Marketing Strategy
Marketing, Comms, and Media Best Practice
25 Jul 2025
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7 min read

Marketing, advertising, and media have never had more tools or noise.

What works? What's the shiny new thing? What's next?

I created this to simplify the chaos. Four essential lenses every brand should consider to guide media and comms decisions, drawn from four leading schools of thought:

- Marketing Science (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Byron Sharp, Les Binet, Peter Field, Mark Ritson) - what the evidence tells us.
- Attention Planning (Karen Nelson-Field, Lumen Research, System1) - what the audience actually sees.
- Digital & Data (Aninash Kaushik, Think with Google) - what the dashboard tells us.
- Planning for AI/LLMs (MIT Technology Review, Scott Brinker, McKinsey & Co.) - what the algorithms will prioritise next.

If your plan only lives in one or two of these quadrants, you're either ignoring what works or not preparing for what's coming.

I appreciate that you will need to dig a little deeper if you aren't using one; it's challenging to fit everything on a page, but this should provide you with direction, space for thought, and focus.

For me, Marketing Science and Attention Planning are the two most important for most brands today. One shows what works. The other makes sure it's seen.

Data and AI matter, but too often, they can distract us from the basics many brands still need to get right.

That said, no doubt moving forward, brands will need to engage both humans and AI. For me, it will be the well-known, trusted, and clearly positioned brands, those with proper authority in their category, that AI and people are most likely to choose.

Here's to it being useful for you.

Gareth O'Connor
Gareth O'Connor
Founder & Director
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