The 95-5 Rule and the Power of Broad Appeal in Advertising
Marcos Malagris explains how building future mental availability drives long-term brand growth.
Most people reached by an ad campaign are not ready to buy right away. Marcos Malagris breaks down the logic behind the 95-5 rule and explains how broad-appeal messaging secures brand recall once buyers finally enter the market.
In a conversation with Bruno Gimenes on Marketing - The Podcast, Marcos Malagris, General Manager LATAM at System1, discussed the role of mass reach and the importance of speaking to audiences outside the immediate buying window. The topic was part of a broader conversation on advertising effectiveness in the episode "Data Doesn't Lie, But It Doesn't Decide Alone".
The 95-5 rule and the role of brand memory
When analyzing high-reach campaigns, Malagris turns to the concept popularized by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute to explain why advertising shouldn't focus solely on immediate conversion. On average, the vast majority of consumers reached by a message have no immediate buying intent in that category at the moment of exposure.
"There is a golden rule we use, the 95-5 rule established by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute—the institute behind How Brands Grow—where they estimated that, generally, when you run a large communication campaign, 95% of people reached are not in the buying window; only 5% are in the buying window," Malagris explains. To illustrate the math in categories with long purchase cycles, he cites the automotive market: if people replace their cars every 10 years, only 10% buy in a given year, representing roughly 2.5% of buyers per quarter.
The so-called waste that builds brands
Under strict digital metrics, talking to the 95% who will not buy immediately might seem like operational inefficiency. However, Malagris notes that this apparent waste is precisely what sustains brand equity over the medium and long term.
"There is a fantastic quote—and an article about it—which says that marketing waste is the part that actually works. For every great brand, that waste is what built the brand," Malagris says. According to him, when consumers reach their decision point years later, the brand that sparked emotion and built prior memory naturally enters their consideration set.
In the video above, Malagris and Bruno analyze the behind-the-scenes effectiveness testing of Volkswagen's "Gerações" campaign, recognized by System1 as ad of the month due to its high rate of positive emotional response.
Balancing present and future demand
Business sustainability requires marketing teams to operate across two distinct time horizons simultaneously. Strategy must capture immediate revenue from the active 5% without neglecting the 95% who will drive sales in upcoming cycles.
"To do advertising well, you are constantly balancing two plates: the short term and the long term," Malagris points out. He summarizes the essential function of marketing as the ability to "convert existing demand and generate future demand. If you only convert existing demand, you won't have any demand left in the future."
Broad appeal and universal themes vs. extreme targeting
The push to engage specific audiences, such as younger demographics, often leads brands to craft overly niche messaging. Drawing from his hands-on experience at Coca-Cola, Malagris notes that campaigns connecting best with new audiences were those grounded in universal human values and high-reach cultural moments.
"Paradoxically, the campaigns that performed best among young people were those with broad-appeal themes—Christmas, the World Cup, the Olympics—campaigns with genuine cultural relevance," Malagris shares. He emphasizes that broad-appeal marketing puts the individual at the center of the story: "Make the person the protagonist. Your product can enable their story, support a goal, or help their character evolve, but your product cannot be the protagonist of people's lives."