You can feel it in the room. The team’s been flat out for weeks. Mood boards. Script rewrites. Production meetings. The big reveal is coming. This is the one. The campaign that will finally “put us on the map.”
Then I ask a simple question.
Where’s it running?
Silence. A bit of throat clearing. “Well… we’ll push it out on our channels.”
I was talking to a marketing manager recently about their beautiful new brand campaign. Proper TVC. Cinematic. Must have been close to 100k in production.
I’ve only seen it a few times.
That’s the bit that really gets me. The waste.
In the age of AI, this shouldn’t be happening. Creative and production costs have collapsed. You can get agency-level output without burning six figures, and yet lean teams are still behaving like they’re Unilever.
They over-invest in one big idea.
One big shoot.
One big bet.
Meanwhile distribution gets whatever’s left over.
Gary Vaynerchuk has been banging on about this for years. Don’t spend 100k on one heroic film and pray it works. Take that budget and make 20 bets. Test angles. Test hooks. Test formats. Put media behind what’s working.
Smaller brands with modest budgets keep trying to play the national brand game. Big reveal energy and an expensive launch. And then… nothing.
Just a beautiful asset sitting quietly on YouTube with 312 views.
Creative is only powerful when it’s seen, and in 2026, attention is a distribution game.
If you’re a lean marketer, you don’t need one masterpiece. You need a system that produces and tests consistently. A messaging spine. A brand-trained Custom GPT. Templates that let you create variations quickly and put budget behind what bites.
Marketing should feel like momentum, not a lottery ticket.
If this sounds familiar, email steve@brandiq.co.nz and let’s reduce your content spend before your budget’s all gone!
