Reach Remains the Cornerstone of Campaign Effectiveness.
Sustainable Growth Depends on Maximizing Reach, Managing Frequency, and Building Mental Availability.
The Reach Imperative in a Fragmented Market
Campaign reach is no longer easy to achieve. As media consumption fragments across platforms, reaching a broad share of category buyers has become a structural challenge. Traditional assumptions about frequency and media concentration are under strain. Marketers must now reconsider how to plan reach in an environment defined by shrinking linear audiences, proliferating digital channels, and changing consumer habits.
Three forces shape this reality. First, brand objectives: the profile of the audience and the budget dictate the parameters of reach. Second, media selection: each channel carries different contextual strengths. Third, consumer purchase habits: brands must understand how buyers convert across fragmented journeys. For younger audiences in particular, incremental reach increasingly comes from integrating a wider range of platforms.
Reach and Growth Are Indivisible
Decades of work by Byron Sharp, Les Binet, and Peter Field, combined with new studies from Oxford’s Saïd Business School, have reinforced a core principle: brands grow by reaching more category buyers. Reach is not about saturating existing loyalists, but about building fame and penetration across the widest possible base.
Research for Radiocentre in 2020 demonstrated that TV remains the strongest channel for brand salience, supported by radio and social media for activation. Out-of-home provides efficiency for reinforcing brand cues. The relationship is straightforward: growth in sales quantity comes with the acquisition of new customers, and that requires maximizing reach.
The Multiplier Effect of Integrated Campaigns
Evidence shows that campaigns work harder when channels are integrated. The Advertising Research Foundation found that moving from one platform to two can increase marketing ROI by nearly 20%, with further gains as more platforms are added.
Analytic Partners confirm that combining television and online delivers the most powerful returns, as each channel amplifies the other.
ROI peaks when 40–50% of budgets are allocated online. This balance optimizes synergy, avoiding the inefficiency of one-channel dominance while ensuring scale. Campaigns that use clusters of complementary media, rather than concentrating spend on a single environment, unlock the “multiplier effect”: the compounding advantage of integrated exposure across touchpoints.
Frequency Without a Formula
Managing frequency has always been a delicate art. The old “three-plus” rule of exposures has been displaced by evidence showing no single optimal number applies. In a cluttered landscape where consumers see thousands of ads daily, the question is less about how many times an ad is shown and more about how each impression secures genuine attention.
Sky Media’s research suggests that effectiveness peaks around 14 exposures across a campaign, though this varies by channel. Facebook found strong brand response with as few as two to five exposures per week, while out-of-home reaches saturation more slowly. Crucially, quality trumps quantity: campaigns that command attention, even at lower frequency, outperform those that rely on repeated but shallow impressions.
Mental Availability: The Strategic Outcome of Reach
Professor Karen Nelson-Field defines mental availability as the likelihood of a brand coming to mind versus competitors when a purchase occasion arises.
It is now widely recognized as the key indicator of brand strength and market share potential. Mental availability does not emerge from targeting narrow segments, it requires sustained reach and attention across the category.
Research with OMD confirms that active attention directly uplifts mental availability. When attention is paid, memory encoding improves, leading to higher brand salience and slower rates of memory decay. When attention is absent, no uplift occurs, regardless of exposure. Three-quarters of cases studied showed stronger mental availability for audiences exposed to attentive advertising compared to non-exposed groups.
Leaders
Prioritize Incremental Reach: Brands must build plans that maximize exposure to new buyers, not just existing customers.
Integrate Media for Multipliers: Allocate budgets across complementary channels to capture synergy effects rather than overweighting single platforms.
Manage Frequency as Attention: Replace arbitrary exposure rules with strategies that secure meaningful consumer attention.
Build Mental Availability: Invest in distinctive assets and broad campaigns that strengthen memory structures, ensuring the brand is recalled at purchase moments.
Measure What Matters: Shift metrics from impressions alone to active attention and mental availability as the true precursors of growth.
Bottom Line: Reach, Attention, and Mental Availability Define Effectiveness
Brands that maximize reach, integrate media for multiplier effects, and translate exposures into mental availability secure durable growth.
Those that chase narrow segments or confuse frequency with effectiveness risk decline.
