Thirty years ago, the Spice Girls told us what they really, really want. That song still earns over half a million streams per day in 2026, and that’s just in my car. In some ways, nothing has changed at all.
But our behaviours and technologies evolve near constantly. We’ve moved on from dial-up internet, fax machines and, for the most part, Union Jack minidresses.
You don’t have to go back 30 years to see how much has changed. Even in the last few years, the way people discover products and purchase things has changed significantly.
Creators have become storefronts, search has fragmented across platforms, AI is shaping discovery, and group chats are acting as the recommendation engine, with 64% of Snapchatters saying they’re more likely to buy a product after chatting about it with friends on the app.
As a brand builder, I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how brands stay relevant as audiences, culture and behaviours change. The best marketing has always been about understanding where people are heading, not simply relying on what worked before.
Media plans have evolved too, but not always at the same pace. Look at where budgets actually go and familiar channels and allocations can still exert a surprisingly strong pull, even as audiences and behaviours move elsewhere.
Optimising our marketing content and strategy for the channels we know and love is a daily task, but when it comes to trying new avenues or channels we often say “Stop right there, thank you very much.”
Stop confusing the old playbook with the right playbook
There are good reasons that established channels continue to attract the lion’s share of budgets. Scale, familiar benchmarks, years of data behind them, experienced team members. But this can be self-reinforcing. More investment generates more data, which creates more confidence, which encourages further investment.
It’s less safe to assume that because a channel has historically performed well, the next pound spent there will work just as hard. Or that it wouldn’t work harder elsewhere.
Eventually, marketers need to look beyond where customers have come from before, and instead ask where is our next customer right now?
That means looking at marginal returns. A channel can still be performing while additional investment delivers diminishing value.
Follow the audience, not the old media plan
Consumer behaviour has changed much faster than we like to think. And change can be a Scary Spice to add to any recipe that’s worked for years.
Discovery, recommendation, conversation and purchase no longer happen in distinct stages or even different platforms. Two become one as messaging and discovery enter the same app, but at the same time, one becomes two as search splits out across different parts of the digital world.
Audiences are more split than ever. In the UK, for example, GWI analysis found that 49% of daily Snapchatters are not daily YouTube users, while a third are not on TikTok.
The takeaway is that concentrating spend in familiar environments can mean repeatedly paying to reach the same people, while overlooking audiences elsewhere. You might be converting Mel B, but are you even reaching Mel C?
This is where our definition of performance needs to broaden. Metrics such as CPA and ROAS remain important, but efficiency alone cannot tell us whether an investment created genuinely new value. A conversion delivered cheaply is less impressive if that customer would have purchased anyway.
Incrementality asks a harder question: what would have happened without this activity? Is a channel creating new demand and reaching new customers, or simply capturing demand that already existed?
And this flips the assumption of many media plans on its head, with different channels fulfilling vastly different niches when viewed under this lens. Recent analysis found advertisers can see a 19.3% higher incremental return on ad spend from Snapchat compared with the blended incremental return across social advertising in e-commerce.
That is a different question from simply asking which platform produces the cheapest conversion.
Spice up your plans
None of this means tearing up the media plan every 6 months, but 30 years ago a certain girl group gave us a stark warning that many have forgotten - variety is the spice of life.
Modern marketers should update their media planning mentality and understand that in a world of immense change, moving beyond what’s comfortable is the only way to stay ahead.
Protect part of the budget each quarter for innovation and compare what is actually delivering marginal ROI. Then take those insights and be prepared to scale when an underused channel proves it is bringing something genuinely new to the mix.
Performance marketing should be exactly that - performance-led.
It’s thirty years after the brilliant debut album “Spice”, and if what marketers really, really want is sustainable growth, perhaps it’s time to optimise the media plan itself - and keep asking where the next customer, the next incremental return and the next source of growth will come from.
