Global advertising spend is set to surpass $1 trillion this year, with the share flowing into digital and social channels continuing to increase. Yet marketing budgets remain under intense pressure.
As a result, marketers and agencies are trying to justify every investment. Money increasingly flows towards activity that can be measured, attributed and defended. Even as audiences fragment across digital and social platforms, many of the industry’s most influential voices continue to equate scale with paid reach.
This is rational thinking: decisions are easier to defend when they’re backed by data. But the sheer availability of metrics has turned measurement from a useful tool into something closer to an obsession.
The problem is that the marketing industry is becoming so good at measuring and minimizing risk, it’s overlooking the simple fact that creativity and fame are still the levers for disproportionate attention. Genuine fame – the thing many marketing directors claim to want – doesn’t work in predictable, attributable increments.
Fame demands risk
Fame isn’t built through exposure alone. Exposure can be bought; fame depends on what happens next.
It comes when people care enough to talk about a brand, reinterpret what it’s said and done and pass it on. And because this makes fame unpredictable by nature, it demands a tolerance for risk across both media and creative that’s increasingly hard to find.
Work that is easy to measure and defend will always have appeal, particularly when budgets are under scrutiny. You are more likely to get fired in business, as Rory Sutherland said, for being irrational (and going with the risk), than for being unimaginative (and going with the data). But for brands to really connect and engage, they need more than lessons from the past. Optimization favors what’s worked in the past – the only place data comes from. Fame comes from things people haven’t seen before.
This means there should be space created for the “Oh wow!” moment that no planning model can guarantee. Increasingly, these emerge when brands become part of culture through communities, creators and conversations that people actively choose to engage with.
Brands can spend millions putting an idea in front of an audience. The more interesting question is whether anyone will do something with it. When people choose to share the work, the audience stops being the end point of the media plan and becomes its most powerful distribution channel.
Be a lighthouse, not a firework
A spike in attention is not the same as lasting fame. A campaign can explode into public consciousness and disappear almost as quickly. That brief, viral, flash-in-the-pan moment of fame is a firework, when what brands actually want to be is a lighthouse: consistently visible and recognizable over time.
Sustained fame comes from consistency: distinctive ideas, assets and stories that build over time and settle into people’s collective consciousness. That is increasingly difficult in an industry shaped by short-term metrics, short agency relationships and equally short tenures for marketing leaders. Yet it is possible.
Nike’s “Rip the Script” and Nothing’s collaboration with Charli XCX are valuable because they generated attention and because they built on existing relationships between the brands, their audiences and the communities and culture they want to inhabit. They were not isolated attempts to borrow relevance for a day or two.
This is where influence becomes important. While reach can be bought and engagement counted, neither necessarily captures the point at which an audience begins to care enough to carry an idea further.
That happens when brands participate in existing conversations, understand the communities around them and engage in ways that feel appropriate to those spaces. When it works, people do more than consume the content: they respond to it, reshape it and share it.
This sort of cultural participation is a dialogue. Audiences quickly recognize artificial attempts to manufacture connections, including when a brand has blindly borrowed the language or aesthetics of a community.
As with any other conversation, this dialogue, too, involves giving up a degree of control. Brands like Monzo and KFC have accepted that this comes with risk – not everything will land exactly as intended with every audience – but it’s clear that they are comfortable in recognizing the value of risk.
Measure for measure
None of this makes performance metrics worthless. Far from it. Data and measurement remain essential to understanding audiences, and help inform decisions that build the most successful digital and social campaigns.
The issue arises when data makes decisions, or, more specifically, when people lean on data (the past) to justify a decision about the future. The work then gets shaped by what’s most easily demonstrated and justified, rather than what might be genuinely distinctive. Marketing gets better, in theory, at delivering the outcomes the model predicts, while leaving less room for the unexpected.
That’s a problem for fame. Its effects can be measured after the event, but they can’t always be predicted or neatly attributed within a quarterly reporting window. Cultural influence rarely travels in a straight line from media spend to purchase.
Media can put a brand in front of millions of people, and optimization can improve its performance, but neither guarantees that anyone will care.
That depends on the strength of the idea, the credibility of the brand’s participation and whether the work gives people something worth talking about. Fame remains one of the strongest drivers of long-term growth – so use the metrics to help inform the ideas, but accept the uncertainty and trust your creatives to make your brand famous.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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