Reach is a rate, not a number: why your market keeps forgetting you

Your customers are forgetting you right now. Not because your last campaign was bad, but because that is what human memory does, quietly and on schedule, whether you are on air or not.

That is the part of Dale Harrison's talk at Adweek's Brandweek (recorded for the Adspeak podcast, with Angela Voss of Marketing Architects) that stuck with me. Harrison calls his position "reach primacy", and he admits it is contrarian: reach, not creative, is the strongest force in marketing. I agree with him. But the reason I agree is less about reach and more about memory.

Effectiveness is a multiplication, and one side is easier to grow

Harrison's model is simple enough to write on a napkin. Campaign effectiveness equals how persuasive the ad is for one person, multiplied by how many people see it. Two levers. The question is which one has more room to move.

Making creative better is hard. Every creative director knows the feeling of fighting for the last 10% of a script, the casting, the edit, the line that finally lands. Doubling the persuasive power of an ad is a rare and expensive event. Doubling reach is a media plan and a budget conversation. Multiplying it by ten is still a media plan.

"2x better creative is not going to beat 100x greater reach." - Dale Harrison

This is not an argument that creative does not matter (I make ads for a living, I would be arguing myself out of a job). It is an argument about where the leverage sits when you have to choose.

The surface area of effectiveness

Harrison has a name for the multiplication: the surface area of effectiveness. Picture a rectangle. One side is creative effectiveness, the other is reach. The area is the business result.

Now play with it. On a big reach, a small improvement in creative stretches across millions of future buyers, and the area grows a lot. On a small reach, even a massive creative improvement stretches across almost nobody, and the area barely moves. Same creative gain, completely different outcome.

This is the uncomfortable bit for small brands. A little better creative on a big reach brings brutal results; a lot better creative on a small reach brings almost nothing. Which also explains a pattern every agency person has seen: the brilliant campaign for the small client that wins a shelf of awards and leaves the sales chart flat. The work was good. The rectangle was thin.

It also means creative optimisation pays off most for the brands that already have reach. The big players get a double win - they can afford the reach, and every creative improvement is worth more to them.

Reach is a rate, not a number

Here is where memory comes in, and where the talk gets interesting.

Most media plans treat reach as a number. "We reached 74% of the target." Fine. But reached when? Harrison's point is that awareness only has commercial value at one moment: when the buyer comes into the market and has to remember you. And most buyers are not in the market at any given time. The 95:5 rule from the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass says roughly 95% of B2B buyers are out of market at any moment.

So the memory you plant has to survive until they show up. And it does not. People forget, continuously, whether you are advertising or not. Harrison points out that the adstock curves in marketing mix models are essentially a measurement of this forgetting, and depending on the category the decay happens within days, weeks or a few months.

"Reach is not a number, reach is a rate." - Dale Harrison

What you get is a dynamic equilibrium. Reach plants and refreshes memories; forgetting erases them. The share of your market that can recall you when it matters settles wherever those two rates meet. Reach more often and the equilibrium sits higher. Go dark and recall slides back down, and when you switch the campaign back on, it takes time to climb again. Reaching someone a year before they buy is close to worthless if they forgot you in March.

I find this framing more useful than another round of "brand vs. performance". Forgetting is the one thing in marketing that is truly always on. Your reach has to be too.

You do not need to be top of mind. Just in mind.

One more line from Harrison that I would put on the wall of every planning department:

"You don't have to be top of mind. What matters is to simply come to mind." - Dale Harrison

When buyers enter the market, they usually walk in with two to five brands already in their head. Harrison claims that about 90% of final purchase decisions come from that initial consideration set (his figure, stated on stage, so treat it as an informed estimate, not a study). They might discover something new along the way, but mostly they choose from the shortlist they arrived with.

The goal is not to win the memory contest. It is to be on the shortlist. That is a lower bar, and a much more achievable one, as long as you keep clearing it.

B2B makes this worse, not better

B2B marketers often argue that their world is different: fewer buyers, long cycles, a sales team that does the real work. Harrison flips that. Long cycles are exactly the problem. When the interpurchase period for a software platform or an industrial supplier runs years, the gap between "we reached them" and "they need us" is enormous, and memory has years to decay.

The longer your buyers stay out of market, the more you need continuous presence, not less. A big launch campaign every two years is a very expensive way to be forgotten in between.

What to do with this

None of this is brand new. It sits on the same Ehrenberg-Bass foundations that Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson kept coming back to at Cannes, and it lines up with the case for brand memory over cheap views. What Harrison adds is a clean way to explain it to a CFO: two rates, one equilibrium, and a rectangle.

Three practical moves:

• Before you spend another month polishing the creative, check how many future buyers it will actually reach. If the answer is "not many", the polish will not save it.

• Plan reach as a frequency over time (how often each buyer gets refreshed before they forget), not as a single campaign total.

• When budget is tight, cut the burst, not the continuity. Lower but steady presence beats a loud quarter followed by silence.

And when you do work on creative, work on the kind that gets remembered: distinctive assets, a consistent brand cue, an idea people can retell. If you want proof of what that looks like, the campaign library is full of work that solved both sides of the rectangle at once.

Your market will forget you again by next quarter. The only question is whether you will be there to remind it.