Modern media’s odyssey – navigating the journey to growth

The Odyssey is fundamentally a story about navigating complexity, temptation and uncertainty to reach a destination. It's about staying on course when every force around you is pulling you somewhere else. This sounds remarkably like modern marketing.

The forces are many. We make 10X+ more content vs. ten years ago without stopping to ask whether it is effectively building our brand. The impact of media spend is not what it once was. Ipsos in-market data shows you need 8x more spend to get to similar levels of ad recognition on TV vs. 2012.

There’s been a shift in ad spend to digital channels, with retail media being the fastest grower. Investment has moved away from environments that create sustained attention based, in part, on consumer behaviour, but in also ease of measurement.

Riding Christopher Nolan’s cultural coat-tails and borrowing from The Odyssey, I’ve been inspired by encounters with the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, Athena and ultimately the return to Ithaca to contextualise modern media’s own journey to award winning effectiveness. Unlike our hero’s stormy journey, I’ve been able to ride a following sea thanks to the wide Ipsos evidence base in telling this story.

Resist the allure of narrow metrics

In our recent work Creativity over Clicks, we explored the performance of retail media vs. control environments which highlighted some of the challenges of solely relying on feedback from narrow attribution windows and purely closed loop systems.

The major risks being that you optimise to existing vs. near term or future demand. It shows how high-quality creative drives upper-funnel growth, converts undecided shoppers, and builds long-term brand equity beyond the initial click.

Plotting a course to the most effective channel mix

Scylla and Charybdis represent the straits between mass reach and hyper precision that media planners must navigate. The lesson is to focus on orchestration; assigning every channel a role and making them work together. When consumers recognised a campaign across five or more media channels, their intention to act increased by 21%.

The challenge in how we maximise discoverability and attention in each channel is threefold:

1. Know what you are buying and how it fits together. High attention environments aren't just premium, they're fundamentally different products. You're buying different levels of engagement and different opportunities to build brand meaning.

2. Manage Risk. One of the killer charts for me from Profitability 2 was the one that shows how different media channels carry different levels of variability in returns. We shouldn't evaluate media purely on average expected return. We need to consider risk. A channel that delivers consistent, predictable returns may be more in line with your immediate campaign requirements. Or in some instances you may have a different appetite for higher average returns but greater variability.

3. Creative discipline enables effective orchestration across channels. Make smart asset choices to establish distinctiveness and consistently apply them (See Ipsos Power of You). This delivers the ‘freedom of a tight brief’ with every ad additive to what went before it.

Harness the transformative power of advertising

In The Odyssey, Circe’s power is transformation and a healthy dose of drama. And the most effective advertising does the same. It doesn't just communicate information; it creates memories and primes a brand response.

Our ‘Misfits Storytelling’ work highlighted the many pathways for brands to boost effectiveness, with strong signals on combining playful participation with the unexpected to be more memorable. It also revealed how couching brand value in a relatable narrative is twice as effective. It feels obvious, but there isn’t as much discipline in our industry around fully dramatizing brand value as you might think – only half of ads tell a relatable story.

The lesson from Athena

The goddess Athena embodies Insight and teaches us a critical lesson not to undervalue people or the strategic unlock. Ipsos conducted a meta-analysis of over 1,700 global ad testing cases to we learned that when creativity and empathy & fit come together, you get outsize business effects.

We talk about creativity a great deal but having that strategic unlock – the ‘Proper’ of Yorkshire tea, the KitKat ritual and tagline – is what sustains campaign orchestration to create memories, influence choice and create future demand.

Once we button down our strategic platform, thinking about the context in which your creative turns up is key. We sometimes stumble at this hurdle. Creative should flex, in tune with the specific ‘culture’ of a culture and how people engage there. Empathy & fit are even more important in Social in-feed and short form video as people seek utility as much as entertainment.

Getting to your destination is an individual journey

And finally, Ithaca. Remembering the destination is growth and not the mechanisms that support it. There is staircase of effects that enables progress towards growth – discoverability, attention, memory and choice – which are rarely linear and not the destination in themselves.

And THAT is where the Odyssey becomes individual and interesting. Because all learning must ultimately be adapted to your specific brand, market and competitive context. While I have a host of Ipsos meta learning, true Misfits build and springboard from these with their specific adaptations for effectiveness.

This article draws on material presented at the IPA Media Planning and Strategy Summit 2026 on 9 September.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.