A few months ago I started reviewing our Amazon campaigns systematically. Precise targeting, narrow audiences, high relevance scores — across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. The conversion rate looked solid, the TACoS was okay. The budget was gone, the reach was modest. I closed the document and thought: we need to do this differently.

That's not a one-off. It's a pattern I see everywhere — internally, in earlier roles, in agency conversations. Precision targeting is what everyone talks about. Reach sounds old-fashioned by comparison, almost naive. But the reality is the opposite.

Byron Sharp documented this clearly in "How Brands Grow." Brands don't grow by deepening loyalty with existing customers. They grow by reaching new buyers — people who barely know the brand, buy rarely, but will buy eventually, if the brand is present when the need arises. He calls it mental availability. And you don't build that by running ads to the same 3 percent of the population over and over.

The problem with precision targeting is structural. When I only reach people who are already ready to buy, I'm competing in the most expensive segment. Auction prices are high, CPMs are elevated, margins are tight. And I fall back on metrics that look good: conversion rate, ROAS, cost per acquisition. What I don't measure: how many people who don't know my brand today should know it next month.

At TZS First Austria, I work in a category where most purchase decisions are impulse-driven or situational. Someone doesn't search for a hand blender because they've been loyal to a brand for years. They search because their old one broke. In that moment, the brand that wins is the one they already know — not the one that hit them with a "purchase intent" segment on Meta three weeks ago.

That doesn't make targeting irrelevant. It has its place — lower funnel, retargeting, campaigns with a direct sales objective. But if I invest exclusively there, I'm building on a foundation I didn't lay myself. I'm harvesting awareness that others built, or that happened by accident.

What I've learned in practice: reach requires confidence. Not because it's risky, but because it's harder to justify. Explaining to a managing director why we're putting money into awareness campaigns with no directly attributable ROAS is a different conversation than "look how precisely we're targeting." Awareness works with a delay. And that delay is uncomfortable in a world focused on quarterly targets.

But here's the question I keep coming back to: if we only target the 3 percent who are ready to buy right now — who fills the sponge we're trying to squeeze?