What marketers get wrong about media, attention & brand building in 2026

Marketers talk a lot about creativity. They talk about reach. They talk about engagement.

Much less attention is given to what actually determines long-term growth: Do people remember you?

10 lessons about media, attention and brand building

In a recent conversation with Veronika Hromadova, Group Media Performance Manager at Stock Spirits Group, one thing became clear: when launching brands across Europe, performance isn’t decided by trends, but by how well you build mental availability.

Here are 10 key lessons we took away from the conversation:

1. New brands don’t “naturally” get remembered

When Stock launched the vodka brand Żołądkowa in Germany, pre-testing results were… painful.

Branding scores were extremely low. Even though the logo, product, and assets were present in the creative, people simply couldn’t recall the brand.

Why? An unfamiliar name, no existing mental availability, and strong competitors dominating memory structures.

The lesson here was not to panic, but to adapt. New brands require aggressive branding: logo, voiceover, product, repetition. Early and often.

If you don’t invest heavily in brand cues from the start, your media budget works for someone else.

2. Time is cognitive space

Short formats are seductive. They’re cheaper. They feel modern. But when launching new brands, compression can destroy effectiveness.

Second-by-second diagnostics revealed a simple truth: : branding, story, and emotion all need time.

When everything is squeezed into 15 seconds, something has to go — and it’s usually memory.

For new brands especially, time isn’t waste; it’s cognitive space. If people don’t have enough time to process the brand, they won’t store it.

3. Memorability beats reach

But reach alone doesn’t build brands. If exposure doesn’t translate into encoding, you’re paying for impressions that evaporate.

With tight budgets, you can’t optimize for maximum reach, frequency, and duration at the same time. You have to choose.

Stock’s philosophy: memorability over reach.

Reach without memory is wasted exposure. Attention without branding is expensive decoration. Mental availability, not impressions, is the driver of long-term growth.

4. Skippable ads are a false economy

If people can skip, they skip. Yet many brands still invest heavily in skippable formats, sometimes without branding in the first seconds.

That means:

• Minimal exposure
• No brand encoding
• Low impact
  

Non-skippable video may cost more, but it secures attention. And when attention is scarce, guaranteed exposure matters.

5. Fragmentation kills tight budgets

A common mistake with small budgets is spreading money evenly across multiple waves, multiple formats, and multiple channels.

This tends to create the illusion of presence without actual impact.

The smarter approach would be to concentrate spend, prioritize ruthlessly, and build weight in fewer places.

You cannot behave like a big spender if you’re not one.

6. Premium formats don’t automatically mean premium results

New formats like Connected TV are often sold at higher prices. But a critical question remains: is it 2–3× more effective if it costs 2–3× more?

In many cases, there’s no proof.

Linear TV, despite being considered “old,” still delivers strong cost-per-contact efficiency for FMCG brands.

Trendiness is not a strategy. Evidence is.

7. Engagement metrics don’t predict brand growth

Likes. View time. Completion rates. Sure, these are easy to measure, but they don’t reliably predict brand impact.

Instead, Stock focuses on:

• Post-tests with creative stimulus
• Brand tracking
• Funnel metrics
• Econometric modeling

Digital platform metrics often optimize for algorithmic performance, not brand memory. If you want long-term growth, measure what matters.

8. Data can challenge your assumptions

One surprising insight from econometric modeling: in some markets, local publisher video outperformed YouTube, despite YouTube looking superior “on paper.”

The reasons included alcohol advertising restrictions, inventory limitations, targeting constraints, and differences in audit transparency. Channel performance is contextual. Theory should never replace measurement.

9. Frequency matters for new brands

When Stock was launching a new brand, increasing frequency and using longer formats significantly improved memorability.

Established brands can afford maintenance mode. New brands cannot.

Without sufficient repetition, memory doesn’t consolidate. Behaviorally, the brain needs reinforcement to store new associations. Low-frequency exposure may feel efficient, but cognitively, it’s fragile.

10. Distinctive brand assets are a competitive advantage

Legacy brands benefit from decades of asset building. New brands don’t. That means early campaigns must consciously build visual codes, audio cues, and consistent repetition patterns.

Why? Because distinctive brand assets reduce cognitive load, accelerate recognition, and increase encoding speed.

Without them, every campaign starts from zero.

Final thoughts

Across markets and campaigns, the same behavioral principles apply:

• Evidence over trends
• Attention over impressions
• Memorability over vanity metrics
• Concentration over fragmentation
• Long-term brand building over short-term optimization

Media trends change, platforms evolve, and formats shrink. But the consumer’s subconscious hasn’t changed.

If your strategy doesn’t respect how memory works, it won’t scale, no matter how modern the channel looks.