Wasted impressions may be advertising’s most misunderstood asset. New media analysis argues that reaching people who are not buying yet is what builds future demand, and that mass-reach media like AM/FM does it better than tightly targeted digital buys.
Cumulus Media Chief Insights Officer Pierre Bouvard is drawing on James Hurman’s new book, Future Demand: How Marketing To Tomorrow’s Customers Will Break Your Brand Out Of The Performance Trap, and a new study from Les Binet and Will Davis to argue that reaching a lot of people, including those not currently shopping, is what grows a business.
In an Audio Active Group post, Bouvard starts from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95/5 rule, which holds that only about 5% of buyers are in the market at any time. It says advertisers have two jobs: converting existing demand among the 5% through short-term sales activation, and creating future demand among the 95% through brand building aimed at broad reach.
On targeting, a February 2026 Advertiser Perceptions study of 304 marketers and media agencies found they attribute an average of 22% of a campaign’s sales contribution to targeting, while a Circana analysis of nearly 450 CPG campaigns put the figure at 11%. In October 2025, Bouvard made a related case that creative, not targeting, drives sales.
Among persons 25-54, out of home reaches 94% weekly, AM/FM radio 86%, and live and time-shifted TV 65%, while podcasts reach 69% monthly, Facebook 62%, YouTube 57%, and Instagram 50%. The radio and TV figures come from Nielsen Comparable Metrics via Katz Radio Group’s Sound Answers for the first quarter of 2026, the podcast figure from Edison Research’s The Infinite Dial 2026, and the other platforms from Spring 2026 MRI-Simmons. In July, Katz reported traditional radio reaching 87% of US adults weekly in the first quarter, ahead of smartphone app and web use at 82%.
Citing Binet and Peter Field’s 2013 IPA analysis, the deck says campaigns aimed at the whole market produced 6.7 very large business and brand effects on average, compared with 5.4 for campaigns aimed at new customers and 2.4 for existing customers. Among one-to-two-year campaigns, 34% of whole-market campaigns reported very large profit growth, versus 21% for new customers and 9% for existing customers. Among campaigns running three years or longer, 36% of those aimed at new customers reported very large profit growth, compared with 27% for the whole market and 13% for existing customers.
The Binet and Davis study found broadcast channels, defined as TV, newspapers, magazines, and AM/FM radio, averaged 40% across measures of quality, financial strength, confidence, popularity, success, and trust, compared with 29% for digital channels such as social media and online video. Broadcast channels scored 38% on quality versus 21% for digital and 28% on trust versus 20%. Hurman argues that ads on public media carry more weight because audiences know many others are seeing or hearing them, while personalized feeds are private.
The deck also cites Amplified Intelligence’s Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, whose research found over 85% of online ads do not reach the 2.5-second Attention-Memory Threshold, and a WPP Media study of 1.2 million consumer purchase journeys across 47 countries and 200 categories, which found 84% of purchases are effectively decided before shopping begins. In September, Bouvard cited Binet’s research in arguing that budget, not ROI, drives profit growth.
