The WARC Podcast Best of 2025: What 1.1 million purchase journeys tell us about reach
Dec 25, 2025
Felipe Thomaz, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Oxford, dives into transformative research on media reach and campaign effectiveness. He challenges traditional beliefs about maximizing reach, arguing that context and brand objectives play crucial roles in campaign success. Felipe introduces the concept of archetypes for media planning and discusses the complexities of influenceability across age groups and categories. He reveals the surprising consequences of activating every channel, emphasizing informed decision-making over one-size-fits-all strategies.
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Beyond Pairwise Channel Thinking
- Most academic work studies pairs of channels, which misses real-world complexity of many-channel media plans.
- Felipe Thomaz proposes archetypes to model multi-channel combinations and their distinct outcomes.
Use Archetypes To Map Campaign Recipes
- Archetypes cluster commonly observed channel compositions and reveal functional differences between plans.
- Campaigns can be described as blends of archetypes to choose composition that matches the campaign goal.
Cross Effects Aren't The Same As Complementarity
- Cross effects (multiplicative) differ from complementarity (distinct jobs) and both matter when composing plans.
- Turning on every channel is often the worst-performing approach; targeted composition outperforms scattershot reach.