Every Brand Has Access to Reach and yet almost None of Them Know What to Put Inside It.

Distribution used to be the hard part. You needed a budget, an agency, and someone in the room who knew which pages were worth buying. That barrier did a lot of work on everyone's behalf, because by the time a brand got heard it had usually been through enough scrutiny that something had to be worth saying before anyone signed off on saying it.

That's gone now and mostly for the better.

Any brand with a phone and a modest budget can reach more people than most national campaigns managed twenty years ago. Thinking about it most the brands I personally listen to would never have made it past the old gatekeepers.

What this shift also did was show how few organisations had anything ready for the moment they finally got the room.

I've lost count of the planning sessions that opened with a distribution question.

Which platforms, what frequency, where the budget splits. Everyone's engaged and everyone's got a view. It feels like progress because the answers are concrete. Then I ask what the brand actually believes that nobody else in the category could claim and the energy leaves. Someone suggests we park it for a workshop. The workshop produces a deck. The deck gets filed somewhere nobody opens it again and the media plan goes live regardless.

I've been that person too, by the way. Easier to build a plan than to admit the underlying thing isn't there yet.

You can see the result everywhere. Brands publishing constantly across every surface, hitting cadence and meeting brief while saying almost nothing that survives being read twice. 

Reach without a position is just faster forgetting. You get in front of more people and fall out of their memory at the same speed, so the only way to stay present is to keep paying. 

The brands cutting through did it in the opposite order. They worked out their position first and then used cheap distribution to carry something that was already worth carrying. Amplification multiplies whatever you put into it, including zero. Remember that.

There's a competitive argument in here too, and it matters most if you're the smaller one in the fight. Volume is the single advantage a bigger competitor can always out-buy you on. Whatever you spend, they can spend more and if the game is who gets seen most often then you lose on arithmetic before you start. What they can't buy is a position they're not built to hold. A read on the category that only makes sense coming from you.

Most brands are solving for how to get heard. The better question and the one almost nobody sits with long enough is what you'd want someone to repeat about you when you're not in the room.

Without an answer to that, more reach just means more people encountering nothing.

Shot of the good stuff.