‘Reach’ Isn’t a Dirty Word—It’s How Brands Grow 

Targeting only your most loyal, high-value customers may feel efficient. But if you’re trying to grow, it’s limiting.

There’s a long-standing assumption in marketing that precision is power. That the narrower your audience, the more impactful your message will be. But decades of evidence and a growing body of marketing effectiveness research say the opposite. Brands grow by reaching more people, not fewer.

Yes, it costs money to get your brand in front of a broad audience. But do you know what costs even more? Narrowing your audience so much that you miss the very people who would have bought from you.

This isn’t an anti-targeting argument. It’s an anti-over-targeting argument. And it’s a call to rethink what actually drives results.

What marketers get wrong about targeting

One common mistake is confusing reach with waste. If you’re reaching people outside your ideal customer profile, it’s easy to assume that spend is wasted. But what if those impressions still influence decision-makers, or reach future customers who aren’t ready to buy just yet? That isn’t waste. It’s “positive spill.”

The Dirichlet model of buying behavior shows that most of a brand’s buyers are light buyers who only purchase once or twice a year. These buyers often fall outside narrow audience definitions, but according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, light buyers provide almost half of a brand’s sales. Brands don’t grow by squeezing more from loyalists; they grow by reaching more category buyers overall.

So just because someone doesn’t immediately click on your ad doesn’t mean it was ineffective. In fact, clicks don’t correlate with brand lift or conversion.

A marketer’s job isn’t to avoid waste

Too often, advertisers chase precision to avoid these “wasted” impressions without realizing the hidden costs, including:

• Higher CPMs
• Smaller audiences and higher frequency
• Reduced campaign reach and fewer net-new customers

Ironically, the tighter your targeting, the more likely you are to pay to show ads to the same people again and again. The cost per impression looks better. But the cost per incremental customer? Not so much.

High frequency drives fatigue. Once someone has seen your ad a few times and hasn’t acted, additional impressions aren’t likely to change their mind. Studies show purchase intent actually drops when viewers are overexposed.

That’s why efficiency comes not from squeezing the same audience but from expanding reach. And no channel is better positioned to do that than TV. Despite growing fragmentation, TV remains one of the best ways to get in front of large audiences. Its massive reach and visibility allow brands to build awareness, trust, and preference at scale. It absolutely drives response, but you’re missing out if you aren’t thinking full funnel.

The truth about the cost of reach

If media were free, nearly every campaign would succeed. What determines whether advertising delivers sustainable growth is often the price paid to reach an audience. Paying premiums for “high-quality” inventory often reduces efficiency without improving outcomes. Efficiency improves, reach expands, and ROI follows when CPMs are lowered.

Broad, cost-effective buys often reach the same households as premium placements, but at a fraction of the cost. In this way, price is actually the multiplier that decides whether a strategy can scale.

How to break your reach bias

But to identify these opportunities for growth, you need to start by expanding your targeting efforts and reinventing how you approach reach.

Widen your audience definition. Instead of narrowing down to a hyper-specific persona, define your bullseye target and then expand to include secondary and tertiary groups. Remember, influencers matter. That could mean reaching everyone from grandparents influencing kids’ toy choices to employees swaying B2B purchase opinions.

Test for incrementality. Don’t just ask whether targeting works—ask whether it works better than broad reach at the same cost. Simple test-and-control markets can give you that answer.

Mind your frequency. Set clear caps to avoid oversaturating a small audience. Incremental reach nearly always beats repeat exposure.

Challenge the “expensive equals effective” bias. In media, a high price often signals scarcity or complexity, not quality. Lowering cost is what makes scale possible.

Measure beyond clicks and orders. Look at brand recall, direct traffic, and mental availability. These leading indicators will show whether you’re building future demand or just harvesting today’s.

Reach is efficient, if done right. It gets your brand in front of more buyers, drives future demand, and grows your business.

So go ahead. Say it out loud. “Reach” isn’t a dirty word.

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Angela Voss started her career in digital media but quickly discovered her love for TV. Now, she’s spent more than 17 years crafting TV campaign strategies designed to deliver ROI. Today, she leads Marketing Architects, helping marketers launch and scale on TV to drive profitable growth for their businesses.