Meta and Reach vs Frequency

Don't pay for reach and get frequency

Thank you for your patience as I move Marketing BS back to a paid premium product. This is post four this week. I plan on continuing this cadence with two free posts and two premium paid posts per week. In the future I expect I will not clutter your inbox with previews of every paid post for the non-premium subscribers, but I thought I would to keep me top of mind during “re-launch week”. This is your last reminder than the “50% off forever” offer is about to expire tomorrow. After than Marketing BS will be $100/year. If you are not already familiar with the reach/frequency trade-off then this post should be worth 10x the annual cost of this subscription in terms of career benefit all by itself. Onto the post!

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Last week was Meta’s [do we still need to clarify we are talking about Facebook?] Q1 earnings call. It went well. The stock price jumped almost 15% from $209 to $240. Mark clarified that they are still doubling down on the Metaverse (while everyone else seems to be pivoting to AI), and that all of their businesses were growing nicely (Total revenue up 31% YoY, net income up 17% YoY, advertising views up and rev per view also up, content and AR revenue up 71%). But most interesting is the absolute size of their user base. From Mark’s comments:

For the first time, we surpassed 3 billion people using at least one of our family of apps on a daily basis in March and approximately 3.8 billion people use at least one on a monthly basis.

For this post I want to talk about the implications of those numbers, and how they relate to the number one thing most marketing agencies get wrong.

My fight with Marketing Agencies

The biggest fight I get into with the agencies of new clients is around reach vs frequency. When I was at P&G 20+ years ago I was told that marketing plans should attempt to achieve 3 and 80. Three advertising impressions per person to 80% of your target audience per purchase cycle. I have since dug into the origin of the rule and found that it was more anecdotal than scientific (more on this in a future post). What IS science/fact is that the first impression on any individual is worth more than the second impression (which in turn is worth more than the third impression).

Think of it this way: