Great piece, thanks for writing it. Totally agree with your view on this!

Hey, thanks so much for your comment. I'm really pleased you find it useful :)

Hey, thanks for the comment.

This is a total misunderstanding of what marketing is. Marketing is strategy (How do we get to where we need to be? How do we engage the right people? Who are the right people? How will we know if it's working?), not design. I would recommend that you review your understanding of marketing as it's much more complex and critical to success than design.

Calling marketing “poisoning” strategy only makes sense if you think impact happens automatically once the evidence is correct. It does not.

A strategy can be perfectly evidence-based and still fail because no one notices it, understands it, trusts it, or changes behaviour. That failure mode is extremely common in EA work and it is rarely about the core intervention being wrong. It is about adoption.

Marketing, at its best, is simply the discipline that asks whether a theoretically sound idea will actually be processed and acted on by real humans with limited attention, competing priorities, and imperfect reasoning.

Ignoring that layer does not make a strategy more epistemically pure. It just shifts the risk from “is this true?” to “will anyone meaningfully engage with this?” and then acts surprised when uptake is low.

If the objective is real-world impact rather than theoretical elegance, then stress-testing for salience, comprehension, and behavioural response is not a contamination of strategy. It is part of doing strategy properly.

Hey, thanks for reading.

Yeah, we wouldn't say that they were unsuccessful, just less-so.

In a broad sense, we'd expect ads that were poorly branded, rational arguments only and lacking in intrigue and interest as 'unsuccessful'

Hey, thanks for reading.

The objective for the campaign was increase the brand awareness (taking people from 'never heard of GWWC' to 'remember that they exist') and not conversion (taking people from 'remember that they exist' to 'doing something'). We would never expect people who had never heard of GWWC to hear about them for the first time and then pledge. It's going to take time to warm them up. It's also not part of our campaign test, or within our control the ability of the site to convert traffic.

That said, it's important to remember long-term branding work can produce conversion results, and in this case, we delivered 3x more pledge page views (for 4 mins and more) than organic traffic, and ~80% of all traffic hitting the pledge page.  So we were targeting engaged and interested people (as compared to organic traffic).

It's too early to know the pledge levels of this new audience as it'll take time and continued engagement to bring them along (we'd expect ~7 interactions before they act), but it's a good story that we're bringing a much larger audience to the table.

What's the basis of your hypothesis?

Yes, absolutely. You can see a version here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K4YBAzACTRU?feature=share

It is linked in the doc above the table. I've just made bold to make more clear.

Thanks for your comment Melissa.

In terms of EA as a movement or individual orgs, I would vote for the latter. They typically will have clearer CTAs and modes of supporting their target audiences. Whereas we've seen many challenges to having one unified movement that must represent us all, and us all it. The fundementals of the approach can guide and inform the organisations, but I'm not sure 'the movement' needs to be a something we present to the gen-pop vs organisations, though of course I wouldn't see this as an either/or decision. Both need to improve the marketing work, but perhaps for different reasons.

Thanks for your message Jeffrey, always great to hear from fellow creatives.

Thanks Deena! Really appreciate the support.

Love seeing marketing in here! New organisations often haven't budgeted for their marketing needs. It would be great to see systemic change in funders making clear what's expected and that includes a marketing spend (in most cases).