In the realm of marketing measurement, reach has been one of the top dogs. Influential work such as How Brands Grow has helped to establish the belief that reach – getting in front of as many category buyers as possible – should be the overriding target of media strategy, taking precedence over frequency of exposure, targeting audience segments and the like.

It’s an appealing model because of its simplicity. It provides something of an Occam’s Razor for media planners that renders all the usual attendant debates over the merits of different channels moot. It makes the process feel cleaner, underpinned by the assurance of sound academic thinking.

But there’s a growing number of dissenting voices to this approach, highlighting that such a narrow focus on reach doesn’t tell the whole story and doesn’t necessarily lead to the most effective outcomes for brands. One such voice is Said Business School Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz, whose study “Beyond the pair: media archetypes and complex channel synergies in advertising” looked at 1,083 large-scale ad campaigns to explore whether there really was a definitive link between reach and effectiveness.

His results showed no consistent correlation between the two, with channels varying widely in effectiveness, such as TV swinging from 2% influence on purchase intent to 50% influence depending on the category being used. 

In short, we could be seriously limiting the impact of our media spend if we only seek to maximise reach. Surprise surprise, the picture is more nuanced.

The work of people like Dr Karen Nelson-Field, who has built an impressive range of evidence, demonstrates how important attention is in driving value in media. Yes, you need to reach people, but if you’re only getting a fraction of a second on one channel versus several seconds on another, that difference can majorly impact the strength of memory structures you build with the audience. The key stat here is 1.5 seconds – the minimum length of time Nelson-Field reckons is needed to encode memory of a brand.

So what can we B2B marketers do about it? 

Choose wisely

It’s crucial that we take due care in choosing which channels perform best for a given campaign’s purposes, based on the quality of attention achievable. Which channels are more likely to deliver 1.5 seconds or more of exposure? Which are not, and should perhaps be downscaled?

It’s important here to make the distinction between optimising for time an ad is in view versus “active attention” – that’s to say, how long an ad is actually viewed for. This can be difficult to fully assess and, particularly in B2B, is an area that needs more work to provide the full picture. However, it’s so critical a point that it needs considering as far as possible in the here and now.

Quality of creative matters too

But the channel isn’t the sole arbiter in this. As Nelson-Field highlights: that 1.5-second memory-encoding threshold only holds if the ad is carrying distinctive brand assets that can build recognition in the time available. By this we mean the likes of strong colours, a consistent logo lockup, a sonic cue, a familiar layout. Without these, the threshold increases to 2.5 seconds – a lifetime in digital terms. 

In other words, the best media plan in the world is still gambling with your budget if what’s actually on screen isn’t built to be quickly recognised. Investment in making sure your creative is keeping its end of the bargain is just as important if you don’t want to fritter away attention.

Now, none of this is about abandoning reach as an important metric, and there’s no universal consensus on where other factors like attention fit, either. This is about building the right combination of factors to maximise the chances a campaign is successful, and the evidence suggests that thinking more broadly about the quality of the media and creative you’re using can reap dividends.