Let’s start with a truth bomb…CFOs are right to think you’re wasting money on advertising. But like most courtroom dramas, they’ve got the wrong suspect in custody. The problem isn’t brand advertising — it’s where those ads are going.

Working with the MMA, I’ve analyzed more than a dozen studies, millions of IDs, and multiple industries. The consistent finding? Up to 95% of ad impressions lose money — not because of weak creative or bad partner decisions, but because of one fatal flaw…

Broad reach media plans and conquesting lists aim your ad impressions at Dead Zones so you unintentionally engineering in the ad waste that you want to avoid!

What Are the Dead Zones?

Dead Zones are newly identified sub-segments within the Movable Middle™ framework. 

 The Low-End Dead Zone is made up of the sub-segment of consumers with a near-zero chance (0–5%) of choosing your brand within the segment who have less than a 20% chance of buying your brand.  For a brand with a 10% market share, this will be about 2/3rds of the population…a big black hole where lots of impressions go in (if you are using broad reach or targeting for acquisition) but no response comes out. They’re worse than non-buyers. They’re never-buyers. For this sub-segment, you are the gorilla in the basketball video — they don’t even see you so there is no response in terms of sales, new buyers or brand favorability.

The High-End Dead Zone is also problematic. These are the 95–100% loyalists. They already buy you, love you, but there’s little marginal lift left. The only saving grace is that there aren’t many of these consumers so broad reach does not lead to much of your budget being wasted here.  But whatever does go here, is waste.

The low-end dead zone is WHY CFOs think brand campaigns are a waste…because marketers use bifurcated media strategies where they bundle together broad reach with brand advertising assets.  If brand marketing means filling the upper funnel it SEEMS logical to go really broad but science and math (and experiments) prove it is really bad to do this.

What should a marketer do instead?

Creating audiences with smaller dead zones. When you create audiences that are engineered to have larger Movable Middles, you get a smaller dead zone.  It comes from the math of the beta distribution and can be precisely calculated.  For example, if a brand has a national average of 16% Movable Middles and you use lookalike modeling to create an audience with 32% Movable Middles, we can calculate that the dead zone goes from 68% of consumers to 44%.  That means about one quarter of your media is back in play to have the impact you hope for.

Your Playbook

• Ditch broad reach. Broad reach media plans don’t build brands — they bury them…in Dead Zones, where ad impressions are engineered to fail.
• Test high Movable Middle audiences. When you create an audience with higher-than-average concentration of Movable Middles. It should deliver the trifecta…more incremental ROAS, more brand favorability and more buyers.  Test this. There is a lot at stake.
• Be suspicious of machine learning that will tilt lookalikes towards more loyal consumers. Those audiences might produce more conversions but are unlikely to be best for lift in favorability or new buyers.

Final Thought

Want to convince your CFO? Show them that Dead Zone targeting is the real villain. Then reallocate. Run the test. And let the numbers prove what I’ve now seen over and over again in my work with the MMA…advertising in a modern marketing era can and should be a profit generator.