Unlearning marketing’s biggest myths

Every generation of marketers has its north star: Rule of Seven, 60/40 rule, optimizing to attention, space on the shelf.

For years, these ideas shaped strategies, media plans and boardroom conversations. Although they weren't necessarily wrong, the ‘old ways to win’ have been overtaken.

Our Strategy Directors Andy Johnson and Emma Lambourne put marketing myths to the test in this article, uncovering what brands need to do to get discovered today.

Because the way people discover brands has fundamentally changed. The buying journey no longer starts with a TV commercial, a search engine or even a retailer. It starts with a machine. So the question isn’t if people know your brand. It's now whether algorithms do.

Marketing has been solving the wrong problem

Naturally, brands and marketers are obsessed over getting seen; impressions, reach and attention metrics all defined visibility. 

But do audiences ever genuinely struggle to find anything online anymore? When shopping for hotels, mortgage providers, sneakers… finding them isn’t a problem at all. Most of us carry phones in our pockets that can surface thousands of options in seconds. The real focus for marketers today is recommendation. 

So, today's challenge isn't about appearing anywhere. It's appearing where algorithms now decide what gets recommended. And this is a completely different problem.

It’s about pinpointing the right surfaces where your brand should be visible to be in the best position to achieve growth.

Frequency isn't dead. It's just not enough.

The Rule of Seven became one of marketing's longest-running assumptions: consumers need to see your message seven times before they'll act.

For years, that thinking justified media plans across every category. However, researchers like Byron Sharp argued frequency should depend on your category, your objectives and your brand. There was never one magic number.

And in the digital era, attention fragmented, channels multiplied, creative got even shorter and consumer behavior became less predictable. Frequency couldn’t be led by a formula.

So in the words of our Senior Organic Director, Paul Norris, report, tweak, repeat to find the right cadence for your brand.

Then we all started chasing attention

As impressions lost meaning, attention became the industry's new obsession. Finally, a metric that recognised not every view is equal; it seemed like the most useful way to measure marketing success. Until marketers started asking the same question they'd asked about frequency: What's the magic number? 

First, the sweet spot for effective attention was 2.5 seconds – long enough to register but short enough to demand creative discipline. Then this became under 2 seconds. And now research suggests distinctive brands can create recall in around 1.5 seconds. In just a few years, the ‘correct’ answer almost halved. The pace of the environment kept changing, and fast.

So, we know that attention matters as a useful marketing metric. But it’s not a silver bullet for marketing success. Both high and low attention processing can be important in different contexts based on involvement and value to the audience. Evidence is even emerging that small bursts of attention spread across multiple platforms can outperform large TV formats. But, again, there's no universal threshold that survives platform shifts and changing behaviour.

More spend isn’t a quick fix

Marketing used to reward fewer, bigger moments, with the 60/40 rule (the suggestion that you should spend 60% of budget on brand building and 40% on sales activation) famously yielding the best long term results. Because of this, the industry believed all marketers needed to do was write a cheque to a media network and just be there.

However, today, evidence increasingly points in the opposite direction. In fact, multiple short moments across different platforms can outperform a handful of expensive, high-attention placements. In the digital era, people don't experience brands in one place anymore. Discovery is fragmented, so audiences experience them everywhere. This means it isn’t as simple as buying our way to the top and that presence is no longer wholesale.

If you’re wondering where to start in this new landscape, check out this guide to discovery marketing from VP of Strategy, Lydia Hinchliff.

The shelf has disappeared

Physical availability used to be about shelf space. Then it became about being easy to find online. More recently, it expanded into marketplaces, social commerce, and other digital channels. Since its launch 2 years ago, TikTok Shop has claimed a 1% share of global ecommerce revenue. 

But another shift is underway and the physical and virtual ‘shelf’ is disappearing altogether.

More and more people are replacing traditional search with AI assistants. Instead of browsing pages of results, they're asking questions like:

• "What running shoes should I buy?"


• "What's the best CRM?"


• "Recommend a hotel in Barcelona."

The difference is that these recommendations aren't coming from a search results page, instead, they're coming from AI. That changes what it means to be discoverable. If ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI assistant doesn't surface your brand when it's relevant, you're less likely to be part of the customer's consideration set. That isn't necessarily a reflection of product quality, but, if AI doesn't mention your brand, you're effectively off the shelf. So, it’s key now more than ever for the machines to truly understand your brand.

Organic Strategy Director, Becs Jackson, and Creative Director, Amy Jones have written about how you can be distinctive for AI-led platforms to understand your brand through a blend of consistency and creativity.

Stop looking for the next rule

The biggest mistake marketers could make right now is asking: "What's the new framework to stay ahead?". There isn't one.

We've watched every major marketing principle evolve over the last decade because the environment changed faster than the theory.

Optimizing for one metric, one platform or one playbook is exactly what leaves brands exposed.

Being present today means more than buying media. It means showing up wherever discovery happens: paid, owned, earned, search, social, commerce and AI.

The brands that win won't simply create better advertising; they need to become easier for both humans and machines to find. Because in a machine-mediated world, discoverability is the new availability. And presence is the strategy that makes it possible.

How to build a clearer picture of presence

To get a real sense of whether your brand really does have presence in the right way, ask yourself these three questions:

Where are we being discovered?

Map every realistic encounter and identify where competitors appear before you do. Where does the brand appear before someone knows its name? Do you appear for needs, problems, questions, and not just the product you want to sell? Look at the unexpected: creator mentions, Reddit threads, review roundups, press mentions, AI answers etc. 

Is our visibility creating real market access? 

Test whether you are building durable, multi-channel demand or simply paying digital rent through paid media. Compare share of search, share of traffic, brand recall, category visibility, and share of voice against the competitor set. Do not look at these in isolation. And ask yourself whether visibility is concentrated in one place.

What does a new buyer see first?

Experience the category as an unfamiliar customer would, then identify who owns the early decision space. Run the journey as if you didn’t even know the brand existed. Which brand dominated? Which questions are answered? Is the brand easy to find? What’s your first impression of the category?

 

Want to learn more about discovery marketing and how our Discovery System creates genuine growth, by mastering today’s new terrain? Let’s talk.