Here is what I want you to do…draw a vertical line down the middle of your upper funnel.

Now x out the left half.

Those in the x-ed out half don’t give a sh$t about your brand so advertising to them is wasted. And furthermore, it is predictable which specific IDs are in that x-ed out half. Advertising to them on purpose, for the sake of maximizing reach, is a self-inflicted wound!

In practice you cannot eliminate all of this waste, but you can certainly beat the odds. Here’s how.

Create audiences that have higher than average percentages of Movable Middles, that is those consumers who have a 20-80% chance of choosing your brand. If nationally you have, say, a 15% Movable Middle, build an audience with 25-35% Movable Middles. MMA has identified scaling partners who are able to achieve that magnitude of extra concentration rate.

The idea that those with a near 0 probability of choosing your brand ALSO have little or no responsiveness (sales or brand lift) to advertising was derived mathematically…but the MMA’s award winning “brand as performance and Movable Middle studies” support this with experimental evidence.

Why do marketers wrongly conflate broad reach media plans with brand marketing? I think it is something as silly as every drawing of a marketing funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. If the top of the funnel is wide, you go broad to build the brand, right? No…broad reach is a predicable waste of money. which is why I want you to x out half of the upper funnel…the half I have also referred to as the ‘dead zone“.

To shift the odds in your favor, you can also work it the other way…create a list of say 50MM IDs that have a low Movable Middle percentage and SUPPRESS. Those ad impressions that would have gone to these IDs under the mantra of “buy as much reach as you can afford” would be wasted anyway.

Now some may counter, “I see why high Movable Middle audiences deliver a bigger conversion bump but how does that improve brand perceptions? Using calculus, I have been able to model the expected change in brand perceptions as well as conversion rates in response to ad exposure as a function of baseline probability of choice. The peak for brand lift occurs within the Movable Middle too. It does peak a bit sooner (at about 28% probability of choice for brand lift vs. 50% for converson lift) but the conclusion is the same. Audiences built to have a higher concentration of Movable Middles deliver BOTH brand lift and conversion lift BETTER than mass reach media strategies.

If you think of “upper funnel” as a set of outcomes (e.g. awareness, familiarity), not a media strategy — you’ll free up your thinking to understand that advertising best grows awareness and brand proclivity by targeting the Movable Middle, not by spraying broad reach.

This blog is based on the learnings from two award winning platforms. The MMA has now won two prestigious awards (Gold and Silver) from ESOMAR for research and analysis platforms I helped to create… Brand as Performance and Movable Middle Growth Framework.