In 1905, a young patent clerk changed the laws of physics forever by proving that time and space were not unrelated as Newton thought…they must be interlinked by a common factor – the velocity of the traveler.

Many marketers still implicitly operate under an analogous, flawed assumption…that changes in brand favorability vs. sales are caused by advertising in unrelated ways.  The manifestation is that Marketers use a bifurcated media strategy: they go broad/top-of-funnel for brand campaigns but turn on optimizers and machine learning for performance campaigns.

However, through extension of Movable Middle™ math, we’ve discovered these two goals are actually strongly connected by their own common factor: the consumer’s probability to choose the brand of interest.

From this insight we now know that audiences with a higher-than-average percentages of Movable Middles are more responsive to advertising, both in terms of brand favorability and sales…beating out broad reach approaches by as much as 2-5X.  

First theory, then evidence. This audience breakthrough was math-led. When two outcomes are functions of the same underlying variable, their rates of change can be related through that shared variable using calculus.

This allowed us to derive the expression for the change in brand favorability with respect to advertising and guess what? The baseline probability of choice is in the first derivative! In English, favorability response to advertising varies as a function of probability of choice — the very same variable that drives sales responsiveness. Working with the formula, we derived that consumers with a low (say less than 5%) probability of choosing your brand have low and unmovable brand favorability…the opposite of the assumption built into broad reach media plans! The data from three MMA brand-as-performance studies clearly exhibit this pattern: there was little to no movement in brand favorability or sales for consumers with a low choice probability; brand lift mostly occurred among Movable Middles.

Why broad reach is so wasteful.  That low end of probability of choice is where most consumers reside for a typical brand. In surveys, most give the typical brand 0 or 1 point out of 10 points on a constant sum question…indicating little likelihood to choose that brand. While orthodoxy says this low end represents opportunity, math (and now evidence) says it represents explicit or implicit rejection, so they do not respond to your advertising. Broad reach goals fail because they demand they you serve advertising to this unproductive rejector segment. 

A surprising finding for QSR, snacks, cereals. To illustrate how deceptive broad reach thinking can be, consider McDonalds. According to published sources, McDonald’s has 67% annual penetration and about a 13% share of QSR in the US. With broad penetration, you would think that broad reach is the way to go. But no! By fitting a Beta distribution and assuming a category purchase cycle of once per week, we can easily calculate that over 50% of consumers are in that “low probability of choice/low response to advertising” segment. Again, even for brands like this… QSR, snacks, breakfast cereals…choiceful media allocation is a better strategy.  While I have not tested McDonalds, working with the MMA, I have tested another high penetration brand…Campbell Soup.  The principle definitely holds.

Illustrating the relationship. For a prototypical brand, here’s what that relationship looks like (the actual graph will vary somewhat for different brands).

How to read this: The x-axis is expected sales responsiveness to advertising. The y-axis is expected lift in favorability in response to advertising. Each point reflects an audience with Movable Middle percentages ranging from 7% (below the national average of 13%) up to 40%.

Findings. As Movable Middle concentration rates increase, expected favorability and sales lift rise almost one-for-one — a pattern that holds up to about 40%.

At the brand’s national average — which is what broad reach typically delivers — the lift in favorability is only half of what it could be. Worse, the lift in sales is well below half of the potential. This is why broad reach is such an underperforming strategy for all but a few gigantic share brands: it suppresses both outcomes.

Conclusion. The potential of brand campaigns is undermined when they are coupled with broad reach media plans which predictably waste too many ad impressions.  CFOs are right to challenge brand campaigns as underperforming.

But the right response is not to kill brand campaigns…it is to realize that brand and performance lift benefit from the same…not bifurcated…audience strategies. While you might lean in more heavily on video for brand campaigns and display for performance, all campaigns will benefit from finding or creating audiences with higher-than-average percentages of Movable Middles.

Working with the MMA, I’d be happy to guide your team in leaving bifurcated strategies behind and optimizing every campaign — for BOTH brand and performance.