Distribution drives more impact than advertising
Lastly, did you know that distribution has 67 times the sales impact of advertising?
Getting onto one more shelf, into one more channel, moves more product than any purpose-driven creative, or any media plan ever written.
The most powerful marketing decision a brand makes isn’t creative. It’s where they show up.
As an ex-advertising agency guy, that one hurts.
This knowledge exists. It has been tested, proven, published, and peer-reviewed.
I believe few in our profession are using it
Sure, some of it might trickle down through experience passed on, but a profession and each professional needs to understand the underlying science.
So that’s the knowledge we’ve been ignoring for decades. Now let me tell you what we’re ignoring more recently.
Remember I mentioned the financial contributions of brand long term? The Marketing + Media Alliance, based on five years of research, thinks it’s around 5X at this point, meaning an additional $5 million in sales are generated over time on top of the initial $1 million in sales during a campaign.
But what is it for your brand? There is a methodology that you can use to capture that knowledge.
Or the insane increase in impact when AI-driven machine learning is used properly to serve personalized ads to audience cohorts? On average, based on 30 lab experiments done to date, it looks to be over 125%. That’s more than double.
Why isn’t everyone doing personalization of ads today?
You get the idea. There is scientific and advanced knowledge out there today that’s just not universally known or being applied.
Is AI the answer?
First, let me be clear: having worked with AI now for several years and applying it to marketing, and having seen a lot of these trends for the last three decades, AI is real. It is foundational. It is revolutionary.
And it will absolutely shape how marketing works and how marketers work.
You must learn AI fluency, which is: You know when, where, and how to apply AI.
This is not optional.
But AI is not the answer to our opinion challenge.
Because if you ask AI what good marketing looks like, it mostly gives you back the OPINIONS that exist for marketing. AI reflects patterns. It is not expertise or judgment, at least currently.
And what if what is already out there is flawed?
AI will not save you from it. It will scale it.
If your assumptions are wrong, AI compounds the error. If your measurement is weak, AI makes you feel more confident about the wrong insights. If your theories about growth are made up, AI will industrialize them.
So yes: Learn AI fluency.
But do not confuse learning the machines, with knowing truth.
So why does all this matter to me?
I’ve said this before, I was presented with the opportunity to develop multi-touch attribution over 20 years ago that gave me deep insight into what marketers and marketing does well and not so well.
That body of work, those studies over five years, showed me that campaigns failed 47% of the time before a dollar of media was spent
