Why Fame Still Matters in a Digital World
Precision drives clicks. Fame drives growth.
The Efficiency Trap
For many digital-first brands, success has been engineered through precision: advanced targeting, automated bidding, and endless optimisation loops. Yet this focus on efficiency has become a trap. By continually chasing short-term returns, many brands have confined themselves to a shrinking pool of high-intent users. It is effective for harvesting demand, but ineffective for creating it.
Evidence from the IPA Databank shows a clear pattern: campaigns that combine emotional reach with mass exposure are more likely to drive long-term profit growth than those built on narrow targeting. This aligns with the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which demonstrates that brands grow mainly through penetration, not loyalty. In other words, broad reach and memorability trump precision.
Digital optimisation has made us better at counting outcomes but worse at creating them. A culture of short-term metrics has led many brands to mistake efficiency for effectiveness.
The Enduring Value of Fame
Fame is not a relic from the broadcast era. It remains one of the most powerful levers in modern marketing. Fame drives mental availability and increases the likelihood that a consumer will think of your brand when a buying moment arises.
Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA research has shown that famous brands enjoy disproportionately higher long-term effects. Fame builds emotional connection, shared understanding, and social proof. It allows a brand to live in culture rather than just in feeds.
Recent findings from Thinkbox’s “Staying Power: The Longevity of AV Advertising” underline this point. Their analysis revealed that audiovisual advertising, spanning TV and broadcaster VOD, delivers long lasting business effects, with a significant proportion of response continuing for months or even years after a campaign airs. Crucially, this “long tail” cannot be replicated by digital-only formats optimised for immediate clicks. Fame takes time to build, but once established, it sustains performance far beyond the campaign window.
Why Above-the-Line Still Works
Above the line media work because they create shared visibility. Television, outdoor, and audio each play a unique role in building the memory structures that performance channels later harvest.
Television builds emotion and scale. Its audiovisual nature captures attention in a way that no algorithmic feed can.
Outdoor reinforces presence through physical dominance and repeated exposure, driving recall and trust.
Audio, including podcasts and radio, adds frequency and intimacy, ensuring the brand’s voice becomes familiar.
These channels do not compete with digital; they strengthen it. In mixed modelling studies across multiple sectors, increases in ATL spend consistently correlate with improved performance in search and social. When people recognise a brand, they click more readily, convert more easily, and cost less to acquire.
Measurement Beyond Clicks
Click based attribution remains blind to most of this impact. Media like video and audio are inherently “difficult to track”, not because they are ineffective, but because their influence occurs before the click. The solution is not to ignore them, but to measure them differently.
A triangulated approach works best:
Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) for quantifying long-term contribution.
Incrementality testing to isolate short-term causal effects.
Brand tracking and search uplift analysis to monitor changes in awareness and intent.
We’ve seen ourselves that when a digital-first brand turns on TV, they see double and sometimes triple digit increases in their organic and direct traffic, and that their CPCs drop significantly.
From Short-Term Optimisation to Long-Term Growth
Efficiency is not the enemy of effectiveness, but it cannot replace it. Digital-first brands have mastered the art of demand capture. Now they must relearn the craft of demand creation.
The brands that achieve lasting growth blend both: using digital tools for precision while investing in mass reach to build fame. Fame fuels trust, drives memory, and multiplies every future impression. It is what allows a brand to be chosen before it is searched for.
In the end, performance marketing converts interest, but fame creates it. And in a world where every feed resets daily, cultural memory is the only metric that compounds.