Fact-Checking Marketing Beliefs: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why

It is said that 50% of ad campaigns show no lift. We need to do better; the main impediment is hanging onto old beliefs that are no longer true (and maybe never were…).

Can you correctly identify which of these common marketing beliefs are true?

1. Advertising channels should be categorized as either for brand building or for driving performance. For example, use video for building brands and display to drive performance.

2. Broad reach is the best media strategy when you are trying to build brand awareness and win more customers.

3. The way a brand grows is by growing its customer base.

4. Most brand purchases are decided on while the consumer is shopping.

5. The total sales lift from advertising is twice what is measured during the campaign.

6. Advertising to your own customers is wasteful since you can email and text them without media placement costs.

7. Retail media is big! Amazon’s ad revenues are likely to grow to 80% of Meta’s ad revenues by 2026.

8. MTA is dead because ID level information is no longer available due to privacy concerns.

9. Great creative is the primary driver of consumers paying attention to advertising.

1. FALSE. This was the overly simplistic assumption that Binet and Field made in their original write up "The Long and Short of It". MMA global has now conducted 3 “brand as performance” studies where we see that display can drive brand favorability and video can (and should) drive sales and customer acquisition. This varies by brand and needs to be determined by research and not assumption.

2. FALSE. Research shows that targeting Movable Middles (those with a 20-80% probability of buying your brand) results in the greatest increase in buyers beating broad reach by a mile.

3. FALSE. Thinking brands grow by winning new customers is like thinking eating ice cream causes warm, sunny days. When brands increase consumer consideration and favorability levels, it shifts the underlying probability distribution of choosing that brand. This leads to winning new customers and even more importantly, retaining them!

4. TRUE. When POPAI trade association reported in 1995 that 70% of brand decisions are made in store, marketers freaked out and denied the results. Since then, my own shopper research confirmed that more than half of purchase decisions are made at point of purchase.

5. FALSE. It is actually much higher! In the MMA brand as performance research, we have seen that short plus long term sales lift ranges from 2.5 to 6.5 times the short term (in campaign) sales lift.

6. FALSE. MMA research proves that existing customers are actually the MOST responsive to paid media, over and above any CRM marketing, while non-customers are mostly non-responsive. In fact, customers are so responsive to paid media, it can be thought of as a profit generator.

7. TRUE. Statista reports that by 2026 Amazon is projected to have ad revenues that are 80% of Meta.

8. FALSE. MTA is not dead. The MMA uses MTA as part of the analytics for each brand as performance study. Working with TransUnion and Circana, we find MTA to be extremely valuable as they integrate data from a variety of media partners including integration of linear TV and social. In fact, Google announced in 2024 that they are not eliminating IDs in log files.

9. FALSE. Paying attention to an ad is the handshake between marketer and consumer. If your brand is not in line with their brand preferences, they are much less likely to recall being exposed. We have hard evidence that those who are not interested in buying a brand have less than half the recall of ad exposure, even though we know through log files that they were exposed.

Towards better marketing…

Advertising has the power to drive sales and profit growth when it’s guided by truth rather than squandering advertising funds via outdated assumptions. The key lies in treating advertising not as a gamble but as a calculated investment—one informed by rigorous research and math.

Please comment below on what statements you nailed as myths and which answers were surprising to you!