Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotesAdvertising teams can spend six weeks polishing the menu for a restaurant nobody knows exists.
The unglamorous decision—whether enough people will see the work often enough—is allowed to sit in a media spreadsheet while everyone debates the elegant decision: which headline, colour grade or director best expresses the brand. Creative matters enormously. Invisible creative, however, is an expensive in-joke.
This is the generic truth agencies have little incentive to dramatise. A new campaign creates pitches, production and awards entries. Recommending that a client keep a proven advert running and buy more reach sounds suspiciously like common sense, which is terrible for novelty and often rather good for business.
The trap appears beyond advertising. A retailer redesigns the packaging before fixing distribution. A conference invests in a cinematic trailer while its mailing list could fit in a taxi. A brilliant sales deck gets rebuilt for the fourth time although the team is speaking to twelve prospects a month.
Spending blindly would spread weak work and waste at industrial scale. The commercial sequence is to establish that the message works, then ask whether it has enough weight to work in the market. Reach, frequency, availability and creative quality are a system.
Sometimes the bold strategic recommendation is embarrassingly plain: stop fiddling with the poster and buy it a larger wall.