The boardroom ritual
Each month, the same scene plays out in boardrooms around the world.
A media agency stands before a brand manager, pointing proudly to a glossy deck. “Last quarter, your media wastage sat at 15%,” they declare. “But thanks to our new hyper-granular targeting parameters, we’ve managed to slice that waste down to just 4%. Look how much of your budget we saved.”
The brand manager applauds. The agency retainer is safely renewed. Everyone goes home happy.
But there is a dark, unspoken truth lurking beneath the applause. The agency didn’t save the brand money. They gave you a framework for thinking about marketing that is wrong in every direction it points. And the damage runs much deeper than your media plan.
The Wanamaker problem
Most people in marketing know the quote. John Wanamaker, the 19th century retail pioneer, famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
It has been repeated in boardrooms for over a century. It feels honest. It feels relatable. And it is far too generous.
The reality is not a neat 50/50 split between what works and what doesn’t. The evidence points to something far more lopsided: roughly 10% of creative work drives approximately 95% of measurable marketing value. The remaining 90% doesn’t fail catastrophically – it simply doesn’t break through.
This is what statisticians call a fat-tailed distribution. A small number of outcomes produce a wildly disproportionate share of the results. It shows up in publishing, in music, in venture capital, and in marketing more clearly than almost anywhere else.
Call it the 10/95 rule.
Here is why it matters: if you cannot know in advance which 10% of your creative will deliver the outsized results, and the evidence strongly suggests you cannot, then the entire logic of modern marketing efficiency is built on a false premise.
You are optimising a system that rewards the unpredictable as if it were predictable. And you are losing.
The media wastage fallacy
To understand how badly this plays out in practice, start with how the industry thinks about media.
“Media wastage” has become the ultimate boogeyman. Fuelled by the rise of performance marketing and an industry obsessed with efficiency over effectiveness, brands are relentlessly pursuing the elimination of every impression that doesn’t lead to an immediate, trackable action.
But media wastage isn’t a leak in your budget. It’s a fabricated metric designed to make agencies look indispensable.
Think about what hyper-targeting actually does in practice. A brand selling a premium product targets women aged 35, driving a Mercedes, living in a specific zip code, working in corporate tech. An ad is served to a 33-year-old woman driving a BMW who lives two blocks outside that zip code. The agency’s dashboard flags it as waste.
But that woman might be six months away from being the brand’s ideal customer. She might tell three friends. She might remember the brand when her life circumstances shift. The data doesn’t capture any of that, so the agency calls it waste and charges you to eliminate it.
What performance marketers call media wastage is actually long-term brand building and mental availability. When a brand serving products for women over 30 reaches a 23-year-old, the short-term dashboard screams inefficiency.
But in seven years, when that woman enters the target demographic, she will choose the brand she has known for a decade over the competitor that starts aggressively targeting her the morning of her 30th birthday.
Brand building is about influencing people before they are actively in the market to buy. If you only target the fraction of people ready to purchase today, you are trapping your brand in a hyper-aggressive, low-margin price war with no exit.
There is also a practical problem with hyper-targeting that agencies don’t advertise. It drives up your cost per thousand impressions significantly. You are paying more money to reach fewer people, under the guise of efficiency. Broad reach looks easy, which makes it hard for agencies to charge a premium for it.
Hyper-granular targeting looks like rocket science, which justifies high retainers. The incentive structure is not aligned with your growth.
The AI platforms have already solved the targeting problem, by the way. Meta, TikTok and YouTube don’t need a human strategist building 42 micro-segmented custom audiences. They need good creative and a broad audience signal.
The algorithm will find the buyers. It is better at this than any team of people pulling levers in an ad manager. When you hyper-target, you are not helping the machine. You are constraining it.
The creative wastage fallacy
Here is where the story gets uncomfortable.
Everything just described about media targeting? Brands are doing the exact same thing to their creative. And almost nobody is talking about it.
The same efficiency logic that drives hyper-targeting in media now drives creative decisions too. Ads are pre-tested to death. Concepts are run past focus groups. Everything is optimised for recall scores and brand safety. Anything that feels unfamiliar, risky, or genuinely different gets killed before it sees daylight.
Brands are, in effect, trying to eliminate creative wastage. And in doing so they are systematically filtering out the 10% that would have mattered.
Think about what that means in practice: If breakthrough creative is by definition unpredictable, then every process designed to de-risk creative decisions is a process designed to remove your best outcomes. The pre-test doesn’t find the winner. It finds the inoffensive middle. And the inoffensive middle doesn’t build brands.
The greatest campaigns in advertising history would not have survived a modern approval process. They were strange, bold, or counterintuitive. They looked like risks. They were risks. That’s precisely why they worked.
The job of a CMO is not to make the 90% more efficient. It is to maximise the number of shots you take at the 10%. That requires volume, variety, and the courage to back ideas that might fail, because the alternative is a portfolio of safe, focus-grouped creative that is statistically guaranteed never to break through.
You cannot A/B test your way to a cultural moment. You cannot eliminate creative risk, without also eliminating creative upside.
The bridge: Creative volume solves both problems
So what do you actually do about it?
The answer is less complicated than the industry wants you to believe. If 10% of your creative drives 95% of your results, and you can’t predict which 10%, then the most rational response is to increase the total volume of creative you produce. More attempts mean a larger absolute pool of potential breakthrough work. You are not trying to find the winner in advance; you are creating more chances for a winner to emerge.
But here is the part that connects everything: higher creative volume doesn’t just solve the creative problem. It solves the media problem at the same time.
When you give a platform a single piece of creative and a hyper-targeted audience, you are making every decision yourself. You are telling the algorithm who to reach, and what to say to them. You are removing its ability to do the thing it is genuinely better at than any human team.
When you give a platform varied creative at volume and a broad audience, something different happens. The algorithm tests each piece of creative against real audience behaviour in real time. It finds the people most likely to connect with each execution. It optimises toward engagement signals you couldn’t have predicted; and wouldn’t have thought to target.
The creative becomes the targeting mechanism.
This is why the framing of “creative or media” has always been wrong. And “creative plus media” is only marginally better. The real relationship is multiplicative, not additive. Great creative amplifies media reach. Broad media reach amplifies the impact of great creative. Volume amplifies both.
Which brings us to the only formula that actually matters in modern marketing.
The formula
(Creative x Media) x (Quality x Quantity x Continuity)
Each element multiplies the others. Zero in any variable collapses the whole equation.
Quality means creative that is genuinely distinctive, not just competent. Quantity means enough volume to give the algorithm real signals, and give your 10% a chance to emerge. Continuity means staying in market long enough for brand memory to compound – because mental availability is built over years, not quarters.
The industry has spent two decades optimising individual variables in isolation. Better targeting. Cheaper production. Shorter campaigns. Every intervention made one number look better, while quietly degrading the system as a whole.
The brands winning long-term are not doing something complicated. They are producing more creative, running it broadly, and staying consistent for longer than feels comfortable. They are making more bets than everyone else. They are funding the search generously, because they understand this to be the only way to reliably find the solution.
Conclusion: Ask better questions
The next time an agency stands in front of you, proud of the four percent wastage figure on slide seven, do not applaud.
Ask them how many pieces of your creative they tested last quarter. Ask them what percentage of your budget went to broad-reach versus hyper-targeted audiences. Ask them how long your best performing campaigns ran before they were pulled. Ask them how many shots you were given at the 10%.
If they can’t answer these questions, they are optimising your budget for their own metrics; not your growth.
The greatest brands in history did not build global empires by hunting down two percent variances in demographic targeting data. They built them through broad, unapologetic, emotionally resonant creative, run at volume, for longer than felt rational.
They understood something the efficiency experts never will. Today’s wastage, in media and in creative, is tomorrow’s market share.
Stop trying to eliminate it. Start trying to earn it.
Pieter Geyser is commercial director at Humanz.
*Part two of this series examines how the separation of creative and media into different agencies creates the structural conditions for this problem, why the industry’s biggest players are now scrambling to reverse it, and why they will struggle to fix it as long as they still believe one discipline is more important than the other.
