- Creative has a ceiling, but reach scales. Exposing 100x more future buyers to your message will always outpace the growth potential of perfecting an ad.
- Reach isn't a box you check once. Most people aren't ready to buy when they first see your ad, making consistent presence the real driver of purchase-moment memory.
- Hypertargeting feels efficient but backfires on TV. Light buyers and secondary influencers represent a massive share of sales that narrow audiences simply can’t capture.
- Brands winning on TV combine broad, cost-efficient reach with layered measurement, using multiple models to triangulate results no single approach can reveal on its own.
Linear TV still leads Connected TV in ad spend this year, 48 billion dollars to 36.9 billion, and Americans spend more than five hours a day in front of a TV screen. Reach hasn’t gone anywhere. What’s changed is how many marketing teams give it up for a narrower, “smarter” targeting strategy the moment budgets tighten.
Marketing Architects CEO Angela Voss made that case alongside Dale Harrison, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at The Insight Collective, on a panel at ADWEEK’s Brandweek in November 2025. Their argument: reach, not creative, is the most powerful lever in TV advertising, and it changes how brands should plan, buy, and measure the channel.
Reach outperforms creative on its own
Campaign effectiveness comes down to two factors: how persuasive the ad is, and how many people it reaches. Creative effectiveness has a ceiling. Reach doesn’t. Doubling your creative’s persuasiveness will never match the growth potential of reaching 100 times more future buyers.
Brands chasing scale should spend less energy perfecting the ad and more exposing it to more potential buyers. As Dale put it, “No one buys a brand they don’t remember.” Reach builds memory. Memory drives recall.
Why does memory fade faster than marketers think?
Most people aren’t ready to buy when they see your ad. So awareness alone isn’t enough. What matters is whether consumers remember you when it’s time to make a purchase decision.
But memory fades fast. That’s why reach isn’t a box you check once, but a rate to maintain by showing up regularly.
Memory research explains why that’s hard to bank on. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped the forgetting curve more than a century ago and found that unreinforced memory drops fast, often falling to roughly 40% retention within the first few days before the decline levels off. Repetition spaced over time softens that drop far more effectively than a single burst of exposure. Reach works as a rate to maintain, not a box to check once at launch, and a consistent cadence is what protects the memory this research describes.
This is also where the NBD-Dirichlet model, the framework Dale referenced from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, becomes useful. The model describes a pattern researchers call double jeopardy: brands with fewer buyers also see those buyers purchase less often.
Growing a brand means nudging the propensity of the many light, occasional buyers in a category, not just deepening loyalty among the few heavy ones. Consistent reach is how that nudge happens.
Why narrow targeting costs you sales
TV can feel expensive. So the instinct is to tighten your target. But that instinct backfires.
Digital-first brands often bring hyper-targeting habits to TV, and that approach ignores light buyers and secondary influencers who don’t fit a narrow persona but still drive real revenue. Coca-Cola reports that half its buyers purchase the brand only once or twice a year. A campaign built to reach only frequent Coke drinkers would miss half the base entirely.
B2B has its own version of this problem, and it’s arguably worse. A typical B2B purchase decision involves six to 10 people, from the end user to procurement to the executive who signs off. Targeting only the “decision-maker” title on a media plan leaves out most of the committee that actually decides. A campaign narrow enough to hit just one title in that group misses the researchers, influencers, and budget holders who shape the outcome before a signature ever happens.
Only targeting heavy buyers or single titles shrinks your future customer base. Targeting fees on top of that mean you pay more to reach fewer people.
How much does TV advertising really cost?
TV’s reputation for being expensive isn’t the whole story. A Super Bowl ad runs $8 million for 30 seconds, but outside marquee events, linear TV is a surprisingly efficient way to reach broad audiences.
Connected TV has a lower barrier to entry but carries higher CPMs from tech fees, targeting layers, and platform costs. That means fewer impressions for the same budget, even as CTV keeps growing.
The real advantage comes from tapping the full TV industry and buying based on the most efficient way to reach a specific audience. Brands that limit themselves to a handful of premium networks often pay more to reach fewer people than brands that buy broadly.
Where technology fits into smarter media buys
No media team can manually track today’s fragmented inventory across thousands of sources. That’s where Annika, a media-buying AI Marketing Architects built in-house, comes in. It evaluates which buys will drive the strongest return based on audience and performance criteria, cutting costs while growing reach. The result is a smarter use of the same TV budget.
How do you measure TV advertising effectiveness?
According to a survey of more than 300 marketers, linear TV is the hardest channel to measure. CTV follows close behind in third place. But hard doesn’t mean impossible.
Four methods carry most of the weight for TV specifically, and each one answers a different question:
Angela reminded the Brandweek audience: “All models are wrong. Some are useful.”
Spot-based attribution ties a sales or web-traffic spike to the exact minute a specific ad aired. It’s fast and granular, useful for reading short-term response, but it struggles to capture delayed or brand-building effects.
Media mix modeling (MMM) uses statistical regression across all your channels and a longer time window to estimate each one’s contribution to sales. It’s the best tool for planning budget allocation across a full marketing mix, though it needs enough historical data to be reliable.
Incrementality testing compares a group exposed to your TV campaign against a matched group that wasn’t, isolating the sales lift TV alone caused. It answers the causation question the other methods can only estimate.
Geo holdout groups hold TV spend out of specific markets entirely, then compare results against markets where the campaign ran. It’s a cleaner version of incrementality testing at the market level, useful when you can afford to sit out a region for a test period.
No single model tells the full story on its own. Layered together, they point toward what’s actually working. Brands winning on TV chase reach: broad, consistent, and cost-effective. Paired with strong creative, smart technology, and layered measurement, that reach turns TV from a brand tool alone into a full-funnel growth engine.
Keep learning about the power of reach.
Listen to Dale’s perspective on the NBD-Dirichlet model that governs consumer behavior on The Marketing Architects Podcast.
