Targeting has become the default assumption of media planning. If you can narrow your audience to people who have searched for your category, visited your competitor's site, or match a behavioral profile that correlates with purchase intent, why would you ever buy broad reach?
It's a reasonable question. The answer from the most rigorous academic research on brand growth is more complicated than the targeting platforms want you to believe.
How Brands Actually Grow
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has spent decades studying how brands grow across categories. Their core finding challenges the premise of precision targeting directly: brands grow primarily by reaching light and non-users, not by converting loyal customers more efficiently.
The implication is counterintuitive. Most of your future customers are not currently in your retargeting pool. They haven't searched for you, visited your site, or shown any signal that a behavioral targeting algorithm can detect. They are living their lives, going to work, buying things in your category occasionally, and they've never thought about your brand specifically.
Reaching those people, building what Ehrenberg-Bass calls "mental availability" (the probability of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation), requires broad reach media. Not narrow targeting. The people who are actively searching for you are already going to find you. The advertising opportunity is the much larger group who hasn't thought to look yet.
The Penetration Premium
Ehrenberg-Bass research across consumer categories consistently finds that market share is determined more by the breadth of a brand's customer base than by the depth of loyalty among existing customers. Brands with more customers, even customers who buy infrequently, reliably outperform brands with smaller but more "loyal" customer bases.
This means the advertising strategy that looks most efficient on a cost-per-conversion basis (targeting known buyers, retargeting recent visitors, bidding on in-market intent signals) is often the strategy that makes the smallest contribution to long-term growth. You're spending money to remind people who already know you to buy again, while your competitors reach the market you aren't.
What "Wasted" Reach Actually Produces
When a radio station delivers your message to a listener who isn't currently in the market for your product, that exposure is often dismissed as waste. The targeting-first mindset would say: we paid to reach someone who wasn't going to buy anyway. But the research on how purchase decisions actually form tells a different story.
A listener who hears your name repeatedly over six months builds an unconscious familiarity that surfaces at the moment they do enter the market. They don't remember the specific ad. They just think of your name. They feel like they know you. That feeling, mental availability, is what makes a brand come to mind when it matters, and it can only be built through reach that extends beyond the currently active buyer pool.
Gain Theory's analysis of advertising effects across hundreds of campaigns found that 58% of total advertising profit occurs more than six months after the campaign runs. That delayed effect is almost entirely driven by broad-reach brand building reaching people who weren't ready to buy at the time, but were when the moment came.
The Targeting Trap in Competitive Markets
There's a specific dynamic in competitive local markets worth understanding. When every advertiser in a category is competing for the same narrow audience (the in-market buyer, the high-intent searcher, the person who just visited a competitor's site) the cost of that audience goes up and the differentiation goes down. You're in a bidding war for the same people, with the same message, at the same moment.
The brand that's already in the non-buyer's head when they eventually become a buyer doesn't have to win that bidding war. The work was done months earlier, through reach that nobody was competing for, at a fraction of the cost.
In the Treasure Valley specifically, a market adding tens of thousands of new residents annually, the new-to-category and new-to-market buyer pool is exceptionally large. None of those people are in any local advertiser's retargeting pool yet. Radio reaches them from day one.
The Right Mix, Not an Either/Or
None of this means targeting is worthless. Performance advertising at the bottom of the funnel, capturing intent that already exists, converting warm leads, following up with recent visitors, is valuable and works. The problem is building an entire strategy around it while neglecting the broad-reach work that feeds the funnel in the first place.
Binet and Field's IPA research across 1,400+ campaigns found that the optimal split for most categories is roughly 60% brand-building (broad reach) to 40% performance (targeted conversion). Most digital-first advertisers are running something closer to the inverse. AI planning tools compound this imbalance by optimizing toward what's measurable, which tends to be the performance end of the funnel rather than the brand-building end.
Want to see how broad reach and targeted digital work together in the Treasure Valley?
We build campaigns that pair radio's reach with digital's precision, so you're building the audience that feeds your funnel, not just retargeting the one you already have.
Start a conversation →Sources: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, "How Brands Grow" (Byron Sharp, 2010) and subsequent research on mental availability and brand penetration. Binet and Field, IPA Databank analysis of 1,400+ campaigns, brand vs. activation split findings. Gain Theory advertising profit attribution analysis. Nielsen Audio, AM/FM weekly reach and audience composition data.