“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” - John Wanamaker ~120 yr ago

That can still be the case (or much worse) with poor targeting, boring creative, insufficient repetition, and all that. But maybe it's not so bad.

There is a thing that I am pondering though. Some of that waste that comes from high production costs and media spends blasting the same message to everyone — might actually not be wasted.

It's just more long-term brand benefit, thus hard to measure.

Advertising legend Tim Ambler argues that consumers believe a brand is of a higher quality if they think a lot of money was spent on it. It's signaling.

If I drive a fancy sports car, I'm signaling I'm rich and got extra money to spend.

There's a similar thing with the handicap principle in nature.

The magnificent peacock’s tail signals their exceptional biological fitness.

By blasting my high-production ads everywhere, I'm signaling to the consumer that the brand is serious and confident of future success.

As an example this Monday . com comes to mind.

There was a time period you couldn't avoid one of their fancy ads. Seemed like they bought the whole YouTube ad inventory.

I don't really know how their CRM is different, but now I'm aware that they exist which is most important.

Binet and Field have so vividly demonstrated with their work on getting the right balance between brand-building and activation (performance marketing).

They argue that the most effective advertising is split 60:40 between brand building and activation (generally speaking).

The work of Professor Andrew Ehrenberg showed that across all categories, a few people buy a significant portion of your brand, but most buy the brand infrequently.

You need to advertise wider to grow your brand. If you only advertise to your true fans, you're doing it wrong.

. @ProfByron says there are two fundamental rules about how to spend your advertising budget.

#1: spend as much as you can.
#2: divide your total spend and spend around a twelfth of it every month.

Optimize for mental availability and physical availability.

So for brand advertising, perhaps the waste is much less than you think.