Distribution is half the work — and almost always under-invested

The asset is not the product

Brands spend months on a flagship video. It's beautiful. It's strategic. It cost real money.

Then it gets posted once, runs for two weeks, and quietly disappears under the next thing the team is producing.

This is the most common waste in marketing — and it's almost never a creative problem.

The 50/50 rule

If you're producing a hero asset (a brand film, a campaign launch, a major case study), budget the same amount of money and effort on getting it in front of people as you spent making it.

That sounds extreme. It isn't. It's just honest about how attention works in 2026:

• The average buyer needs to see something 7–14 times before they act on it.
• Algorithms reward consistency and depth, not novelty.
• Your audience isn't all in the same place — you need to be in their feed, their inbox, their podcast queue, and their broker's email.

What "distribution work" actually looks like

For a single hero asset, plan for:

• Cutdowns — 60s, 30s, 15s, 6s for ads; vertical reels; story slices.
• Paid placement — Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube pre-roll, programmatic where it makes sense.
• Owned channels — email, SMS, newsletter, podcast plug, sales decks.
• Earned + partner — broker outreach, PR pitch, influencer/operator drops.
• Repurposing schedule — the asset reappears in different forms over 90 days, not 14.

A test for your last big campaign

Pull up the analytics from your last big launch. Ask three questions:

1. How many cutdowns did the hero asset generate? (If under 5, you under-distributed.)
2. How much of the budget went to paid placement vs. production? (If production is more than 60%, the ratio is off.)
3. How long after launch was the asset still actively running somewhere? (If under 30 days, you cut the cycle short.)

The fix isn't a bigger budget. It's a better split.