The Eight Secrets of How To Increase YOY Brand Sales

We looked at the four most recent years of data we have for 33 top advertisers in the Auto, CPG, QSR, and Tech fields, and found that the average year-over-year brand sales change was -3.6%.

McKinsey finds that 70% of CEOs want year over year (YOY) brand sales increase above all other marketing goals. That was in 2025; the year before that stat was only 50%. So CEOs are becoming more explicitly focused on current-year sales effects (which drives their bonuses, incidentally). Nevertheless, most outcome measurement in advertising today looks at things other than sales effects. Why? Because it’s cheaper.

Would a country be wise to cut corners on military weapons? Would a husband be wise to buy the cheapest cancer doctor for his wife?

Getting the cheapest price for things generally makes sense, but in certain areas, it is shooting oneself in the head.

Rule #1: Buy the best information possible. Don’t save a few thousand bucks on information you use to make decisions on millions or billions of dollars’ worth of advertising. Bad or even just noisy information doesn’t just lower your sales effects a little bit; it can totally eliminate sales increases or cause sales decreases by causing you to make the wrong decision.

Rule #2: Don’t judge information based on what other people say. Test it in-market against sales changes. People in general don’t know what they’re talking about. They, however, all talk a good game.

Rule #3: Don’t measure sales effects just based on MMM. MMM is a good tool when it is best in class methodology, and the data are complete and accurate – which is rare. But because media tend to overlap in time, one must be extremely careful about how to attribute the incremental sales made during overlap periods. It’s best to use other methods along with MMM to be certain about those overlap periods (i.e., most of the year).

Rule #4: In those “other methods,” do not use sales proxies; use sales (see Rule #2). But don’t compare the incremental sales between the exposed group and the unexposed group. No matter how you weigh these to be seemingly comparable, you are fooling yourself. Measure changes in buying behavior in the same household from before (multiple-year lookback period) to during/after the campaign, and aggregate these across millions of households. This is the only way you can be close to certain that the campaign lifted sales. Example: measure the number of households that have not bought the brand for a year or more, now buying since this campaign started. Yes, some of that can be coincidence, or the results of product improvements, word of mouth, price discounts, or even the weather, so you still need to have human and AI analysts consider all those possibilities. Marketing and media research is not more perfect than medical research. The world is complicated, and oversimplification is the cause of most business error.

Rule #5: Target the Moveable Middle. Those are the people who buy your brand sometimes, but not all the time. A long time ago, I discovered that 83% of CPG users who switched their favorite brands had six months earlier considered their current favorite brand their second choice. In 2006, my company TRA (now part of TiVo), published findings that 80% of the sales effects of advertising were accounted for by what I called “swing” purchasers. Today, Joel Rubinson‘s moniker “Moveable Middle” has taken hold. If you target your loyals, they can’t do much for YOY increase. If you target people who never bought your brand, you can get new users, but the acquisition cost might take a long time to be recouped; it is still worth experimenting with never-users because of lifetime value (more on this below in Rule #8).

This does not mean de-targeting everyone else because the next Rule will include a way of being reasonably sure you do not miss all the possible opportunities (because it will involve including linear TV).

Rule #6: Maximize Reach. If you do not reach someone, your advertising will not have any direct effect on them. This is obvious. Yet the amount of reach marketers are settling for is unsettling. This recent article documents the fact that 4 out of 5 campaigns in the U.S. are getting reach levels of below 10%. Yes, they may be hyper-targeted and only wanted to reach those imminent purchase luxury SUV intenders. Yes, over the course of a year, a brand running a number of campaigns might have a 90% reach while only reaching under 10% each month, but that is very unlikely.

How do you get high reach? Does it simply mean spend a lot of money, use a GRP: Reach curve, get at least 1800 GRP per campaign, or is there more to it? There is more to it than GRP. In fact, as the same article cited in Rule #6 shows, you can save a fortune on excess GRP by following these principles, taken together under Rule #6:

• Use linear TV, CTV, mobile, and computer, distributing target impressions across them in roughly 30/30/30/10 percent chunks.
• Use multiple publishers within each of those four types. Preferably, at least ten publishers per type, and in linear 70+ would be ideal.

Dispersed campaigns across a great many media types, publishers, and dayparts is the way to minimize spend while maximizing reach. (Source of these findings: Nielsen ONE)

Rule #7: Pay attention to attention norms by platform types and avoid overspending in media types with average ad attention of only a few seconds. That is only going to function as reminder advertising when it has any effect at all. Don’t follow the herd and do what everyone else has been doing for the past ten years, which has wildly overspent in short-attention-span media. This is why there are now over 40 companies measuring attention, but the people who place the money bets on the media are evidently not paying attention.

Rule #8: Increase the sales effect of advertising by using a “dating service for ads and contexts”, as Hank Frecon, CEO of Source Digital, describes “my” company RMT. When an ad finds the contexts that are most motivationally similar to the ad itself, sales effect goes up +36% (NCS). When an ad is sent programmatically or otherwise to an advanced audience of people whose motivations (as revealed by their content consumption) mirror the ad’s subconscious motivators, sales effect goes up +95% (Neustar). This targeting of people based on their motivations goes beyond the Moveable Middle and even beyond current category users, and the same Neustar study shows that it increases New To Brand by +115%. This is the only pre-buy impression quality measure that has been proven over and over again to increase the sales effect of advertising, and validated by Wharton Neuroscience to be “the only statistically significant predictor of EEG Synchrony”, which has a 91% correlation to sales increase.

Test RMT and any other impression quality metrics against sales effects following the guidance in Rule #4. Decide for yourself what really works, and use it on all your global marketing.

If you follow the 8 Rules above, I personally guarantee you will achieve YOY brand sales growth. If you come to me and show me that you have followed all these Rules and your YOY brand sales have not gone up, I will provide free consulting services until your YOY brand sales do go up.