It's time for brands to go supernova

One truth shines through Making Sense 8: media isn't dying; it's exploding with possibility.

Whilst the underlying human needs that drive consumption remain the same – to be informed, entertained, and connected – the methods of delivery have changed, and dramatically scaled the canvas for brands.

Making Sense 8 shows the routes to mass reach are now myriad. And we can see content production costs are trending to zero. Today anyone with a smartphone can be a broadcaster.

This means advertisers are no longer just competing with rival brands, but a vibrant, rapidly expanding galaxy of clips, articles, videos, posts, pods, and programmes.

This then is the most exciting time in history to be a media planner.

But it's hard graft in Adland right now. That's because the economy remains stagnant. Consumers aren't confident, growth is limited, and efficiency is the watchword of business in the UK.

Sadly, this is holding us back from realising the potential of today's media landscape. Fragmentation of media and a tough economy mean that instead of building starships to navigate this exciting media galaxy, we have launched thousands of tiny dinghies. We are trying to do more 'right' things, for more people, and focus them on an array of 'right' moments, violently fragmenting our budgets in the process.

I'm privileged to work with some very large brands. Few would baulk at the goal of "fewer, bigger, better" campaigns. But the reality? It's not uncommon to see a portfolio company's laydown have 50% more campaigns on it by summer than it did in January.

For many big companies, 55-75% of their campaigns account for just 10-20% of the total budget. With such small campaign briefs, large chunks of our amazing media galaxy are out of reach. Budgets become dominated by social and display media - an approach shown to be suboptimal by the largest study of advertiser effectiveness data.

Yes, there's a fleeting hit of dopamine every time one of these micro-campaigns goes live. It feels like momentum. We console ourselves that "niche is mainstream" or that we can win with "lots of littles".

Sadly, our penchant for campaigning with less budget is not building brands, it's flattening them. WPP's BAV database reveals that this century, as spend has shifted into platforms that espouse a fragmented campaigning approach, brand differentiation - the strongest driver of penetration - has reached a 20-year low.

Others share this concern. In Go Big or Go Home, Les Binet shows our industry is suffering from "small thinking": slicing budgets so thinly that we lose all economies of scale and the vital signalling power of mass media. Richard Huntington has called out Adland's obsession with "small culture" as an obscene corporate vanity exercise. The desire to participate in fleeting memes distracts from our primary job: building enduring, famous campaigns that ignite and sustain brand growth.

We must stop having the wrong arguments. No more tired debate about "traditional versus digital", terms that are entirely meaningless when a TV ad is served programmatically and a YouTube video is watched on a 60-inch screen. And enough of the banal false binary of long versus short-termism. We obviously need both.

Instead, the new mandate for media planning must be density.

In a galaxy of fragmented media dust, don't spread your budget into a thin, invisible nebula. Win by going supernova, creating a supermassive hole: campaigns with so much mass, scale, and cultural gravity that they inescapably suck in attention.

A perfect example is Nationwide's work featuring Dominic West as the arrogant boss of a fictional rival bank. It doesn't desperately try to hook on to a fleeting trend. It's designed to run for years. It's highly entertaining, aiming to be something everyone recognises, understands, and can chuckle at together. It has the gravitational pull of true mass culture. No wonder they're Kantar's most meaningful UK bank, growing brand value 34% last year.

Creating a supermassive black hole campaign requires immense concentration of resources. It means saying "no" to the 25 tiny campaigns that sit below a sufficiency threshold. Instead, consolidate fragmented briefs into meaningful campaigns that allow you to harness the gravity of the entire media landscape.

Making Sense 8 reveals a complex commercial media landscape, but the physics of growth haven't changed. To experience the genuine thrill of building brands, we must not tackle media fragmentation with a fragmented plan. It is time to go supernova, to build density, to pull the universe towards us.

Rich Kirk is EVP Planning at WPP Media

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.