Brand building isn't dead, but targeting has changed the rule: Experts

New Delhi: As marketers face increasing pressure to prove returns while navigating fragmented media environments, one debate continues to dominate boardrooms: should brands pursue mass reach or focus on precision targeting? That question took centre stage at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising's Cannes Lions 2026 session, ‘Go Big, Or Just Keep Posting? The New Battle for Growth’. In the session, marketing effectiveness expert Les Binet, TikTok's Group Lead for Global Accounts and Agencies Adrian Adaramoye, and McCann CEO Mel Arrow examined whether long-established principles of brand building still hold in an era of algorithms, creators, and always-on media. An era of fragmentation Opening the discussion, Arrow framed the issue as one of marketing's most persistent tensions. “We have the argument for scale,” he said, referring to the traditional belief that brands are built through broad reach, mental availability and sustained investment. On the other side sits a digital ecosystem where “every impression can be optimised, every audience segmented” and relevance has become central to campaign planning. Binet argued that the industry has become overly focused on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. “We've become obsessed with the small, prioritising efficiency over effectiveness,” he said. According to Binet, marketers have increasingly reduced advertising investment, narrowed audience targeting, and prioritised short-term return on investment, producing campaigns that are efficient but less capable of delivering long-term business growth. “We're producing a wall of small, low quality, highly disposable, churn and burn,” he said, describing what he sees as the consequences of shrinking creative ambition and fragmented media spending. His solution was a return to broader brand-building principles. Rather than concentrating solely on ROI, Binet argued that marketers should invest in scale, broader reach, long-term brand building, multiple media channels working together, and consistent creative platforms. “We need to think a lot more about investing, rather than focusing on ROI,” he said. Flip side of the argument Adaramoye offered a different perspective, arguing that today's consumers no longer move through neatly defined marketing funnels. “Modern consumers operate in fluid ecosystems where engagement and action happen simultaneously,” he said. Instead of separating brand and performance activity, he suggested brands should embrace what he described as “distributed scale” by appearing across thousands of communities, creators and cultural conversations simultaneously. “True modern scale is distributed scale,” he said. Rather than relying on a single mass-market message, Adaramoye argued that brands can build scale by becoming culturally relevant in multiple environments at once. The discussion also challenged the long-held belief that eliminating media waste automatically improves effectiveness. Binet argued that precision targeting often comes at a cost. “We have this myth that we can precisely target somebody,” he said, adding that marketers frequently “leave a lot of money at the table” by narrowing campaigns too aggressively. The question of attention quality The debate later shifted to attention quality. Adaramoye argued that attention earned in social feeds carries greater value because users actively choose to engage. “Scroll-based attention is high quality, it's deliberate,” he said. Binet agreed that attention quality matters but maintained that creative remains the deciding factor regardless of platform. “What we want is creativity. We want to make ads that people can't help looking at,” he said, pointing to recent research suggesting that voluntary attention is “twice as effective” in driving long-term sales. Consistency versus adaptability While Binet defended long-running creative platforms that build memory over time, Adaramoye argued that brands must also remain agile enough to participate naturally in changing cultural environments. Despite approaching the issue from different directions, both speakers agreed that neither brand building nor platform-based activation should exist in isolation. Instead, they argued that marketers should combine long-term brand investment with continuous engagement tailored to different audiences and moments. Summing up the discussion, Arrow said the debate was less about identifying a winner than understanding the compromises involved. “I think what we've learned is that this isn't really about right and wrong. This is about understanding trade-offs,” he concluded.