One day in 1968, a man called Spencer Silver did something that made his company a lot of money.

Faced with disappointingly not-sticky glue, he spotted an unexpected route ahead. Sticky paper that could be repositioned without damaging surfaces. Ta-da! He’d invented Post-it notes.

It’s a fable for modern marketers seeking to build brands because, just like the un-sticky glue, available media placements don’t seem up to the task. A TV ad doesn’t get the reach it used to, and what you get instead struggles to get a paltry three seconds worth of attention.

But there is hope if you come at it from a different angle.

After all, the modern media stack is not just complexity and fragmentation, it’s also options and variety. And, importantly, it’s numerous ways of communicating that have been shown to work well together.

That means there is now a new route to brand building that works. It’s where marketers make something big out of all the small exposures they can deliver to potential customers.

The whole is more than the sum of the fragmented parts

It’s not news that different media channels work well together, that there’s synergy.

Study after reputable study confirms it. Spending the same amount of money across more media channels boosts the returns you get in revenue and brand strength.

The chart below plots the size of these effects as you go from using one channel to five. Econometrics reports a huge 35-65% more ROI. And, according to Kantar, you can more than double the effect on your brand.

As additional channels are added to the mix, they do different but related small jobs that combine into something powerful. No single media channel gets everyone for 30 glorious seconds, but together, the stack delivers a critical mass of smaller exposures.
Target audiences see different things that work together, and you get the memory and persuasiveness benefits of repetition, without getting boring.

The diagram above depicts how effects build as more channels are layered in. It shows that every time a new channel or platform is added, it has its own effect and a synergy effect where it interacts with the other channels.

It’s based on what my team at Magic Numbers sees in econometrics, but the size of the dark blue bit lines up with what Kantar knows about brand building. Its latest estimate is that synergies make up a full 41% of the effect of campaigns on brand metrics.

Variety means good associations for your brand

It’s not surprising that this “many-touchpoint” type of campaign, when done well, is especially powerful for brand building.

Brands last in people’s minds when they are associated with something entertaining, funny, or emotionally potent, and the variety this strategy employs ensures that’s what you get.

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With a lot of channels, you reach people where they’ve actively chosen to be.

You don’t get the benefit of everyone watching the same ad at once and maybe discussing it. But you do get to appear next to exactly the entertainment a person likes, no matter how niche their interest is.

The evidence shows that this matters. In research by IAS, 65% of consumers in the UK agree they are more likely to engage with an ad when it’s surrounded by what they perceive to be high-quality content.

Matching luggage and personalised purchase journeys

It’s a world where, as Billy Ryan from the7stars puts it: “The modern media stack is a feature, not a bug.”. And where fragmentation is emphatically not an effectiveness problem.

But that’s not to say it’s easy.

Tom Roach from Jellyfish has collected together a very convincing set of evidence that shows creative made especially for the platform it’s on works better. And yet, for a many-touchpoint campaign to work, creative has to be samey enough that it gels together in the audience’s mind.

Tom Roach: Ignore the sceptics, brands can be built on digital platforms

For this strategy to work, ideas will have to be ruthlessly stuck to, but versatile. The look and feel will have to be beautiful everywhere. Marketers will need a matching set of luggage that’ll take them to the moon, the arctic, and to Croydon.

The media management job is equally thorny. With so many channels and a proliferation of same-but-different ads, businesses and their agencies will need to get very good at serving everything up in a coordinated way.

There’s likely a role for tech here. Martin Sorrell recently called personalisation at scale “the most powerful model [for advertising] that we see from our modern technology point of view”.

He was talking about personalisation of the ads themselves, which is a lot to ask of a video or picture that in the many touchpoint campaign already has to match the brand, the idea, and the platform.

A better use of personalisation tech is managing individual purchase journeys so that each person sees the right ads for them.

If my friend regularly looks at yoga content on Instagram, reads the FT, and clicks the odd like on a Grace Kite LinkedIn post, what does the algorithm look like that places matching luggage ads in front of her in all of those places?

And how can it ensure that it’s talking to her in the right way for the different mindsets she brings to each place?

There’s no going back

The platforms people scroll through only catching a glimpse of your ad are here to stay. And so are the pages where people first learn your product exists in a boring one-line of black text on a white background.

Equally, the generation that’s grown up spoilt rotten with content, isn’t going to compromise in the future.

They’ve been able to watch a robot solve a jigsaw or a flamingo being made out of chocolate, knowing they can skip when they get bored. They aren’t ever going to tolerate please-all content in their millions the way their parents did.

It means that smaller reach per placement and smaller attention per ad is not going to go away.

And great acts of brand building will have to be like plans sketched out on a million Post-its on the meeting room wall. They’ll have to be made up of a lot of little things.

Grace Kite is the founder of Magic Numbers, which provides people-friendly analytics and practical training for marketers.