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Episode 171
How to Build a Media Mix That Actually Works
Concern over short-termism has more than doubled in three years, from 25% of marketers calling it the biggest industry issue in 2022 to 55% in 2025. And yet, budget allocation has barely moved.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob dig into why the say-do gap persists in media planning and what it looks like to build a mix based on marketing effectiveness principles instead. They walk through the 60-40 rule and how to make it your own, what warning signs signal a brand is over-indexed on performance, and why channels like TV and audio earn a closer look when competitors are busy piling into the same digital placements.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] The say-do gap and why marketers keep doing what they know doesn't work
• [05:22] What rebalancing toward brand building looks like in practice
• [07:27] Warning signs your brand is over-indexed on performance
• [10:00] How to use reach to grow beyond your existing customers
• [12:28] Using share of voice to find channel opportunities your competitors have missed
• [14:08] Linear vs. CTV: how to use each as a distinct strategic tool
• [17:46] Building a measurement approach that captures both short and long-term impact
Resources:
2026 WARC Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Transcript
Rob: We talk a lot about distinctive assets. We don't always have that same lens on our media channels. We just flock to where all our competitors are. But there's a real opportunity to zig when everyone else is zagging. And that's where you find things like audio and TV can really shine.
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. Hello. Hello. We're 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're going to talk about how to build a media mix using marketing effectiveness principles. And we're going to start with this: if marketers largely know what works, why do so few of them actually do it? So I'm going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. Today's piece is from WARC.
It's written by David Tiltman, who is their chief content officer. It's titled "What's Stopping CMOs from Investing in Brand Building?" And it builds on WARC's earlier Multiplier Effect report, which proves that stronger brand equity acts as a multiplier, driving greater impact and efficiency for your performance advertising. It's the most successful report that WARC has ever launched. And yet, Tiltman opens with this follow-up by noting that marketers keep asking the same questions — things like: how do I prove brand investment has financial value?
How do I get internal alignment? What does good actually look like? And his argument is that the problem really isn't theory anymore. There's now this consensus that advertising investment most probably pays back. The problem is the say-do gap, which we've talked about on the podcast before — the distance between knowing the right thing and then actually doing it. So WARC's own Voice of the Marketer survey found that concern over short-termism has risen from 25% of marketers calling it the biggest industry issue in 2022 to 55% in 2025. So that has more than doubled in three years.
And yet, budget allocation has barely moved as a result. So David Tiltman, he identifies these different structural, procedural, and cultural blockers that prevent CMOs from changing course — things like misalignment with the C-suite, measurement systems that are out of whack, and fragmented media are just a couple of those challenges.
So I know we've talked about this gap before. We're going to use it today as a jumping-off point again, because it's worth discussing — the media mix is really where this gap becomes a reality between what people say and what they actually do. But first, the article makes the point that this isn't a knowledge problem. Marketers know what works. Why do we think this say-do gap is still so persistent?
Angela: I think you can pick your poison because there's a lot of reasons, but probably the easy answer is just incentives and the culture that you exist in internally at the brand. The harder answer is probably the measurement systems that punish that right behavior. So when a CFO is asking what did that campaign do?
The only thing most brands can answer confidently with is something tied back to last-click attribution, ROAS on something like paid search, a cost per lead. And those numbers exist because the tools were built to produce them. Brand building produces different signals in longer time frames — harder to pinpoint on a dashboard. And very often I think they're also built with models that are a little harder to trust.
It does require some belief that you're doing the right thing. So what ends up happening is the CMO maybe knows the 60/40 principle. She's read Binet and Field and believes in it. But then when you walk into a budget review where every performance channel has a clean ROI number and brand has a deck with a regression model that nobody fully trusts, it's easier to cut brand — just because the measurement infrastructure made one choice more defensible, maybe, than the other, and the other felt more like faith.
So it's kind of a structural trap that CMOs deal with. Until brands fix what they're measuring and have that belief underneath the numbers, they'll keep making decisions that look rational on paper but kind of work against them at the portfolio level.
Rob: I have never been a CMO. My history has been in creative, and one of the best parts of being a creative is you get to pop off and not be accountable for things.
And this topic in particular, I've popped off on in the past and said, it's not a knowledge problem, it's a courage problem — says the creative guy who never had to stand in front of a board and present why the numbers don't look great. So I'm just going to add a different, slight vantage point to this, which is compassion — it's hard, right?
It's hard to have that trust, that faith that you're talking about, Angela. That's a hard journey. I mean, it's why CMOs earned the title that they have, but it's hard, you know, trying to convince shareholders to wait — that it's going to get better, that we need to invest in things that we can't see immediate performance from. It's a tough journey.
So I just wanted to throw that out there, since I've never had to actually do that journey, that I have compassion for it. It must especially be hard and frustrating when you're at a brand that doesn't have those traditional beliefs and maybe isn't doing great. That feels like the worst situation for a marketer to try to come in and shift belief systems.
Because if I'm going to keep my job, I've got to behave in a certain way.
Elena: So we've named the problem. If we accept this gap exists, let's talk about what a media mix could look like if we resist the pull towards performance and build it on effectiveness principles instead. You mentioned Binet and Field's 60/40 rule — roughly 60% of your budget should go towards long-term brand building, 40% towards short-term activation. Talked about that a lot on the podcast before. I'm curious — for a brand that has been weighted more heavily towards performance, which is most brands we talk to, I feel like most are unbalanced in that way — what does rebalancing actually look like in practice, like in terms of real channel decisions they can make? And I think, like we've said before, 60/40 is a principle, not a hard 60% and 40%.
Angela: Binet and Field will tell you the same thing. So I think it's trying to understand what is your 60/40. It might be 70/30. It might actually be 80/20. It could be something more like 50/50. But trying to get a better understanding of your in-market versus out-of-market consumers, I think, is the first place to start. And then thinking about this as a multi-year shift — you know, for a brand that's been maybe 80% performance for three years, a sudden reallocation is going to cause some major internal whiplash, and it might actually hurt your short-term numbers before those brand effects can compound and start working in your favor.
In terms of channel decisions, carving out budgets specifically for channels like reach-oriented television, broad-reach linear or streaming, that puts you in front of people who are out of market today, running creative with a strong CTA, but with a measurement stack and measurement plan that helps us better understand across the full funnel — top-of-funnel brand awareness, preference, intent, all the way down to bottom-of-funnel conversion metrics — gives you a better map to operate off of. And it doesn't feel so jarring internally to be making those budget shifts and tracking new metrics along the way that help us understand that we're on the right path.
Elena: Yes, we're kind of making it more gradual instead of feeling like they're falling off a cliff. So, Rob, if I come into a brand and they are spending most of their budget on performance — they're really over-indexed on sales activation — what do you think would be some warning signs that would exist if that was happening?
Rob: Praising success would be an opportunity to pause. And what does that mean? If you are doing an activation and you're like, holy smokes, this is going off the charts, we could build our business on this activation, it's doing so well — that's the time to pause and go: are we rotting the brand while we're riding the success? The best story I can think of in this — it's a little bit of a parallel story, but — is Red Lobster, okay? So Red Lobster had an all-you-can-eat shrimp special. I remember hearing about it — it went freaking bananas.
I mean, come on, you put me in front of an all-you-can-eat — I'm going to beat the house. I'm going to walk out of there having made money, right? So they built their empire, as of recently, on that notion. And then they filed for bankruptcy. New CEO comes in, right, and he's speaking our language. He's like, I'm investing in the brand, I'm going to right this ship, we're going to focus in on what matters. But here's why it's a cautionary tale, right? Guess what just made the headlines — he's bringing back the all-you-can-eat shrimp. I swear to God, you can't make it up. So you just look at the paradox we live in — you're not seeing the signals right away, and you just retreat back to your instincts.
It's a limited-time offer, and they're increasing the cost of it. So maybe this time they'll see it as the way it should have been — not an everlasting gobstopper of an offer, but instead something that can trigger response. But I guess my point is: be careful, because we're all looking for signals, and sometimes those signals can get us so excited. Just make sure you're not rotting your brand quietly while you're celebrating at the same time.
Elena: Yeah, that's a really great point — both of your points. First, about if you're launching a new channel and the results seem too good to be true, they probably actually are too good to be true. And just like the pull of performance and those sales activations, it's just so hard to resist. And you mentioned this earlier, but one founding principle of marketing effectiveness is that brands grow by reaching their light buyers and their non-buyers.
And you really have to take time to understand: who are my light buyers, who's not buying, who's in market, who's out of market — not just deepening relationships with existing customers. So that's a lot of work — Byron Sharp. But most of these performance-heavy media mixes are doing the opposite. They're optimizing towards who's most likely to buy right now, which are usually people who are already close to buying your product or service.
So I'm curious — if we understand this principle and want to apply it, how would this translate into picking my marketing channels? Like, if reach is my goal, what does that mean for where I should think about putting my budget when I'm planning my media mix?
Angela: It's hard, because again, when we talk about incentives and bias internally, usually there's a data set that's pointing us in that direction. And so these activation-heavy mixes optimize towards people that are either close to buying or who would have bought anyway. And so that's where I think the compassion that Rob has for this group is totally fair. When you think about channel, think about the measurement stack, regardless of the channel. Do we have a view of incrementality?
Because if we don't, this is going to be really hard when we get into channels that both convert existing demand and need to drive new demand. So whether that's search, whether that's television, whether it's radio, incrementality is super important. And then it does require you to work against some internal pull that you probably have — meaning, reach media gets you in front of people who aren't raising their hands.
Television does that. It also puts you in front of people who are raising their hands. But broad-reach audio, national digital, true prospecting built well outside a CRM can do that. And so the question I'd push brands to ask is: what percentage of my media budget is actually reaching people where I have zero data of prior interaction with my brand? Start small, because that's hard, right? You've got a lot of data that supports retargeting and converting these people. Okay, fine. But start to carve away into channels where you can prove that you've got incremental reach, and you can prove that the people you are converting with that incremental reach wouldn't have already been there anyway.
Elena: So speaking of reach, one principle I was trying to think about — like, what are all the marketing effectiveness principles that, if you're really invested in them, would go into your planning when thinking about your media mix? And one of them was the share of voice principle, as popularized by Binet and Field. It basically means if your share of voice exceeds your share of market, you tend to grow. If it's below, you tend to not grow. And I think it's fun to think about how that should come into planning decisions — when you're looking at what your competition is spending, where they're spending, how can you sort of out-shout them? Rob, how do you think that share of voice principle, or just competitive comparison in general — how much should it be shaping what channels we choose to advertise on?
Rob: We talk a lot about distinctive assets, right? Like, how do we differentiate ourselves in our color choices and our story and our jingles? We don't always have that same lens on our media channels. We almost do the opposite — we just flock to where all our competitors are because we feel like that's the way we're going to win.
But there's a real opportunity to, again, zig when everyone else is zagging, and look at channels where your competition isn't necessarily saturating and shouting. It's easier to win that share of voice and share of the market when you're the loudest, and perhaps in a channel where your customers still are but your competition isn't. And that's where you find things like audio and TV and big mental availability channels can really shine.
Elena: Yeah, I think that part's key, because I know one thing people have said about this share of voice principle is, if you're just comparing flat media spend to your competitor, it might not be helpful — because if your competitor has 90% of their spend on digital, their share of voice might actually not be as high as you'd think for their spend.
So yeah, you're right — look at what channels can increase share of voice and how do I invest there? I think that's why the principle, they say, was more applicable back when there were more traditional marketing channel investments. But I still think there's a way to do that analysis and use it to plan in some way, or at least what you're saying — can I use it to thread the needle and see where are my competitors light in their investment?
While speaking of share of voice and channels that are great at driving it — Binet and Field put out this medium focus study, and they found that TV-only campaigns drove a 33% increase in very large business effects. Online video drove 25%, and when they did both together, that jumped to 54%. So as a TV agency, I thought we should talk about this, because TV is becoming increasingly more common to have in your marketing mix with the rise of connected TV.
For marketers planning out their media mix, how do you think they should think about TV's role in that plan?
Angela: Yeah, a lot of opportunity. Super powerful channel. TV builds those memory structures that make a brand easy to recall when someone enters that buying situation months or even years later. But to your point, TV means a lot of things today.
It's fractured in comparison to what it used to be. And so when we think about linear versus CTV, we often say to brands — consumers just see a screen on the wall, they don't really differentiate between one or the other. They don't go, what am I watching right now? Am I on my Mediacom subscription or is this CTV?
And yet from a marketer's perspective, they are different instruments that need to be thought of differently. Linear delivers something that CTV can't match, which is massive simultaneous reach. And more and more it's becoming more efficient in comparison to CTV. You're buying an audience watching the same thing at the same time with limited ability to skip those commercials, right?
That shared attention builds mental availability at scale, and that's why linear still anchors the brand-building case. CTV gives you that living room screen — still emotional storytelling, but with a targeting layer on top. I think it's the most defensible use of that precision. We believe geographic, zip-code-level targeting is real. It works. It gives brands something linear genuinely just can't do at that granularity, especially if you have a retail footprint, specific trade areas, or markets where you are under-indexed for whatever reason.
ZIP-level CTV is a legitimate tool, but I think on the CTV side related to targeting, where the story gets a little shaky — or where you just need to be aware — is the third-party audience segmentation, right? Match rates are lower, I think, than vendors represent. So that's the first watch-out. The data is often stale or modeled, and you're paying a meaningful CPM premium for accuracy that maybe just doesn't hold up.
And so pressure-testing the audience targeting claims is really important. I think a lot of times people think, well, yes, CTV is more expensive, but I'm only paying for the impressions that matter in comparison to linear, and we need to think about the third-party accuracy of that data. We also need to think about the fact that it is a screen on the wall — we don't really know who's in the room. So those are just important considerations to think about as you're trying to decide what medium makes sense between those two channels.
Elena: Yeah, definitely not as simple as just turn on CTV and it works. That would be another one of those channels where Rob is saying, if right away your results look like the best thing you've ever seen in your life, you maybe want to double-click into that and take a look.
And you've mentioned quite a bit about measurement, because that's just sort of a theme throughout this whole conversation. But WARC, in the article, they do identify that as one of the main structural blockers to investing in brand, because performance channels are easier to measure, which makes them easier to defend. But if your measurement system is only capturing the short-term, lower-funnel activity, you're going to under-invest in what's building the long-term demand.
So, what do you think a measurement approach would look like for a brand that's committed to investing in a media mix that values both brand and performance — not just what's easiest to track?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I'd say is if we're going to be serious about measuring a full mix, we have to abandon the idea that a single model can tell us the truth.
Every methodology has a blind spot. I think the discipline is knowing what each one sees, what each one misses, and trying to triangulate all of those viewpoints to get a better understanding of what's actually working. So when we think about measurement of something like television, marketing mix modeling is your long-run revenue lens. I think when done well, it runs continuously.
It's maybe refitted quarterly. It's built to better understand base-level sales from incremental lift. MMM is where brand investment typically shows up better. Brand effects are kind of invisible in that short-term attribution — they show up in a rising baseline over time, and most brands mistake those just as baseline. It's harder to see because it's a slow build.
So run it as an operating infrastructure and use it to set investment levels across your mix of media. Then look at things like geo testing. It's a great way for causal proof when you want to know whether a channel is actually driving business outcomes — incremental customers, incremental revenue. A well-designed geo test, I think, will give you the cleanest answer.
And it's more nimble than something like MMM might tell you — that correlation at scale. But geo tests give you that causation in a more controlled environment. And I think the two together are pretty defensible, much more defensible than either one alone. I wouldn't stop there, though. Looking at things like time series micro-analysis does give you responsiveness at a more granular level, week over week, market by market. You can catch signal in between bigger tests. When spend goes up in a market and something moves downstream, that's a data point. It might not mean exactly what the model is saying, but it gives you a relative view of what might be happening in your data set.
Looking at things like ACR data — automatic content recognition. It's powerful for television. It helps you understand actual exposure at the household level, which means you can connect TV impressions to that downstream behavior.
Again, we still need a view of incrementality. ACR data can get quite aggressive in terms of taking credit. And then just continuing things like brand tracking, just to better understand what that mental availability looks like. This is a layer that connects everything to more long-term growth — how easily your brand comes to mind in a buying situation. That's the mechanism through which brand advertising is compounding over time.
Measure it through unaided awareness. Look at category entry point associations, brand salience, and purchase decisions, and just track it continuously and benchmark it against your competitors. And of course, just treat that movement in those numbers as a leading indicator of future revenue right there.
Rob: All right, people should just put that into Claude and say, give me a six-month plan to apply all of that.
I like it. You mentioned — I feel like there's this movement towards MMM, which is great, but there's also — I've seen people in my comments recently being like, just use MMM and you won't have any of these problems. It's like, okay, I like it too, but I don't know if that's entirely accurate. Like, you can just go to it to get all your answers.
Elena: Unfortunately, if it was that simple, that'd be pretty great, but I don't think it is. All right, well, to wrap us up — what is something in your own life where you know exactly what you should be doing, you just continue to not do it? And we can start with you.
Angela: I am really bad at sitting still. So no phone, no agenda, no productivity attached to it. And I think there's quite a bit of evidence that your decision quality can improve, it can reduce anxiety, maybe makes me a better leader. And I sort of believe in all of that. But I feel structurally terrible at doing nothing, which means I consistently skip the thing that would probably make everything else work better.
Rob: I think that's a BS answer.
That's one of those interview questions where they're like, what's your challenge? I'm too organized, you know, sitting still just — oh, I just get too much stuff done. That is a real challenge for people, Rob, though. That is the thing.
Angela: All right, all right, all right. Actually, it shouldn't be sitting still — it should be like letting my mind be still.
Rob: Okay. There you go. That's hard. Like, no screens, just sitting with your own thoughts. I find that very hard.
Elena: Yes, right. Well, I had too many to choose from, and so I'm just going to go with a simple one, which is eating before bedtime. I just love to do that. I love to just, you know, go after the Cheerios and goat milk while I'm watching Netflix.
Rob: You're drinking goat milk?
Elena: Oh, absolutely.
Rob: Okay. Yes, for sure, for sure. Where do you get your goat milk from?
Elena: From the goat. It's at just normal grocery stores. Yes. It's delicious. It's delicious.
Rob: How about you, Angela?
Angela: From being a homeowner for a couple of years, I know I should do something with, like, the gardens. The person who lived here before did a lovely job. I've got some hostas. My mom's a great gardener. I know I should just get, like, a flower box or do something, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. I just hate gardening. I just don't know why — I just don't want anything to do with it.
And it would probably look so much better. But every year I'm like, I'm going to do something with it. It just never happens.
Rob: Don't you just — we all have that. You know, the perennials — you're just like, oh, thank you for doing that.
Angela: Yeah. At least it doesn't look that bad. That's my ideal sort of gardening — stuff that just comes back.
Rob: You're off the hook. No problem. Absolutely. Like good branding. That should be like a gardening metaphor. Yeah, see what I did? I just tried to make a metaphor that really didn't work, but it kind of sounds like it should have worked, but it didn't. I just thought of a business idea, which is the branding — you should be like a gardener.
That's like, hire me once and you'll never see me again. Like, I will plant things and they'll just come back. You're like, hire me and fire me gardening services. Oh, I love that. That's a great idea. I could use that. But I could be a marketer.
Elena: Yeah. All right.
Rob: Good at it. Perfect.
Elena: That's it for this episode of The Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.
Episode 171
How to Build a Media Mix That Actually Works
Concern over short-termism has more than doubled in three years, from 25% of marketers calling it the biggest industry issue in 2022 to 55% in 2025. And yet, budget allocation has barely moved.
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob dig into why the say-do gap persists in media planning and what it looks like to build a mix based on marketing effectiveness principles instead. They walk through the 60-40 rule and how to make it your own, what warning signs signal a brand is over-indexed on performance, and why channels like TV and audio earn a closer look when competitors are busy piling into the same digital placements.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] The say-do gap and why marketers keep doing what they know doesn't work
• [05:22] What rebalancing toward brand building looks like in practice
• [07:27] Warning signs your brand is over-indexed on performance
• [10:00] How to use reach to grow beyond your existing customers
• [12:28] Using share of voice to find channel opportunities your competitors have missed
• [14:08] Linear vs. CTV: how to use each as a distinct strategic tool
• [17:46] Building a measurement approach that captures both short and long-term impact
Resources:
2026 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
Rob: We talk a lot about distinctive assets. We don't always have that same lens on our media channels. We just flock to where all our competitors are. But there's a real opportunity to zig when everyone else is zagging. And that's where you find things like audio and TV can really shine.
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. Hello. Hello. We're 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're going to talk about how to build a media mix using marketing effectiveness principles. And we're going to start with this: if marketers largely know what works, why do so few of them actually do it? So I'm going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. Today's piece is from WARC.
It's written by David Tiltman, who is their chief content officer. It's titled "What's Stopping CMOs from Investing in Brand Building?" And it builds on WARC's earlier Multiplier Effect report, which proves that stronger brand equity acts as a multiplier, driving greater impact and efficiency for your performance advertising. It's the most successful report that WARC has ever launched. And yet, Tiltman opens with this follow-up by noting that marketers keep asking the same questions — things like: how do I prove brand investment has financial value?
How do I get internal alignment? What does good actually look like? And his argument is that the problem really isn't theory anymore. There's now this consensus that advertising investment most probably pays back. The problem is the say-do gap, which we've talked about on the podcast before — the distance between knowing the right thing and then actually doing it. So WARC's own Voice of the Marketer survey found that concern over short-termism has risen from 25% of marketers calling it the biggest industry issue in 2022 to 55% in 2025. So that has more than doubled in three years.
And yet, budget allocation has barely moved as a result. So David Tiltman, he identifies these different structural, procedural, and cultural blockers that prevent CMOs from changing course — things like misalignment with the C-suite, measurement systems that are out of whack, and fragmented media are just a couple of those challenges.
So I know we've talked about this gap before. We're going to use it today as a jumping-off point again, because it's worth discussing — the media mix is really where this gap becomes a reality between what people say and what they actually do. But first, the article makes the point that this isn't a knowledge problem. Marketers know what works. Why do we think this say-do gap is still so persistent?
Angela: I think you can pick your poison because there's a lot of reasons, but probably the easy answer is just incentives and the culture that you exist in internally at the brand. The harder answer is probably the measurement systems that punish that right behavior. So when a CFO is asking what did that campaign do?
The only thing most brands can answer confidently with is something tied back to last-click attribution, ROAS on something like paid search, a cost per lead. And those numbers exist because the tools were built to produce them. Brand building produces different signals in longer time frames — harder to pinpoint on a dashboard. And very often I think they're also built with models that are a little harder to trust.
It does require some belief that you're doing the right thing. So what ends up happening is the CMO maybe knows the 60/40 principle. She's read Binet and Field and believes in it. But then when you walk into a budget review where every performance channel has a clean ROI number and brand has a deck with a regression model that nobody fully trusts, it's easier to cut brand — just because the measurement infrastructure made one choice more defensible, maybe, than the other, and the other felt more like faith.
So it's kind of a structural trap that CMOs deal with. Until brands fix what they're measuring and have that belief underneath the numbers, they'll keep making decisions that look rational on paper but kind of work against them at the portfolio level.
Rob: I have never been a CMO. My history has been in creative, and one of the best parts of being a creative is you get to pop off and not be accountable for things.
And this topic in particular, I've popped off on in the past and said, it's not a knowledge problem, it's a courage problem — says the creative guy who never had to stand in front of a board and present why the numbers don't look great. So I'm just going to add a different, slight vantage point to this, which is compassion — it's hard, right?
It's hard to have that trust, that faith that you're talking about, Angela. That's a hard journey. I mean, it's why CMOs earned the title that they have, but it's hard, you know, trying to convince shareholders to wait — that it's going to get better, that we need to invest in things that we can't see immediate performance from. It's a tough journey.
So I just wanted to throw that out there, since I've never had to actually do that journey, that I have compassion for it. It must especially be hard and frustrating when you're at a brand that doesn't have those traditional beliefs and maybe isn't doing great. That feels like the worst situation for a marketer to try to come in and shift belief systems.
Because if I'm going to keep my job, I've got to behave in a certain way.
Elena: So we've named the problem. If we accept this gap exists, let's talk about what a media mix could look like if we resist the pull towards performance and build it on effectiveness principles instead. You mentioned Binet and Field's 60/40 rule — roughly 60% of your budget should go towards long-term brand building, 40% towards short-term activation. Talked about that a lot on the podcast before. I'm curious — for a brand that has been weighted more heavily towards performance, which is most brands we talk to, I feel like most are unbalanced in that way — what does rebalancing actually look like in practice, like in terms of real channel decisions they can make? And I think, like we've said before, 60/40 is a principle, not a hard 60% and 40%.
Angela: Binet and Field will tell you the same thing. So I think it's trying to understand what is your 60/40. It might be 70/30. It might actually be 80/20. It could be something more like 50/50. But trying to get a better understanding of your in-market versus out-of-market consumers, I think, is the first place to start. And then thinking about this as a multi-year shift — you know, for a brand that's been maybe 80% performance for three years, a sudden reallocation is going to cause some major internal whiplash, and it might actually hurt your short-term numbers before those brand effects can compound and start working in your favor.
In terms of channel decisions, carving out budgets specifically for channels like reach-oriented television, broad-reach linear or streaming, that puts you in front of people who are out of market today, running creative with a strong CTA, but with a measurement stack and measurement plan that helps us better understand across the full funnel — top-of-funnel brand awareness, preference, intent, all the way down to bottom-of-funnel conversion metrics — gives you a better map to operate off of. And it doesn't feel so jarring internally to be making those budget shifts and tracking new metrics along the way that help us understand that we're on the right path.
Elena: Yes, we're kind of making it more gradual instead of feeling like they're falling off a cliff. So, Rob, if I come into a brand and they are spending most of their budget on performance — they're really over-indexed on sales activation — what do you think would be some warning signs that would exist if that was happening?
Rob: Praising success would be an opportunity to pause. And what does that mean? If you are doing an activation and you're like, holy smokes, this is going off the charts, we could build our business on this activation, it's doing so well — that's the time to pause and go: are we rotting the brand while we're riding the success? The best story I can think of in this — it's a little bit of a parallel story, but — is Red Lobster, okay? So Red Lobster had an all-you-can-eat shrimp special. I remember hearing about it — it went freaking bananas.
I mean, come on, you put me in front of an all-you-can-eat — I'm going to beat the house. I'm going to walk out of there having made money, right? So they built their empire, as of recently, on that notion. And then they filed for bankruptcy. New CEO comes in, right, and he's speaking our language. He's like, I'm investing in the brand, I'm going to right this ship, we're going to focus in on what matters. But here's why it's a cautionary tale, right? Guess what just made the headlines — he's bringing back the all-you-can-eat shrimp. I swear to God, you can't make it up. So you just look at the paradox we live in — you're not seeing the signals right away, and you just retreat back to your instincts.
It's a limited-time offer, and they're increasing the cost of it. So maybe this time they'll see it as the way it should have been — not an everlasting gobstopper of an offer, but instead something that can trigger response. But I guess my point is: be careful, because we're all looking for signals, and sometimes those signals can get us so excited. Just make sure you're not rotting your brand quietly while you're celebrating at the same time.
Elena: Yeah, that's a really great point — both of your points. First, about if you're launching a new channel and the results seem too good to be true, they probably actually are too good to be true. And just like the pull of performance and those sales activations, it's just so hard to resist. And you mentioned this earlier, but one founding principle of marketing effectiveness is that brands grow by reaching their light buyers and their non-buyers.
And you really have to take time to understand: who are my light buyers, who's not buying, who's in market, who's out of market — not just deepening relationships with existing customers. So that's a lot of work — Byron Sharp. But most of these performance-heavy media mixes are doing the opposite. They're optimizing towards who's most likely to buy right now, which are usually people who are already close to buying your product or service.
So I'm curious — if we understand this principle and want to apply it, how would this translate into picking my marketing channels? Like, if reach is my goal, what does that mean for where I should think about putting my budget when I'm planning my media mix?
Angela: It's hard, because again, when we talk about incentives and bias internally, usually there's a data set that's pointing us in that direction. And so these activation-heavy mixes optimize towards people that are either close to buying or who would have bought anyway. And so that's where I think the compassion that Rob has for this group is totally fair. When you think about channel, think about the measurement stack, regardless of the channel. Do we have a view of incrementality?
Because if we don't, this is going to be really hard when we get into channels that both convert existing demand and need to drive new demand. So whether that's search, whether that's television, whether it's radio, incrementality is super important. And then it does require you to work against some internal pull that you probably have — meaning, reach media gets you in front of people who aren't raising their hands.
Television does that. It also puts you in front of people who are raising their hands. But broad-reach audio, national digital, true prospecting built well outside a CRM can do that. And so the question I'd push brands to ask is: what percentage of my media budget is actually reaching people where I have zero data of prior interaction with my brand? Start small, because that's hard, right? You've got a lot of data that supports retargeting and converting these people. Okay, fine. But start to carve away into channels where you can prove that you've got incremental reach, and you can prove that the people you are converting with that incremental reach wouldn't have already been there anyway.
Elena: So speaking of reach, one principle I was trying to think about — like, what are all the marketing effectiveness principles that, if you're really invested in them, would go into your planning when thinking about your media mix? And one of them was the share of voice principle, as popularized by Binet and Field. It basically means if your share of voice exceeds your share of market, you tend to grow. If it's below, you tend to not grow. And I think it's fun to think about how that should come into planning decisions — when you're looking at what your competition is spending, where they're spending, how can you sort of out-shout them? Rob, how do you think that share of voice principle, or just competitive comparison in general — how much should it be shaping what channels we choose to advertise on?
Rob: We talk a lot about distinctive assets, right? Like, how do we differentiate ourselves in our color choices and our story and our jingles? We don't always have that same lens on our media channels. We almost do the opposite — we just flock to where all our competitors are because we feel like that's the way we're going to win.
But there's a real opportunity to, again, zig when everyone else is zagging, and look at channels where your competition isn't necessarily saturating and shouting. It's easier to win that share of voice and share of the market when you're the loudest, and perhaps in a channel where your customers still are but your competition isn't. And that's where you find things like audio and TV and big mental availability channels can really shine.
Elena: Yeah, I think that part's key, because I know one thing people have said about this share of voice principle is, if you're just comparing flat media spend to your competitor, it might not be helpful — because if your competitor has 90% of their spend on digital, their share of voice might actually not be as high as you'd think for their spend.
So yeah, you're right — look at what channels can increase share of voice and how do I invest there? I think that's why the principle, they say, was more applicable back when there were more traditional marketing channel investments. But I still think there's a way to do that analysis and use it to plan in some way, or at least what you're saying — can I use it to thread the needle and see where are my competitors light in their investment?
While speaking of share of voice and channels that are great at driving it — Binet and Field put out this medium focus study, and they found that TV-only campaigns drove a 33% increase in very large business effects. Online video drove 25%, and when they did both together, that jumped to 54%. So as a TV agency, I thought we should talk about this, because TV is becoming increasingly more common to have in your marketing mix with the rise of connected TV.
For marketers planning out their media mix, how do you think they should think about TV's role in that plan?
Angela: Yeah, a lot of opportunity. Super powerful channel. TV builds those memory structures that make a brand easy to recall when someone enters that buying situation months or even years later. But to your point, TV means a lot of things today.
It's fractured in comparison to what it used to be. And so when we think about linear versus CTV, we often say to brands — consumers just see a screen on the wall, they don't really differentiate between one or the other. They don't go, what am I watching right now? Am I on my Mediacom subscription or is this CTV?
And yet from a marketer's perspective, they are different instruments that need to be thought of differently. Linear delivers something that CTV can't match, which is massive simultaneous reach. And more and more it's becoming more efficient in comparison to CTV. You're buying an audience watching the same thing at the same time with limited ability to skip those commercials, right?
That shared attention builds mental availability at scale, and that's why linear still anchors the brand-building case. CTV gives you that living room screen — still emotional storytelling, but with a targeting layer on top. I think it's the most defensible use of that precision. We believe geographic, zip-code-level targeting is real. It works. It gives brands something linear genuinely just can't do at that granularity, especially if you have a retail footprint, specific trade areas, or markets where you are under-indexed for whatever reason.
ZIP-level CTV is a legitimate tool, but I think on the CTV side related to targeting, where the story gets a little shaky — or where you just need to be aware — is the third-party audience segmentation, right? Match rates are lower, I think, than vendors represent. So that's the first watch-out. The data is often stale or modeled, and you're paying a meaningful CPM premium for accuracy that maybe just doesn't hold up.
And so pressure-testing the audience targeting claims is really important. I think a lot of times people think, well, yes, CTV is more expensive, but I'm only paying for the impressions that matter in comparison to linear, and we need to think about the third-party accuracy of that data. We also need to think about the fact that it is a screen on the wall — we don't really know who's in the room. So those are just important considerations to think about as you're trying to decide what medium makes sense between those two channels.
Elena: Yeah, definitely not as simple as just turn on CTV and it works. That would be another one of those channels where Rob is saying, if right away your results look like the best thing you've ever seen in your life, you maybe want to double-click into that and take a look.
And you've mentioned quite a bit about measurement, because that's just sort of a theme throughout this whole conversation. But WARC, in the article, they do identify that as one of the main structural blockers to investing in brand, because performance channels are easier to measure, which makes them easier to defend. But if your measurement system is only capturing the short-term, lower-funnel activity, you're going to under-invest in what's building the long-term demand.
So, what do you think a measurement approach would look like for a brand that's committed to investing in a media mix that values both brand and performance — not just what's easiest to track?
Angela: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I'd say is if we're going to be serious about measuring a full mix, we have to abandon the idea that a single model can tell us the truth.
Every methodology has a blind spot. I think the discipline is knowing what each one sees, what each one misses, and trying to triangulate all of those viewpoints to get a better understanding of what's actually working. So when we think about measurement of something like television, marketing mix modeling is your long-run revenue lens. I think when done well, it runs continuously.
It's maybe refitted quarterly. It's built to better understand base-level sales from incremental lift. MMM is where brand investment typically shows up better. Brand effects are kind of invisible in that short-term attribution — they show up in a rising baseline over time, and most brands mistake those just as baseline. It's harder to see because it's a slow build.
So run it as an operating infrastructure and use it to set investment levels across your mix of media. Then look at things like geo testing. It's a great way for causal proof when you want to know whether a channel is actually driving business outcomes — incremental customers, incremental revenue. A well-designed geo test, I think, will give you the cleanest answer.
And it's more nimble than something like MMM might tell you — that correlation at scale. But geo tests give you that causation in a more controlled environment. And I think the two together are pretty defensible, much more defensible than either one alone. I wouldn't stop there, though. Looking at things like time series micro-analysis does give you responsiveness at a more granular level, week over week, market by market. You can catch signal in between bigger tests. When spend goes up in a market and something moves downstream, that's a data point. It might not mean exactly what the model is saying, but it gives you a relative view of what might be happening in your data set.
Looking at things like ACR data — automatic content recognition. It's powerful for television. It helps you understand actual exposure at the household level, which means you can connect TV impressions to that downstream behavior.
Again, we still need a view of incrementality. ACR data can get quite aggressive in terms of taking credit. And then just continuing things like brand tracking, just to better understand what that mental availability looks like. This is a layer that connects everything to more long-term growth — how easily your brand comes to mind in a buying situation. That's the mechanism through which brand advertising is compounding over time.
Measure it through unaided awareness. Look at category entry point associations, brand salience, and purchase decisions, and just track it continuously and benchmark it against your competitors. And of course, just treat that movement in those numbers as a leading indicator of future revenue right there.
Rob: All right, people should just put that into Claude and say, give me a six-month plan to apply all of that.
I like it. You mentioned — I feel like there's this movement towards MMM, which is great, but there's also — I've seen people in my comments recently being like, just use MMM and you won't have any of these problems. It's like, okay, I like it too, but I don't know if that's entirely accurate. Like, you can just go to it to get all your answers.
Elena: Unfortunately, if it was that simple, that'd be pretty great, but I don't think it is. All right, well, to wrap us up — what is something in your own life where you know exactly what you should be doing, you just continue to not do it? And we can start with you.
Angela: I am really bad at sitting still. So no phone, no agenda, no productivity attached to it. And I think there's quite a bit of evidence that your decision quality can improve, it can reduce anxiety, maybe makes me a better leader. And I sort of believe in all of that. But I feel structurally terrible at doing nothing, which means I consistently skip the thing that would probably make everything else work better.
Rob: I think that's a BS answer.
That's one of those interview questions where they're like, what's your challenge? I'm too organized, you know, sitting still just — oh, I just get too much stuff done. That is a real challenge for people, Rob, though. That is the thing.
Angela: All right, all right, all right. Actually, it shouldn't be sitting still — it should be like letting my mind be still.
Rob: Okay. There you go. That's hard. Like, no screens, just sitting with your own thoughts. I find that very hard.
Elena: Yes, right. Well, I had too many to choose from, and so I'm just going to go with a simple one, which is eating before bedtime. I just love to do that. I love to just, you know, go after the Cheerios and goat milk while I'm watching Netflix.
Rob: You're drinking goat milk?
Elena: Oh, absolutely.
Rob: Okay. Yes, for sure, for sure. Where do you get your goat milk from?
Elena: From the goat. It's at just normal grocery stores. Yes. It's delicious. It's delicious.
Rob: How about you, Angela?
Angela: From being a homeowner for a couple of years, I know I should do something with, like, the gardens. The person who lived here before did a lovely job. I've got some hostas. My mom's a great gardener. I know I should just get, like, a flower box or do something, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. I just hate gardening. I just don't know why — I just don't want anything to do with it.
And it would probably look so much better. But every year I'm like, I'm going to do something with it. It just never happens.
Rob: Don't you just — we all have that. You know, the perennials — you're just like, oh, thank you for doing that.
Angela: Yeah. At least it doesn't look that bad. That's my ideal sort of gardening — stuff that just comes back.
Rob: You're off the hook. No problem. Absolutely. Like good branding. That should be like a gardening metaphor. Yeah, see what I did? I just tried to make a metaphor that really didn't work, but it kind of sounds like it should have worked, but it didn't. I just thought of a business idea, which is the branding — you should be like a gardener.
That's like, hire me once and you'll never see me again. Like, I will plant things and they'll just come back. You're like, hire me and fire me gardening services. Oh, I love that. That's a great idea. I could use that. But I could be a marketer.
Elena: Yeah. All right.
Rob: Good at it. Perfect.
Elena: That's it for this episode of The Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.