The Reach and Repetition Teeter-Totter

So here’s the $64,000 question… where’s the balance point between reach and repetition in your advertising?   If only it were a simple answer.  Truth is, every person is different and every market is different and how they react to your message is different.  It may take only 5 impressions for Joe, but Sally is a harder sell and requires 20 impressions before she trusts the message.

The importance of repetition in advertising has been proposed since 1885 when Thomas Smith published his guide called Successful Advertising.  In it he laid out a schedule requiring 20 impressions before the average person would buy what was offered.  It took five impressions before the person even noticed the ad.  The modern day term for this is top of mind awareness.  Unfortunately, most businesses are constrained by this little thing called a budget and can’t afford to simply throw more money at advertising to keep their message in the public view.  So there has to be a balance point between budget, reach, and repetition.

My favorite example to illustrate the choices between reach and repetition is to choose a fixed cosportunity, for convenience let’s say that the cosportunity of your campaign is $1, and that you have $1000 budgeted.  You can spend your $1000 by any of the following schedules:

Send a message to 1000 people

Send a messages to 500 people, repeated twice.

Send a message to 250 people, repeated 4 times.

Send a message to 100 people, repeated 10 times.

Send a message to 50 people, repeated 20 times.

The worst thing you can do is choose the first schedule, sending one message to the biggest audience you can afford.  Your message isn’t heard and you’ve spent your budget.   You’ve essentially wasted your money and will soon be professing that advertising doesn’t work.  There is a time-based, repetitive aspect to advertising, just like learning.  Did you learn your multiplication tables the first time they were presented to you, or after repeatedly seeing them?

The point I’m trying to make in this post is that repetition is more important than reach for a limited budget.  Well, actually, for any budget.  But for the budget-minded, please pay close attention to any campaign you start and be in it for the long term, even if you have to reduce your reach.