Mid-Journey Marketing Strategies: Navigating the Messy Middle

Since Google’s introduction of the ‘messy middle’, we’ve seen advertising giants like Google, Meta, and others fiercely compete over the mid-funnel. These companies have launched numerous products aimed at capturing advertising spend between awareness and conversion. These full-funnel solutions promise much on paper but often fail to identify customers showing intent for a product or service who aren't yet considering our brand.  

In media planning, we typically distinguish between brand campaigns (for generating tomorrow’s customers, increasing top of mind awareness and building saliency) and performance campaigns (for engaging today’s customers). Understanding our audiences involves identifying those who need the product or service, motivating their desire, and determining when and where to reach them. This forms our outside-in planning strategy. Performance audiences, however, are built inside-out, using existing customer data to define addressable audiences through their intent signals.  

Where Is the Mid-Funnel Today?  

The advertising giants have developed full-funnel products by integrating traditional brand platforms with performance offerings. This allows them to provide closed-loop measurement and multiple touchpoints for advertisers. While we’ve made strides in breaking down the vertical silos between brand and performance through data and measurement, these silos have now shifted horizontally into walled gardens with limited transparency and rudimentary measurement.  

Current mid-funnel campaigns often target those who have seen a brand ad or resemble existing customers. However, this approach overlooks consumers who have intent for a product or service but haven't decided on a brand yet – the incremental in-market audience. Measuring these campaigns combines performance metrics with brand activity, often resulting into misleading CPA comparisons.  

Optimising the Mid-Funnel  

Walled gardens excel in optimisation through AI and machine learning but retain most data within a black box. This can limit truly incremental business growth. To effectively reach mid-journey consumers, we must talk to a receptive audience, use creative to guide their journey, and be present across their daily digital ecosystem. We want to create personal relevance within their journey.  

What Does This Mean for Media in the Mid-Journey?  

Effective mid-journey media campaigns should ingest multiple data sources to create educated touchpoints, combining first-, second-, and third-party data. Creative must aid the decision process with high personalisation and contextual relevance.  

Campaigns should operate in a truly omni-channel capacity, free from the confines of walled gardens, reaching audiences across platforms, devices, and journey stages.  

How Do We De-Mess the Middle?  

We de-mess the middle by selectively isolating and outsourcing the most valuable features the walled gardens have to offer, by leveraging our advanced tool set, and combining that with human brilliance to ensure incrementality. 

1. Design: Brand experts should design campaigns while performance specialists run them. This shift ensures campaigns target truly incremental customers, using top-down planning to build journeys rather than merely capturing intent.  

2. Data: Utilise platforms like dentsu’s Merkury to activate first-party data across channels and incorporate second-party data for more comprehensive audience modelling.  

3. Creative: Employ dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) platforms like dentsu’s Artemis to create and optimise AI-powered creative assets, retaining performance insights for future campaigns.