The Fight for In-Market Buyers Is a Battle Smaller Brands Have Already Lost

Ad costs climb every year, and the pressure lands hardest on smaller brands. In category after category, advertisers crowd the bottom of the funnel, bidding against each other for the sliver of people ready to buy this week. The giants in that auction can outspend everyone, and they convert at a higher rate because buyers already know their names. A smaller brand that pours its budget into the same fight is competing exactly where its disadvantages compound. Winning there tends to mean winning on price, and the discount that requires usually costs more than the customer is worth.

Patrick Gilbert is the Chief Executive Officer of AdVenture Media, an award-winning digital advertising agency with 50 employees across three U.S. offices, and the author of Never Always, Never Never: Strategic Marketing in an AI World. He has spent more than a decade watching performance marketers pour ever more budget into the same shrinking pool of ready-to-buy customers, and he thinks the reflex to optimize that pool harder is the wrong instinct entirely.

The trouble starts the moment a brand treats the in-market 5% as the whole game. "I've been doing this long enough to realize that if that's the battle you're fighting, you've already lost it," says Gilbert. The only way to compete, he argues, is to do everything right before a buyer ever reaches the point of purchase, which means rethinking who the advertising is for in the first place.

Where the giants have every edge

A decade ago, the economics ran the other way. Inventory was expanding as mobile took off, the biggest brands were slow to move online, and a small advertiser could buy attention cheaply. That window has closed. "You now compete with Home Depot and Starbucks and Coca-Cola and Procter and Gamble on Instagram, and you didn't 10 years ago," says Gilbert. The household names arrived with budgets and margins a startup can't match, and with recognition that lifts their conversion rates on the very same click.

That leaves smaller advertisers one lever, and it's the worst one. When everyone chases the same in-market buyers, and platforms automate the bidding toward whoever will click today, the cost to reach that buyer climbs until the only way to convert is to undercut on price. "If any one of us can afford to discount, it's Lululemon, it's not us," says Gilbert. Giving away margin to win a customer the giants can acquire more cheaply is a slow bleed, he says.

Reaching buyers who aren't ready

His alternative sounds, at first, like a budget a small brand can't afford. Gilbert wants advertisers talking to their entire addressable market, not just the fraction shopping right now. "This is where people start to tune you out, because they hear 'talk to your entire target audience' and they interpret that as mass marketing with a lot of brand budget that's lighting money on fire," he says. That reading confuses reach with waste.

The distinction comes down to how narrowly the audience is defined. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute popularized the idea that only about 5% of a category's buyers are in-market at any moment, which means the buyers who aren't ready make up the vast majority a brand will ever reach. "Talking to your entire target audience means identifying your target audience, which might be only 10 million consumers, and running your advertising in a way that engages those users even if they're not ready to buy today," says Gilbert. A small brand can reach that audience affordably through connected TV, YouTube, and TikTok, he says, and the payoff shows up later, when those buyers finally enter the market and convert without a discount attached.

Storytelling for people not leaning in

Reaching the 95% calls for a different kind of ad. At the bottom of the funnel, a buyer is leaning forward, comparing options, ready to be persuaded by a rational case for why one product beats another. Higher up, that same person is on the couch, scrolling, waiting for a train, and nothing about a spec sheet will land. Gilbert's answer is storytelling built on emotion rather than argument, and he traces it back to fundamentals. "The four Ps of marketing, product, price, place, and then promotion comes last. They're in that order for a reason," he says, putting messaging over the data that dominates most performance work.

A top-of-funnel ad earns its keep later, when the buyer finally reaches the point of purchase and remembers the brand. Gilbert points to electric cars, a rational purchase for two decades that almost nobody made until Tesla made owning one feel like a statement. "There are a million people that do what you do. Stop thinking that you're different," he says. His metric is the consideration set: land among the three brands a buyer weighs at the moment of purchase, get chosen roughly a third of the time, and the top of the funnel has done its job.

The white space in the sameness

AI has made ordinary creative effortless to produce, and distinctive creative scarcer for it. As tools generate content at massive scale, every feed fills with the same shapes. Gilbert's example is the influencer script every brand seems to buy at once. "Her Instagram feed is video after video of 'as a mother of three, getting an oil change was such a hassle until I found this brand,' and then the next one is the same thing for meal kits, and the next for beach chairs," he says. When the format is identical across every category, none of it registers.

That sameness is the opportunity. The tactics marketers abandoned two decades ago, jingles and brand mascots, sit almost entirely unused, which is precisely why they cut through now. Gilbert notes that Duolingo is close to the only digital-era brand with a real mascot, and it credits much of its rise to its green owl. His own agency brought on a creative director with a songwriting background and now writes original jingles for clients, using AI to turn a staff member's rough vocal into a finished track. "We can record one of our employees singing a song and then use an AI tool to turn that into opera or a rock song or a jingle that sounds like it came out of a 1950s radio commercial," says Gilbert. One such song, written for a home-and-garden brand, spread through the client's community on its own, with customers writing in to say they couldn't get it out of their heads.