Tom Phillips | CEO & Founding Partner at Connecting Plots
The audience comes first. The media landscape has evolved faster than most agencies. The prize now goes to brands that orchestrate across silos, engineer coherence, and win the game of inches.
We used to place our bets on the Big Ad. One script. One media buy. One perfectly timed reveal that could change a brand’s fortune overnight.
That era has passed. Not because creativity lost its spark, but because the ground moved under our feet. Culture, technology and behaviour have dismantled the notion of a single captive moment.
We don’t gather around the telly at 8:30pm. We live inside a splintered attention economy where brands are built in millimetres, not miles. It’s no longer a stage; it’s a street fight against other brands, a meme, or a creator with a ring light.
What changed, and who’s leading?
Targeting has gone from crude proxies to rich signals. Mindsets, motivators, behaviours, in-market, out-of-market and everything in between.
As media capability accelerated, media agencies increasingly called the shots. Yet the operating model around it has fragmented. Client teams across brand, growth, social and PR each work with siloed partners. The result is complexity without a compounding effect. Too much content, too little that’s truly felt, and far too much that’s instantly ignorable.
The great disconnect
A one-message-fits-all execution no longer cuts it. “Fit for channel” is table stakes. The real job is fit for purpose with creative, message and media working together to meet different objectives across the customer journey. And unlike yesterday’s fireworks, today’s assets need stamina and consistency over time, not just noise on launch day.
Still, many ecosystems are assembled piecemeal. The hero asset gets the love. Everything else is farmed out as “extras”, detached from strategy and stripped of coherence. No wonder so much value leaks between the cracks.
The orchestrator era
What brands need is a story that is told over many plots. They need an orchestrator (agency-side, client-side, or both) that connects the audience, idea, channels, cadence, and measurement to squeeze out effectiveness and efficiency. Owned comes first, paid is the insurance policy, and earned is the sizzle that makes it sing.
Think living content systems (rather than campaigns) with ideas that are designed for the realities of each channel, optimised for attention, deployed with precision, and built to compound. The six-second pre-roll matters. The reel matters. The humble shelf wobbler matters. Each touchpoint is a brushstroke, and together, they form the picture.
Five moves for marketers and their partners
- Start with the audience, not the asset
Establish a shared “audience operating system” that covers audience profiles. It should include respective mindsets, motivators and messages, and be mapped against the customer journey. Because if the audience, context and message aren’t defined, orchestration isn’t possible.
- Create one strategic spine
Develop a unifying platform that flexes from brand to demand and map channels against it. While they are very different outputs, a reactive TikTok and a packaging tweak should both feel unmistakably “you”.
- Engineer fit-for-purpose creative
Design for each channel’s strengths and constraints. Quality content beats quantity; create fewer, sharper assets that nudge interest into intent and provide value to audiences. Make it entertaining or make it educational; you get bonus points for both.
- Fix the operating model
Co-locate creative and media thinking, run weekly orchestration rituals, and empower a single owner of coherence. Incentivise partners on their compounded impact, not just outputs.
- Measure what compounds
Optimise for effective attention and branded memory, not just cheap reach. Judge the system by its ability to build salience over time and convert when it counts.
- The long game
This approach is more efficient and more powerful. Each impression strengthens the last. Each channel reinforces the idea. Over weeks and months, cohesion compounds into cultural presence.
The truth is disarmingly simple:
Every channel matters.
Every moment matters.
Get the inches right, and the yards look after themselves.