Thars Gold In Them Thar Dreck

What I had said was, “Interestingly, the vast amount of nonpremium video content which is bought to bring down average CPM and is normally considered to be of low quality, i.e. dreck, may actually be of very high quality when looked at through the lens of resonance with your ad.” Perhaps I should have added, “Not dreck at all.”

The point is worth retelling and explaining here in more depth because the importance of CPM cannot be overstated, even in our brave new world of outcomes. Practitioners still reflexively chase the lowest CPM, among the oldest habits in our industry, even when they know ROI matters more. One rationalizes that they are doing it to save time because the client will choose CPM no matter how well you put it in its place, though this may not be true.

The long tail, which is what I should have said instead of dreck, is now more than 90% of all available inventory. And as has long been proven by Nielsen data, high reach can be attained with a high volume of low rated spots, and an incremental brute force reach optimizer. This array of low CPM inventory—dispersed across networks, dayparts, and genres, using both linear and streaming, the latter being most important—can get to 90% reach of any target (including young people) quite efficiently, as was also discussed at TVOT Montreal 2026.

But with or without high reach, and assuming persuasive creative, a campaign could still fail if the average resonance between the ad and the context is below 20%. Under these conditions, there will be very low conscious and subconscious attention, very low positive emotion, and the persuasive part of the ad will most likely be missed even by the subconscious—exactly as the RMT work has shown.

The same failure could also happen if the audience reached has subconscious motivations that are not aligned with the motivations implicit in the ad.

But if you align streaming and linear DAI addressable ID motivations with the ad using RMT Semasio, and the linear contexts with the ad using RMT, nonpremium content will be high performing. This is worth paying a premium, although right now no one is charging one.

I was wrong to denigrate anyone’s content. The bigger mistake is failing to use media in ways that maximize resonance among ads, target audiences, and the contexts in which they are reached—especially when those same principles can be used to influence the Moveable Middle, the swing purchasers who matter most for growth. It is still the lowest‑cost way to make brands grow.

So yes, I regret the word.

But the idea is one I’d keep: what looks cheap or undistinguished on a spreadsheet can be extraordinarily valuable when it resonates with the ad and with the motivations of the people seeing it.

That was the point in Montreal, and it is the point here:
The gold is not in paying more for what looks premium; the gold is in finding the contexts and audiences that make the advertising work. In other words, there may indeed be gold in them thar dreck—if you know how to look for it.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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