Attention is a feeling, not a metric

Every campaign report we sent in 2019 opened with reach. Big numbers, early slides, everybody happy. Then sales moved for some of those campaigns and not for others, and reach explained none of it.

What did explain it was simpler: did people feel something they could name a week later? So our reports now open with recall and the words people used, and reach comes after.

The slide nobody argued with

Reach is easy to love because it only goes up. You buy more, you get more. It is also the number least connected to anything a finance director cares about. Two of our 2019 campaigns had almost identical reach in the Netherlands. One grew category share by two points. The other did nothing we could measure.

When we went back through the research, the difference was not in how many people saw the work. It was in what they said about it afterwards. The campaign that worked had a phrase people repeated back to us, unprompted, in their own words. The one that failed had a logo people remembered and nothing else.

What we measure first now

Every campaign we run has a seven-day check built into the media plan. We recruit a small panel from the people the plan reached, and we ask three things:

• What do you remember seeing, in your own words?
• How did it make you feel about the brand, if anything?
• Would you tell someone about it, and what would you say?

The answers go to the top of the report, verbatim, before a single number. Then come recall against the category norm, search lift and sales, and only then reach and frequency, as an explanation rather than a result.

If nobody can describe your campaign a week later, the reach number is a receipt, not a result.

Why clients came round to it

The honest answer is that it predicts sales better. Across the 38 campaigns we have running, unprompted recall at day seven tracks with sales lift far more closely than reach does. It also makes creative decisions easier. When a route tests well on reach but nobody can describe it, we know what to fix before we spend the rest of the budget.

It changes the conversation in the room, too. A marketing director can defend a feeling to a board when it comes with the customers’ own words attached. A reach figure only invites the question of what it cost.

What it does not replace

We still report reach, frequency and cost per thousand, and our media team still optimises against them every week. A campaign nobody sees cannot be felt. But the order matters: it tells everyone, including us, what the work is for.

If you want to try it on your own reporting, start small. Add the seven-day question to your next campaign and put the answers on page one. You will learn more from twenty sentences than from the biggest number in the deck.