I started in marketing when digital still behaved like a lever, and the lever was embarrassingly easy to pull. You could publish a few half-decent blog posts, put some money into ads, rinse a webinar list, and walk into the next meeting with a chart that went up.
It made a lot of us feel smart in a way that was only loosely connected to being smart.
It also trained a generation of marketers to treat distribution as the strategy, because distribution kept paying out anyway.
That period wasn’t fake. You weren’t imagining it.
You were renting cheap reach inside systems that had more supply than demand, and the platforms were happy to keep you addicted.
The habit that outlived the conditions
The trap is thinking the lever still exists, and that the only thing missing is you pulling it harder.
That belief shows up as “we just need more volume”, “we just need a new channel”, “we just need a better funnel”, and “we just need to fix attribution”.
It persists because it flatters everyone involved.
The marketer gets to stay in the comfort zone of tactics. The exec gets to feel like growth is a purchasing decision. The platform gets paid whether or not anything has changed in the market.
Reach is still the strong force
I still think of reach as the strong force.
It is the thing that holds growth together better than almost anything else.
That framing explains why so much “better messaging” work fails to move the dial when the audience is tiny.
It also explains why weaker work can appear to work when enough of the market sees it.
If people do not encounter you, you do not get encoded into memory. You do not become easy to retrieve. You do not become a safe option when the buying group is trying to avoid embarrassment.
The part many performance-era careers skipped is that reach only becomes useful when it is doing a job in the mind, rather than merely appearing in a dashboard.
That is the point of mental availability and memory structures. They are about being easy to think of in buying situations, across a much longer span than a two-week reporting window allows.
The related problem is attention: reach only helps if the encounter gives the market something to notice and retrieve. That is the companion argument in The attention bottleneck.
When digital becomes infrastructure
Reach still matters.
It is now fenced in, priced more realistically, and mediated by systems optimised for the platform’s outcomes as much as yours.
In practice, “digital” now sits inside identity, privacy, auctions, recommendations, and measurement.
If you grew up in the lever era, you could treat the platform like a vending machine. Targeting was sharp, tracking was generous, and competition was still thin.
Those conditions have been degrading for years.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency cut into the old mobile feedback loop by requiring permission before apps track users. Apple’s own documentation makes the mechanism clear enough: opting out removes the identifier advertisers use to follow behaviour across apps.
Google’s Chrome cookie saga tells the same story in a messier way. A long-running plan to remove third-party cookies became a sequence of delays, competition concerns, advertiser resistance, and revised privacy controls, with Google eventually saying it would not roll out the standalone third-party-cookie prompt it had previously planned.
Google has been openly preparing advertisers for third-party cookie changes in Chrome, with timelines repeatedly tied up in competition and regulatory concerns. Normal tracking is no longer a quiet technical detail. It is a political, regulatory, and commercial fight.
None of this kills advertising.
It just means the easy advantage moved from knowing the hack to understanding how markets, memory, and buying behaviour work under less forgiving conditions.
The dashboard that ate the budget
Here is a familiar workflow if you work in B2B SaaS with a quarterly number hanging over your head.
The CFO wants predictability. The CEO wants momentum. Everyone agrees that “brand is important” right up until the pipeline review.
So you build a performance plan because it produces weekly signals, and weekly signals make the company feel less terrified.
You run search, LinkedIn, retargeting, nurture, and more reporting so nobody has to argue about the messy bits.
It looks healthy because the system is designed to show you something, and because the conversions you can still measure are the ones the platform is best at taking credit for.
Then costs creep. Lead quality drifts. Sales starts saying “same names, same companies”. The buying cycle stubbornly stays six to twelve months anyway.
That is the same operating habit behind Marketing ops overload: visible systems expanding until they start consuming the work they were meant to support.
So you tighten targeting, because tightening targeting is what you do when you need control.
Now you have the death spiral in miniature: less reach, less future demand, less confidence, more pressure to optimise, and a plan that slowly eats market presence to feed the reporting machine.
Les Binet and Will Davis’s IPA work puts numbers behind the underlying mistake, showing budget and scale driving profit variation far more than ROI in effectiveness case studies, which is awkward if your plan has been built to worship ROI.
Why this keeps happening
It keeps happening because organisations reward what can be defended in a meeting, not what is true in a market.
Attribution is comforting because it gives you a story with a villain and a hero, and the hero is usually the thing you can buy more of this month.
Platforms reinforce the behaviour because they sell certainty, and certainty is a high-margin product.
Marketers reinforce it because the lever era produced a whole identity around being good at digital, which is hard to let go of when it paid your mortgage.
There is also a status game buried in it.
Brand work requires patience, taste, and consistency, which makes it harder to claim personal ownership of the result in the next performance review.
Performance work produces clean artefacts: dashboards, funnels, spreadsheets, campaign reports. They are easy to point at when you need to prove you are valuable.
The irony is that the more measurement degrades, the more the organisation clings to measurement theatre, because letting go would mean admitting it is making bets.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute has popularised the useful 95:5 framing: most B2B buyers are out-of-market most of the time.
If your mental model says ads should work inside the next fortnight, you will keep designing for the small part of the market you can see. You will keep starving the much larger group of future buyers who decide whether the business has a market later.
Decisions after the lever era
After the lever era, performance marketing still has a job.
The decision is what job each activity is doing.
Some activity is there to capture demand now. Some is there to keep the category familiar. Some is there to refresh memory. Some is there because the organisation is scared and wants a number by Friday.
Those jobs are not the same.
That is where the decisions start.
You may need to pay for reach that does not convert in platform reporting, because the point is memory refresh, not a tracked event.
You may need to keep distinctive assets stable long enough to compound, even when internal stakeholders get bored and ask for a refresh.
You may need to trade some short-term efficiency for broader targeting when narrowness starts shrinking total impact.
You may need to invest in creative that travels without perfect targeting, because the targeting advantage is less dependable than it used to be.
And you need measurement that supports decisions, not protects careers. A metric should force a real stop, start, or continue call. If it does not, it is probably just theatre with a chart attached.
Fundamentals are what make reach useful
When people say “back to fundamentals”, they often mean “back to vibes”, as if we are all going to gather round a campfire and chant about purpose.
The useful version is unromantic and practical.
This is the same delay pattern behind We’ll do brand later: the work that makes later demand easier gets postponed because this quarter feels too exposed.
Positioning makes your reach coherent across time, so the market learns a stable association instead of a rotating set of claims. Distinctiveness then has something to stick to: memory retrieval is cue driven, and cues only work when you stop fiddling with them every quarter. Brand building can make performance spend work harder when the market already half recognises you.
This is where the lever story comes full circle.
When digital distribution was cheap, you could get away without doing the hard work, because the system gave you enough free lifts to feel competent.
Now the systems are harsher, the feedback loops are noisier, and the levers are guarded.
So the practical question is what happens when you do get reach.
Does it land?
Does it stick?
Does it make the next encounter easier?
Does it keep paying you back after the campaign is forgotten?
The blunt truth is that being good at digital is no longer a sustainable identity, because the platforms are getting better at doing the digital bit for you.