In modern marketing, it is dangerously easy to feel like you are doing a great job while actually presiding over a disaster.

I see it constantly: a campaign brief is loosely assembled, the “Insights” are surface-level observations, and the “Strategy” is little more than a list of channels. Yet, because the performance dashboards are all showing green, the team feels successful. The platform metrics influence our emotions and perception of success, but the reality is a systemic failure of effectiveness.

When you rush to the “Ink” without a coherent strategy to answer a specific business challenge, you are being wasteful. Truth. You produce generic creative that lacks distinction and a media plan that targets people who would have bought from you anyway. You are simply paying a premium to subsidise existing demand for your product.

The Effectiveness Formula

Marketing effectiveness is the product of a specific sequence:

(Insights x Strategy) x (Creative x Media) = Effectiveness

With a feedback loop for Measurement from Media, back into Insights.

The first two variables, Insights and Strategy, represent the “Think.” This is the internal, upstream work that determines the potential of everything that follows. The latter two, Creative and Media, are the “Ink,” the visible execution.

If your “Think” variables are zero, your “Ink” is merely an expensive way to reach the wrong people with the wrong message. You cannot multiply a zero. A report with green arrows in an execution platform cannot compensate for a lack of strategic diagnosis.

The 95:5 Paradox

The true irony of modern marketing is that we fail to apply the 95:5 principle to our own workflow. In any category, 95% of your potential revenue sits with future buyers, while only 5% are in-market today. Yet, most marketing departments mirror the 5%: they spend 95% of their time on the “Ink” (the immediate execution) and only 5% on the “Think” (the upstream strategy).

We are ignoring the lever.

Targeting the 5% is easy. It requires very little “Think.” You use performance creative, heavy calls-to-action, and bottom-of-funnel media tactics. But targeting the 95% is a different discipline. It requires you to identify Category Entry Points, build Mental Availability, and create Distinctiveness, assets that stick in the memory for months, not seconds.

When marketers don’t apply 95:5 thinking to their Creative and Media, it is because they haven’t done the intellectual work required to win the future. They end up in a bidding war for the same small pool of active buyers, paying a massive premium for a diminishing return.

The Translation Tax and Media Wastage

When we rush the “Think” phase, we don’t save time; we simply defer the cost to the “Ink” phase, where it manifests as Media Wastage. This is the ultimate Translation Tax.

  • In Creative: The tax manifests as dull creative. Because the strategy failed to make a definitive choice, the creative team produces “safe,” generic work. You pay for hours of production that fails to achieve distinctiveness, simply because the hard decisions weren’t made before the “doing” started.
  • In Media: The tax manifests as “Media Wastage.” When the Insights variable is zero, you pay the same CPMs as everyone else to reach an audience that has no reason to notice you. You are essentially donating your budget to the platforms.

The Discipline of Choice

A rigorous strategy allows for faster, more precise execution because the difficult decisions have already been made. When the “Think” is high-quality, the “Ink” becomes a high-speed delivery mechanism rather than a search for meaning.

Real productivity is found in the “Think.” It is the invisible work; the research, the debate, and the synthesis. This gives the visible work its power. Success is not found in how many green circles you have on a dashboard, but in how much you resolve before the production begins.

If 95% of your growth comes from the future, 95% of your strategic rigour should be focused on how to win it.

We need more think and less ink.