have had one, but honestly, I remember their advertising more than anything — the advertising they’ve done at the NFL in particular. Like I still see the Sleep Number spot in my head. And I honestly think that they just hit me when I was out of market, and even though I wouldn’t be their exact target audience at that age, that was the mattress brand that came to mind.
There you go.
Rob: Yeah.
Angela: Power of the anti-target.
Elena: Alright, well, I think that’ll wrap us up today.
Episode 162
Does Targeting Work on Mass Marketing Channels?
Over half of marketers are targeting sub-segments rather than all potential buyers. And 62% aren't even targeting people over 45, a group that accounts for 50% of consumer spending.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob tackle one of the most debated questions in marketing: how do you actually reach the right people on mass channels like TV? They dig into why narrow targeting can quietly shrink your business, how creative can do more of the targeting work than your media buy, and what it really looks like to transition from performance digital to TV.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Les Binet and Will Davis research on budget vs. ROI
• [03:00] Why narrow targeting creates a "death spiral"
• [06:00] Why TV's business impact has increased as media fragmented
• [08:00] How creative can target more effectively than media selection
• [10:00] How a linear TV buy actually works
• [14:00] Brand building vs. activation
• [17:00] How to transition from performance digital to TV
Resources:
2025 IPA Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Subscribe on
Enjoy this episode? Leave us a review.
Transcript
Rob: I think the shift for folks coming from a digital world is going from who is this ad for, to what moment is this ad for. What category entry points are right? Tie your brand to a buying situation and you’ll show up in memory when that moment hits, no matter who that person is.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I’m Elena Jasper, I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I’m joined by my co-hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello. We are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. Today we are going to tackle a question that comes up constantly in marketing, especially when brands are invested in channels like TV, out of home, maybe radio.
If the whole point of mass reach media is to reach everybody, how do you actually make sure you’re reaching the right people? Or maybe the better question — does targeting even mean what we think it means? And I’m going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. I chose findings presented at the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October of last year, 2025.
This was by Les Binet and Will Davis, the Chief Data Officer at Media Lab Group. We have chatted about this research before on the podcast, but it fits so well that I just had to run it back. Their presentation was called “Go Big or Go Home.” And what they did was they analyzed the IPA databank and found that budget was eight times more important than ROI.
When it comes to driving marketing effectiveness, ROI only accounted for 11% of the variation in profit payback. Budget accounted for 89%. But when they surveyed 500 senior marketing decision makers, 65% believed ROI was the most important factor compared to 35% who said budget. The research also revealed that over half of marketers — 56% — are targeting sub-segments of customers rather than all potential buyers.
And we’re just saying, like, not all people — just all potential buyers of their product or service. 62% of marketers were not even targeting people over 45, despite the fact that that cohort accounts for 50% of consumer spending. Binet warned that this narrow targeting, combined with a narrow media mix biased toward digital performance and ROI, is creating what he calls a “death spiral” where budgets, campaigns, and profits all get smaller and smaller.
No good. And the takeaway from all this is that fewer than half of CMOs actually maximize reach, based on that data. But the data also shows that advertisers need 30 to 60 million exposures to drive a statistically significant sales uplift, with 200 million to a billion exposures required for major results.
So broad reach and big media investments are really not optional. They are essential.
Angela: Ange, does that disconnect between what the data continues to show about targeting versus what marketers believe surprise you? Why do you think that so many brands default to narrow targeting even when the evidence continues to say otherwise?
I think it confirms something that we’ve watched play out with clients for years, and I think the disconnect makes complete sense when you think about the incentive structures that marketers are working within. Digital performance channels made measurement feel safe. You could point to a cost per click, a conversion rate, a ROAS number, and use that to justify that spend to your CFO.
And the converse to that is mass reach media demands a different kind of confidence. You have to believe that building a big audience creates downstream profit, even when the attribution model can’t draw that straight line from impression to sale.
I think that belief requires trusting the research maybe more than you trust your own dashboard, and most marketing teams are evaluated on metrics that reward precision. So precision is what they end up optimizing for, even when the evidence says broad reach is what actually moves the needle on profit.
Elena: Les Binet — we love that he talks a lot about the evidence behind why tight targeting might not be entirely effective in all cases. But another thing he talks about, which we also love, is the idea that mass media actually works better than ever today. And he has found that the TV impact on business effects has actually increased over time. Which I also think, if you did a survey, would probably be even more dire about — do marketers actually believe that? Because I don’t think the majority of marketers think that’s true.
I think most marketers think that the effects have actually gotten weaker. Rob, why do you think they’ve actually gotten stronger?
Rob: I mean, it’s counterintuitive, right? I mean, everyone assumed that as media fragmented, TV would lose its juice — lose its power. But it’s actually been the opposite. Everyone was running these tiny targeted digital pockets. TV becomes really one of the few places that you can really build your brand at scale.
It’s like everyone sort of left the big stage to go perform in little coffee shops, but the big stage is still there. It’s the biggest screen in the house. Right? I’d add that the rest of the ecosystem gets rewarded by you going to television as well, which is kind of the double bonus of it, right? Your search lifts, your other channels work harder. Retail takes notice. So TV is doing all this invisible work that really works for the rest of your marketing as well.
Elena: Right, you’re saying the fact that fewer brands buy TV, or there’s more competition in the digital marketplace, that could be helping the brands that do choose to continue to invest in a channel like TV.
Rob: Absolutely. I mean, even when we were doing the Hurricane, which was years ago — no one was advertising canes on television. It was all very targeted, niche things. And so what a great stage for us to go on when no one else was there. And it just — it seems counterintuitive, like I said — but we were able to own it.
We were able to launch into retail faster than anyone else and actually create a brand in a category that had none.
Elena: Well, let’s talk about targeting — my favorite topic. Digital marketing, as Ange kind of walked through, trains us to think a certain way about targeting, and we get caught in this machine of picking exactly who sees our ad and being able to measure that and feeling good about the certainty. When you’re buying channels like TV, even radio or out of home, you can’t hand-select the individuals you’re going to reach.
And while that can be uncomfortable for marketers who grew up in digital, the research all points to that being actually a good thing. So Ange, as someone who’s been buying radio media and then TV media for a long time, when a brand says, “I only want to target my ideal customer,” what’s the problem with how they’re usually thinking about doing that?
Angela: Yeah, I think the assumption is that their ideal customer is already defined and already exists in this tidy segment. Most brands come to us in television with a profile — demographics, psychographics, behavioral data potentially — that represents their current buyer, and then they want to reach more of those same people.
But we know from a plethora of research all saying the same thing that growth almost always comes from light buyers, new buyers — people who are in the category occasionally, or have never tried your brand at all. And those people may look nothing like your core customer profile. So when you target narrowly toward that existing base, you’re sort of watering the plants that are already growing and ignoring the whole rest of the field.
And that’s the beauty of mass reach media. It’s valuable because it puts your brand in front of people who were maybe never on your list, and some of those people could become your best customers. You identify new segments and new growth opportunities. So it’s kind of the challenge to yourself of — who’s the anti-target? And how could you create relevance with those people?
Elena: I like that. Who is the anti-target? Rob, one concept that’s come out of Ehrenberg-Bass that kind of bends my brain a little bit when they start talking about it — but it makes sense in the end — is that you should actually be thinking strategically about how your creative can do more of the targeting work than your media selection.
But typically marketers focus 80% of their time on how they’re going to target through media versus focusing on how to have a creative message that can target for them. What would that look like in practice for a brand?
Rob: I love this one, because digital really taught us that targeting is a media problem, right? You pick the segment, you serve the ad, you’re done. But creative — like you mentioned — it can actually do that job, and in many ways better than third-party data sets can. If you think about the people your ad is relevant to, they’re going to self-select, and everyone will still get exposed to the brand at the same time. The people watching it will see themselves — see the opportunity for themselves — in the ad.
For example, Stuffies, back in the day — we started out just targeting kids and moms, but we were on television and we recognized through that that grandmas were actually the biggest buyers. So had we been niche targeting, we would have completely missed that opportunity. Definitely, I think creative has the opportunity to cast that net into your audience so you can see who your product truly resonates with.
Elena: Yeah. And then also when we realized that grandmas were responding to the ads, we didn’t just start targeting them, right?
Rob: Absolutely. And we adjusted the creative and recognized that grandma was there. But again, we weren’t just buying super niche grandma advertising, because moms saw the value in that as well. And the kids saw how cool the product was.
Elena: Alright, let’s get a little bit tactical with this targeting discussion. Everybody should know by now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast, that we’re a TV agency. And I think there’s a misconception that with different types of television — like linear — you cannot target at all.
So a lot of brands say, “I don’t even want to go there. My audience isn’t watching, or I can’t reach them effectively.” So they say, “I don’t want linear.” And then now CTV has come up, and a lot of the positioning around it is “TV, but like digital — I can handpick exactly who I want.” Spoiler alert: neither are exactly true. So Ange, could you walk us through how a TV buy actually works in terms of reaching the right audience? What levers do media buyers have within a mass reach channel like TV?
Angela: Yeah. I think it’s really common to think about TV like digital, like you’d said. And I’m going to focus on the linear levers a little bit more than the CTV. But before going there — yes, it’s a digital environment, but one of the key pieces that we need to remember when we’re talking true CTV is we’re talking about a screen on a wall and we don’t know who’s in that room.
And because of that, CTV becomes a lot more like linear than people might think. Yes, you have zip targeting you can do, demographic, behavioral. We can argue about whether or not some of that data is accurate enough to even care about. But that’s just a really important thing to keep in mind.
I think related to linear, be thinking of the levers a little more like a dial than a scalpel. We think “scalpel” in a digital environment. In linear TV, you’re making choices around networks, day parts, time of day, programming context. A sports viewer skews a little differently than a daytime talk viewer, potentially.
And placing your brand in the right environment might create a soft relevance. But the honest truth about how audience data works in television is it’s built on ratings — Nielsen or others — which are statistical estimates based on panel data. You’re buying probabilities, you’re not buying a guarantee.
And so when a buyer says, “We’re reaching adults 25-54,” that’s a modeled projection across millions of households. And that doesn’t mean it’s not useful — it’s directionally useful and can help inform strategy — but it’s a far cry from the individual-level precision that people might think of in the CTV space.
And that’s actually fine, because of one of the pieces of research that we haven’t talked about today, but we’ve talked about on many of the other podcasts. At any given moment, on average, roughly 5% of your potential customers are actively in market for what you sell. The other 95% are living their lives, watching TV, going about their day, and they have no intention of buying right now.
So if you design your media strategy purely around finding the people ready to buy today, you’re competing ferociously for a tiny slice of the audience and completely ignoring everyone else. Mass reach media earns its value by working on that 95% — building those memory structures that you mentioned earlier, Elena, creating familiarity so that when someone does enter the market, maybe six months from now, a year from now, your brand is already a part of their consideration set.
Elena: Speaking of future buyers and reaching people outside of your target customer — Rob, I know we just talked about how you can use creative to target on a channel like TV. However, I want to talk a little bit about creative strategy in general, because if you know your ad is going to air broadly, sometimes it seems like brands can go too far with very targeted messages that a lot of people just don’t understand, versus going too broad. How do you thread that needle? How should creative be built to make sure that it works on TV but also lands with the correct buyers?
Rob: I’d say the first thing is that building for broad reach doesn’t mean watering it down. The best mass reach creative is actually super specific — but specific in different ways. Clear story, strong emotional hook, distinctive brand assets you can’t miss. The sharp focus is in the story, not in the demographic filter.
I think the shift for folks coming from a digital world is going from “who is this ad for?” to “what moment is this ad for?” What category entry points are right? Tie your brand to a buying situation and you’ll show up in memory when that moment hits, no matter who that person is.
Elena: Now, sometimes when we talk about targeting on the podcast, we can sound a little bit like absolutists, and I want to be clear that targeting isn’t bad. It has its place. The question is, when and how do you use it? So Binet and Field have talked in the past about targeting being effective for that short-term activation bucket — the short side of the “long and the short.” Could you explain what that means and how you think a brand should decide to use targeted media alongside their mass reach channels?
Angela: Yeah, the framework draws a clear distinction that I think is really helpful between brand building and activation, and maps it pretty directly to how you think about targeting. Brand building is that long game. That work requires broad reach, it requires emotional resonance. Activation is different. It’s for people that are already in market, already considering a purchase, and you want to push them — nudge them across that finish line — maybe with an offer, a reminder, a call to action. Targeted digital is well suited for that, because you can find in-market signals: search behavior, site visits, category engagement. And you can serve them a timely message.
I think the mistake brands make is running their activation creative as if it were brand building creative, because they know they need a brand and they’re trying to do two jobs at once. Which isn’t necessarily wrong, especially in television, because you are reaching both in-market consumers and out-of-market consumers. But they might be using that targeting budget to do awareness work, which is wrong.
The right structure is mass reach building the audience over time, and targeted activation converting those people who are ready to buy. Both have a role. The ratio just needs to reflect where the brand is in its growth stage.
Elena: Yeah, so Rob, speaking of that — I’ve seen this before on TV, where brands will take their best-performing activation digital creative and put that on television. What’s the problem with that, and how should creative be different if you’re running certain creative on digital versus a mass reach channel like TV, radio, or out of home?
Rob: Angela really hit all the great points on this one. It really becomes a question of what your focus is going to be in the messaging. When you’re in a mass reach channel, the creative is about being memorable, emotional, distinctive — really celebrating all those assets that are built to last.
And the amount of time you’re going to spend on the activation stuff is going to be far less than what you’re doing in digital. Digital is that place where you’re meeting them in that buying moment. And that’s not where you’re going to be hitting them with your television campaign. So definitely much more time spent on the brand building work. That is going to be important both in the near term, as Angela was saying, but really important for the long term.
Elena: So to wrap us up here — I think a lot of times brands build up on digital, which makes a lot of sense. And then eventually they realize, “Oh crap, we’ve got to do something different.” So Ange, this happens frequently at Marketing Architects — a brand comes to you and says, “Hey, we’ve been spending most of our budget on performance digital, and we want to start investing in TV or another sort of mass reach channel to balance this out.” Where would you recommend they start in that transition?
Angela: I think the first conversation is just getting clear on what problem they’re trying to solve. To your point, most brands in that situation have hit a ceiling. Their performance channels are delivering diminishing returns, customer acquisition costs are climbing, and they can feel growth stalling — even if they’re still showing a positive ROAS, things are just getting harder. So we start by grounding them in the role that TV should play in their marketing ecosystem.
TV builds reach and brand equity over time. It’s fueling the top of the funnel so that your performance channels can work harder downstream. Then I think we look at the math. Binet’s research says you need tens of millions of exposures to move the needle statistically. So when we think about what a realistic budget commitment looks like and what time horizon to hold that investment accountable to — those are things we really have to get clear on before we launch.
For a lot of brands, starting with a test market or a seasonal window might make sense — just enough to actually measure something, with enough weight, but contained enough to still feel manageable. You’re not having to put millions and millions into television in order to understand whether or not it’s working.
And we build a really clear measurement expectation upfront. Not super precise, but — on what time horizon should we be looking for what signals? A scorecard. We say, “All measurement models are wrong. Some are very useful.” That’s where that comes from.
What incrementality data are we going to be looking at? When is it going to come back? How are we going to interpret it? Because the worst outcome is pulling TV after eight weeks — maybe because the ROAS looks different than what they see in paid search or paid social — before those compound effects of TV have had a chance to show up.
Elena: Yeah, really a worst case scenario — when your brand is ready to invest in something like TV, you’re ready to add brand building, and then you don’t set it up right from the start and it goes kaput. Not a fun feeling. To wrap us up here — this was a hard question. I thought, I don’t know why, but it was hard for me.
What is a brand you feel like found you, even though you were never their target audience? And I say this was hard for me because I feel like most of the brands I use — like they feel like mine. It’s like I feel like I was their target. I’m curious what you guys thought of.
Angela: Okay, this was hard for me too, so that makes me feel better that you said that. I came up with Liquid I.V. Because I would imagine their target audience is like hungover 20-year-olds and endurance athletes — like Elena and Rob a little bit too. I’m neither one of these people, but the brand was everywhere.
I can’t point back to actually where I learned about it. But I now travel with Liquid I.V. like it’s prescribed to me, so.
Rob: Delicious.
Elena: It is delicious. You should try LMNT, Ange.
Angela: I’ve heard of LMNT, but I have not tried it yet.
Elena: I have one right here. Oh my gosh.
Rob: Classic runner. You just have an LMNT right next to you. That’s so funny.
Angela: Oh, I’ve got one that’s pretty near and dear to my heart right now. You know, my wife and I are empty nesters — we have two kids in college — so we’re home alone. We have been adamant our entire lives that we would never own a van. The van is depressing and sad and makes you want to cry.
Rob: They have to drive around in a van. And yet — after the fact, our kids moved out — we bought a van! We bought a VW Buzz, and it’s hilarious because they definitely were not targeting two empty nesters when they came out with that product. But you know what — the brand is joyful, it’s retro.
It makes people happy when they’re driving it down the road. It’s electric, which appeals to my nerdiness. So yeah, I’m definitely not the target audience for that vehicle, but we love it.
Elena: I think that now, seeing the van, Rob — and knowing you — it seems like it was meant for you.
Angela: It really is. I agree. I thought that too. Right when he said it, I was like, it feels perfect for Rob.
Rob: I just don’t think the van category was going after empty nesters, but they got me.
Angela: Dog parents maybe?
Rob: That’s true. We do have two Goldendoodles and a little Morkie.
Elena: So this one was tough for me. And I know I’ve mentioned this brand recently on the podcast, but mine is Sleep Number. Because if you look up Sleep Number and kind of their target audience and their advertising, they say that they target 35- to 54-year-old homeowners.
And I actually bought a Sleep Number when I was right out of college, living in an apartment. And I honestly don’t know why. I was trying to think of like, why did I do that? I think my parents might have had one, but honestly, I remember their advertising more than anything — the advertising they’ve done at the NFL in particular. Like I still see the Sleep Number spot in my head. And I honestly think that they just hit me when I was out of market, and even though I wouldn’t be their exact target audience at that age, that was the mattress brand that came to mind.
There you go.
Rob: Yeah.
Angela: Power of the anti-target.
Elena: Alright, well, I think that’ll wrap us up today.