Move Your ROAS By Going After The Movable?Middle

Last week, I came across a blog written by friend Joel Rubinson , an expert in the field of media science. I first met Joel when he was the Chief Research Officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, these days he’s been staying relevant working with MMA Global (whose members include Google, Meta, Electronic Arts, Spotify, Unilever, McDonalds, Ford).

Joel’s piece made me think again about the power of paid advertising. What he said, was if he ran analytics for a marketer, his goal would be to use math to cause advertising effectiveness.

Really? How? Most people pay a premium to avoid watching ads, while others believe ads are packed with mistruths. Advertising is just another random, fractional impression; equal to a tweet or blog post.

Joel says that he would prove that advertising can consistently be a profit generator, by focusing on the great undiscovered opportunity — the math and science of targeting.

I thought, but everyone targets? The evidence centers on who you target. And how.

Joel Rubinson has defined a group he calls the Movable Middle — those with a 20%-80% probability of choosing your brand. This group is hyper-responsive to your advertising.

The good news is that most of your customers are in this Movable Middle segment, a math-proven group that exists for all brands — and too often ignored.

Fact is, marketers routinely abandon existing purchasers to chase after new customers. Right? The attitude is, “Don’t waste money on existing customers, spend it to get new customers.” This makes sense in the board room, but not so much onsite or on the salesfloor. It’s sort of like a retailer closing their best-performing stores, or lopping off their best-selling product line.

Here come the maths.

Take any CPG marketer who has typically 50% gross margins. If you can redesign media strategies to consistently double ROAS to (say) $4–any CFO would see that cutting advertising — which usually happens in market downturns — is wrong.

First, the reality is that, you don’t really have those customers, you share them.

Let’s describe these people again: They are not your most loyal customers. Nor are they the non-customers who don’t care about your brand and never will. In CPG or retail, these middles are the people who have bought you once or twice. In the auto category, they may have test driven you in a rental car. In travel, they may have purchased a travel guide to Joshua Tree or Rome. Identify your own “middle” — what political campaigns call swing voters.

“They are ‘movable’,” says Rubinson, “because their latent desire to purchase your brand is something your advertising can magnify.”

These “persuadables” just need a poke in your direction. So why not poke?

Rubinson’s evidence shows that advertising to this group can deliver, on average, 5X the sales response to your advertising. And if you tilt your media plan towards this segment, it can lead to a doubling (or more) of ROAS (return on ad spending). Who doesn’t need that?

So, if your advertising isn’t working, maybe it’s not because people avoid advertising in general and would rather TikTok.

Maybe you just have to move to the middle?