Investing for Memories: Finding a New Anchor Point

As Billy Ryan of The7Stars recently put it, we're in an age of abundance.

More media channels.

More formats.

More content options.

More niche communities.

More ways of making & collaborating.

Simply, more ways to buy or earn attention.

We also are working with fewer resources committed to maximizing the impact of marketing than ever before.

The average percent of revenue allocated to marketing is shrinking. (Gartner)

Advertising investment as a percent of Global GDP is falling. (We Are Social/Meltwater Analysis)

Higher expected productivity / return, faster, despite flat and shrinking budgets (Typically based on flawed assumptions about digital efficacy/efficiency: SEC Filings/Transcripts)

Navigating abundance, with insufficient resources, is to put it mildly, a challenge.

The good thing? This is a situation in which truly talented, curious, committed people will thrive.

Make Choices, lean into tradeoffs you can live with

The first principle is understanding the power of choice. When you cant do everything, choosing what you wont do is immensely powerful. The more you are able to remove from consideration, the more resources you've protected to make a meaningful impact among your smaller universe of options.

And there are a lot of tradeoffs to be managed. Just a quick sampling of the different factors to weigh shows that media decisions go FAR, FAR BEYOND channel allocation. We have to make decisions that balance the tradeoffs of growth drivers and constraints such as:

Fundamental Marketing Factors - budget sufficiency (ESOV as a baseline), physical availability, pricing, purchase cycle, mental market share

Audience Factors - total category size, market share, geographic or cyberdemographic density, habits in the category, media use, cultural subscriptions, seasonality for the category

Media Trading Factors - marketplace buying advantages, ad stock, scale of investment, reach & attentive reach

Campaign Design Factors - in-platform buying objectives, depth and variety of audience signals, fluidity of optimization, fit for format assets, asset fluidity & depth of variants

Propagation & Amplification Factors - what components of the campaign can overdeliver in creating attention, emotion, or action? Can we engineer a greater likelihood of spread through the campaign design (e.g. collabs, creators, events/stunts, community activation)

Data Costs & Infrastructure - minimizing unproductive audience or media platform data costs, buying tech

Creating Strong Measurement Signals - short- and long-term indicators, campaign, brand, and commercial outcome metrics, speed of data & decisioning

Experimentation - designing for optimizations

That's exhausting, and probably still missing things.

You need an Anchor Point to base decisions on.

To make confident, committed, decisions you need a strong anchor point for your strategy. A strong "first principal" for subsequent decisions to be aligned around. But in an era of abundance, limited resources, and a broken media landscape, we need a new set of anchor points to build from. The ones that had been the cornerstones of many comms plans in the past are fading away.

Reach - it has been well established, not all reach is equal(tm). See literally any previous post for comments about attention and the failure of media infrastructure, measurement, and most planning tools to sufficiently account for inattentive media, and, as Google calls it, the Attention Recession.

Audience Signals - first party data, in-market audience signals, platform provided interest data - all of which have challenges, and are proving unreliable over the long-term.

Funnel-based or Customer Journey Based Frameworks - planning based on linear paths to purchase (either be pulling people through a out-of-market to in-market funnel stage, or through hypertargeting moments in decision journeys) misconstrue how people think, behave, and buy in the vast majority of categories. Purchase shapes perception, not the other way around.

Let the bots figure it out: AI/ML governed media - can it work, sure. Does it work reliably across industries, budget levels, comms objectives, and audiences? Hell no. It is far from a perfect solve.

Spread it around: optimize to success - let the market tell you what works. Giving every tactic a bit of the budget, A/B and multivariate test your way to impact...sounds like a slow, maddeningly non-strategic answer.

So, with traditional (and some emerging) foundational principles failing to provide a strong anchor point for integrated, effective, comms strategy, we need to shift the focus.

I propose we shift our "first principle" from maximizing any specific comms/media/audience factor towards rewiring memories around an idea.

Idea- and Memory-led Comms Strategy.

VCCP, in their brilliant article on "Cracking the Memory Code" argue that the most effective route to brand growth is in "leaning into desire paths" - prioritize creative, messaging, and comms choices that reinforce existing memory structures people have about a brand. Don't try to build from scratch, or even confront and reposition people's ideas; amplify what's already there, introduce it to more people, or wire in new thoughts and memories over time - no need to replace what's already there.

In practice, that means we aren't building comms plans from a blank page simply aggregating reach (or even total tonnage of attention, for the more modern planner), or even centering them on an audience or consumer journey.

The smarter path is to focus on the memory structure of the brand: the associations people have with your brand and key CEP/buying moment triggers, recognizable assets, and product experiences - and then find the lean into the overall idea on how we're nudging and rewiring those memories.

If the idea is all about being obvious, lean into comms ecosystems built on jarringly easy decisions.

If the idea is all about real, lean into comms ecosystems that both highlight and satirize artifice, as well as amplify moments of grounded honesty.

If the idea is all about getting dirty, lean into comms ecosystems that praise effort and champion achievement.

We are still able to score and evaluate the overall potential of a campaign, and predict the likely brand and commercial impact on all the important factors: attentive reach, contextual CEP alignment, proximity to physical availability; but making decisions about the campaign structure specifically focused on aiding the memory creation, we are more likely to unlock more dramatic impacts from integration & synergy as we tally up the quantitative media factors - it never works the other way 'round.