Brands Mistarget 95% of Consumers by Over-Investing in Direct Purchase Intent
Nerissa Valdellon, SVP of Media Solutions at Channel Factory, discussed how brands need to rethink campaign strategies by focusing on the '4S' framework (scroll, stream, search, shop) rather than traditional funnel stages. She highlighted the inefficiency of solely targeting the 5% of consumers actively looking to buy, advocating for advertisers to engage the other 95% earlier in their fragmented digital journeys. Channel Factory assists brands in measuring ad performance through incrementality across social platforms.
Key Takeaways
- Only 5% of consumers are considered 'in-market' at any given time, yet this segment attracts the highest media costs.
- Consumers now navigate an average of seven digital platforms daily, rendering traditional linear purchase funnels obsolete.
- The 4S framework (scroll, stream, search, shop) replaces channel-locked planning with behavior-based engagement strategies.
- Channel Factory uses incrementality measurement to track how video and social discovery drive outcomes beyond immediate conversions.
Why It Matters
The migration of search and discovery to streaming and social platforms necessitates a shift from lower-funnel obsession to holistic behavioral targeting. As the 'in-market' 5% segment becomes increasingly expensive due to automated bidding competition, advertisers must move upstream to capture intent before it matures. For the streaming ecosystem, this reinforces the role of ad-supported tiers as critical discovery vehicles rather than just reach extensions. In the coming year, watch for shifts in attribution models as brand marketers increasingly favor incrementality metrics over last-click conversion data to justify cross-platform spend.
Additional Context
The emphasis on reaching the 95% of non-shoppers aligns with broader industry data indicating a 'mental availability' crisis in digital advertising. Per WARC research from April 2026, brands focusing exclusively on high-intent performance marketing saw a 12% decline in brand equity scores compared to those maintaining a 60/40 split between brand building and activation. This shift coincides with the IAB’s May 2026 report on 'Retail Media 2.0,' which noted that 65% of buyers now integrate CTV into their retail media budgets specifically to influence discovery phases rather than just the point of sale. Simultaneously, the technical landscape for measuring this '95%' is evolving through clean room integrations. Recent data from Omdia in June 2026 indicates that top-tier streaming platforms have increased their investments in first-party data collaboration by 40% year-over-year. This allows brands to track the 'sprint sideways through the funnel' that Valdellon described by linking streaming exposure to eventual offline or third-party retail purchases. Furthermore, the rise of 'social search'—where Gen Z and Millennial cohorts use video platforms instead of traditional search engines—has forced companies like Google and Amazon to rethink their ad-stack interoperability to prevent losing market share to fragmented, discovery-led ecosystems.
Read full article at beet.tv
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