The Advertiser’s Dilemma: Spend or Be Forgotten

The advertiser sits at the centre of every go-to-market decision, yet the role is increasingly misunderstood. At its core, an advertiser is any business or individual that pays to place a message in front of an audience, with the intention of changing behaviour. That sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the most commercially complex positions in business.

The decisions an advertiser makes, where to appear, how much to spend, what to say and to whom, shape whether a business grows or stagnates. Get those decisions right consistently and you compound. Get them wrong for long enough and no amount of operational efficiency saves you.

What Does an Advertiser Actually Do?

Strip away the jargon and the advertiser does three things. They decide who they want to reach. They decide what they want those people to think, feel or do. And they decide how much they are prepared to pay to make that happen. Everything else, the media planning, the creative development, the measurement, is in service of those three decisions.

What makes the role genuinely difficult is that those three decisions are interdependent. Change your audience definition and your creative brief changes. Change your budget and your channel mix changes. Change your channel mix and your measurement approach needs to change. Advertisers who treat these as separate workstreams, handing audience to one team, creative to another and media to a third, tend to end up with campaigns that are technically competent but strategically incoherent.

I have sat in enough campaign debriefs to know that incoherence is the default, not the exception. The brief says one thing, the media plan reflects something slightly different, and the creative lands in a place that splits the difference between both. Nobody made a bad decision individually. The system just failed to connect the decisions together.

If you want to think more rigorously about how advertisers fit into broader go-to-market thinking, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial architecture that sits behind effective advertising investment.

Why Most Advertisers Are Playing Defence Without Knowing It

There is a structural bias in how most advertisers allocate their budgets, and it pulls them toward defending existing customers rather than acquiring new ones. Performance channels make this worse because they are optimised for measurable conversion, which means they disproportionately reach people who were already close to buying.

Earlier in my career I was guilty of this. I overvalued lower-funnel performance because the numbers looked good. Click-through rates, conversion rates, return on ad spend, all ticking upward. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was how much of that activity was capturing intent that already existed, rather than creating new intent. The business was growing, but it was growing in the way a well-run shop grows when it is in a busy location. The footfall was already there. We were just converting it efficiently.

The problem becomes visible when the footfall slows. If you have spent five years optimising conversion and almost nothing building awareness, you have no reservoir of latent demand to draw from. The pipeline dries up faster than anyone expects, and the performance channels that looked so efficient suddenly look very exposed.

This is not an argument against performance marketing. It is an argument for understanding what performance marketing actually does, and what it does not do. Go-to-market is genuinely harder now partly because so many advertisers have crowded into the same lower-funnel channels, bidding against each other for the same captured intent, while the upper funnel sits relatively underpopulated.

The Advertiser’s Relationship With Their Agency

I have been on both sides of this relationship, and the dysfunction almost always starts on the advertiser side. Not because advertisers are bad clients, but because they often come to an agency with an incomplete brief and expect the agency to fill the gaps with strategy. Agencies can fill those gaps. They will fill those gaps. But what they fill them with is a reasonable guess, not a grounded business decision.

The best client relationships I managed at agency level were the ones where the advertiser came in with genuine commercial clarity. They knew their margin structure. They knew which customer segments drove disproportionate lifetime value. They knew where they were losing to competitors and where they were winning. That clarity allowed us to build media and creative strategies that were actually connected to business outcomes, not just campaign metrics.

The worst relationships were the ones where the brief was essentially: “We need to grow. Here is the budget. What would you do?” That question sounds open and collaborative. In practice it pushes the agency into a position where they are making commercial strategy calls they do not have the data to make well. The campaign that follows is usually fine. Fine is not good enough when the budget is meaningful.

There is also a power dynamic worth naming. Advertisers hold the budget, which means they hold the power. But that power can make advertisers lazy. If you know the agency will always find a way to make the work happen, there is less pressure to do the hard thinking upfront. The discipline of writing a genuinely tight brief, one that forces real choices rather than deferring them, is undervalued in most advertiser organisations.

How Advertisers Think About Audiences (And Where They Go Wrong)

Most advertisers define their target audience in one of two ways. Either they describe their existing customers, which tells you who you have already reached but not necessarily who you should be trying to reach. Or they describe a demographic profile so broad it is practically useless: adults 25-54, household income above a certain threshold, interested in the category.

Neither approach is wrong exactly. But both leave significant value on the table. The first because it anchors strategy to the past. The second because it gives planners no real basis for making meaningful choices about where to show up and what to say.

The advertisers I have seen grow fastest tend to think about audiences in terms of situations and motivations rather than demographics. Not “women aged 30-45” but “people who have just made a decision that changes their financial responsibilities and are now reassessing how they manage money.” That framing tells you something about what they are thinking, what they are anxious about, and where they are likely to be paying attention. Demographics tell you almost none of that.

There is a useful parallel in how financial services firms have had to rethink audience strategy as population needs evolve. The instinct to segment by age or income bracket is understandable, but the advertisers who win tend to be the ones who understand the underlying motivations and moments that drive financial decisions, not just the demographic profile of the person making them.

The Budget Decision Most Advertisers Get Wrong

How much should an advertiser spend? The honest answer is that most advertisers do not know, and the methods commonly used to set budgets are not as rigorous as they appear.

Percentage of revenue is the most common approach. It is also the most circular. If your revenue is down, your budget goes down, which makes it harder to grow revenue back up. If your revenue is up, your budget goes up, which may mean you are over-investing in a market you have already captured. The method assumes that last year’s performance is a reliable guide to what this year’s investment should be. It rarely is.

Competitive parity is slightly better because it at least acknowledges that advertising operates in a competitive context. But it still does not tell you whether the category is spending at the right level overall, or whether your competitors are making the same mistakes you are.

The approach that makes the most commercial sense is to start with what you are trying to achieve, model what it would take to achieve it, and then stress-test that against what you can actually afford. This sounds obvious. In 20 years I have seen it done rigorously perhaps a handful of times. Most budget-setting processes are political exercises dressed up as analytical ones.

The other budget mistake worth naming is the allocation between brand and performance. Advertisers who have been through a period of strong performance marketing results tend to keep shifting budget toward performance until the pipeline weakens. By the time the weakness is visible in the numbers, the brand investment that would have prevented it needed to have happened 12 to 18 months earlier. You cannot fix a brand deficit quickly. The investment has a long lag.

What Measurement Does to Advertiser Behaviour

The measurement tools available to advertisers today are genuinely impressive. They are also genuinely dangerous if you mistake precision for accuracy.

When I was running agency teams managing significant ad spend, one of the recurring conversations I had with clients was about what the attribution model was actually showing them. Last-click attribution was the default for years, and it systematically overstated the contribution of search and direct channels while understating the contribution of everything that had primed the customer earlier in the process. We all knew this. The clients knew it too. But last-click produced clean, defensible numbers, and clean defensible numbers are easier to take into a board meeting than honest approximations.

The consequence is that advertisers built budget allocation models on top of measurement frameworks that were structurally biased. The channels that looked most efficient got more money. The channels that were actually doing the heavy lifting of building demand got cut. Over time, this created a generation of advertisers who were very good at harvesting demand and quite poor at creating it.

This connects to a broader point about market penetration strategy. Growing market share requires reaching people who do not yet have a strong preference for your brand. That kind of reach is almost impossible to measure with the precision advertisers have come to expect from performance channels. But the inability to measure it precisely does not make it less real. It just makes it easier to cut.

I judged the Effie Awards, and one of the things that process reinforced for me was how rarely the most effective campaigns were the most measurable ones in the short term. Effectiveness and measurability are not the same thing. Advertisers who conflate them end up optimising for what they can see rather than what is actually working.

The Advertiser as Strategic Actor, Not Just Buyer

There is a version of the advertiser role that is essentially procurement. You have a budget, you need to buy media, you negotiate rates, you place the spend, you report the results. This version of the role is fine if your market is stable, your competitors are complacent and your brand is already strong. In most categories, none of those conditions hold.

The more commercially useful version of the advertiser role is strategic. It starts with a genuine understanding of where the business is trying to go, what is preventing it from getting there faster, and what role advertising can realistically play in closing that gap. That framing changes the nature of every decision downstream.

I remember a brainstorm early in my career, the kind where the room is full of energy and everyone is pitching ideas, and the question on the table was essentially: what should we say? The more useful question, the one that rarely gets asked early enough, is: who do we need to reach that we are not currently reaching, and what do we need them to believe that they do not currently believe? Answer that question well and the creative brief almost writes itself. Skip it and you end up with work that is entertaining but commercially inert.

Scaling advertising effectively also requires the kind of organisational agility that BCG has written about in the context of scaling agile practices. The advertiser who can move quickly, test assumptions, and reallocate budget based on what is actually happening in market has a structural advantage over one locked into annual planning cycles and rigid channel commitments.

Where Advertiser Strategy Breaks Down in Practice

The gap between advertiser strategy on paper and advertiser behaviour in practice is wider than most organisations acknowledge. A few patterns recur with enough frequency that they are worth naming directly.

The first is short-termism driven by reporting cycles. When the business reports quarterly, the pressure to show results quarterly is intense. Advertising that builds brand salience over 12 to 24 months does not fit that rhythm. So it gets deprioritised in favour of activity that produces numbers within the reporting window, even if those numbers are measuring the wrong things.

The second is channel inertia. Once a channel is working, the default is to keep spending on it until it demonstrably stops working. This sounds rational but it ignores the opportunity cost of not testing alternatives, and it ignores the fact that channel effectiveness tends to degrade gradually rather than suddenly. By the time the decline is obvious, you have often missed the window to build capability in the channels that would have replaced it.

The third is creative underinvestment. Media gets the budget debate and the strategic attention. Creative is often treated as a cost to be minimised rather than a variable that determines whether the media investment works at all. An advertiser who buys excellent media placements for mediocre creative has not made a good advertising decision. They have made an expensive mistake with a good distribution plan.

There is also the question of how advertisers think about growth more broadly. Growth frameworks that focus purely on optimising existing funnels miss the structural question of whether the funnel is pointed at the right audience in the first place. An advertiser who is very efficient at reaching the wrong people is not performing well. They are failing efficiently.

The intelligent growth model Forrester has discussed points toward something more sustainable: growth that comes from genuinely understanding where value is being created and concentrating advertising investment there, rather than spreading spend across every available channel in the hope that something sticks.

The Advertiser in a Fragmenting Media Landscape

The media environment advertisers operate in today is structurally different from the one that existed even a decade ago. Audiences are fragmented across more platforms, more formats and more contexts than any planning model can fully account for. The instinct is to be everywhere. The smarter move is to be somewhere specific with enough presence to actually register.

Fragmentation also creates an opportunity that many advertisers miss. When attention is scattered, the advertiser who shows up consistently in the right context has a disproportionate share of voice relative to their spend. This is particularly true in niche categories where the total volume of advertising is low. You do not need a large budget to dominate a specific context. You need the discipline to choose the right context and commit to it.

Creator partnerships are an increasingly significant part of how advertisers reach fragmented audiences. Working with creators as part of a go-to-market strategy is not a social media tactic. Done well, it is a way of reaching specific audiences through voices they already trust, in contexts where they are genuinely receptive. Done badly, it is expensive content production with no strategic logic behind the creator selection.

The advertiser’s job in a fragmented landscape is not to chase every new format. It is to make clear-headed decisions about where their audience is actually paying attention, and then to show up there with enough consistency and quality to build genuine salience over time. That requires patience, which is the resource most advertisers are shortest on.

There is also a healthcare and regulated category dimension worth noting. Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market challenges in regulated industries illustrates how the advertiser’s strategic options narrow significantly when category rules constrain what can be said, to whom and in what context. The advertisers who thrive in those environments tend to be the ones who have thought hardest about the moments and motivations that drive decisions, because they cannot rely on volume or broad reach to compensate for weak strategy.

What Separates Effective Advertisers From Average Ones

After two decades of watching advertisers make decisions, the differences between the ones who compound and the ones who plateau are fairly consistent.

Effective advertisers are clear about what they are trying to change. Not “increase brand awareness” or “drive consideration.” Something specific: we need people in this situation to think of us before they think of our competitor, because right now they are not thinking of us at all. That specificity makes every downstream decision easier and every piece of work more accountable.

Effective advertisers treat their measurement framework as a working hypothesis rather than a source of truth. They use the data to inform decisions, not to justify them. There is a meaningful difference. One is a thinking process. The other is a political one.

Effective advertisers also maintain some investment in activities they cannot fully measure. Not because measurement does not matter, but because they understand that the absence of a measurement mechanism does not mean the absence of an effect. Brand advertising, content, sponsorship, creator partnerships, these things work even when the attribution model cannot see them working. The advertisers who cut them entirely because they are hard to measure tend to find out why that was a mistake about 18 months later.

And effective advertisers are honest about the limits of what advertising can do. It can shift awareness. It can change perceptions. It can accelerate consideration and prompt trial. It cannot fix a product that does not work, a price point that is wrong for the market, or a distribution model that makes purchase inconvenient. Advertisers who expect advertising to compensate for those problems will be disappointed. The ones who understand what advertising is actually for tend to use it much more effectively.

If you are thinking about how advertiser strategy connects to the broader commercial decisions that drive growth, there is more on the mechanics of that relationship across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, where these themes are explored in more depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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