From Awareness to Choice: How Media Can Help Brands Win

There's a growing disconnect between brand recognition and brand selection that's reshaping how we think about media effectiveness.

Browse any major e-commerce platform and you'll notice something curious: established brands with strong category awareness often struggle to convert that familiarity into purchase decisions. These aren’t unknown challengers; household names with decades of equity are competing not just against digital-native brands like Amazon and ASOS, but against algorithms that increasingly determine consumer choices.

For media strategists, this shift represents a fundamental opportunity to rethink how we deploy investment across the funnel.

Beyond Traditional Awareness Metrics

Strong category awareness doesn't automatically translate to preference in digital environments. Consumers may recognise a brand yet still default to whatever appears first in search results or gets recommended by e-commerce platforms.

This points to a strategic gap: the space between building awareness and driving immediate conversions. While upper-funnel brand building and bottom-funnel retargeting remain important, there's often insufficient focus on the crucial consideration phase where consumers actively weigh their options.

The Consideration Moment

The brands successfully bridging the awareness-to-choice gap are those investing more deliberately in the consideration phase. Rather than assuming consumers will naturally progress from awareness to purchase, they're actively engaging prospects during the comparison and evaluation stages.

This requires media strategies designed to reinforce differentiation when it matters most, not just when it's easiest to measure. It's about communicating unique value propositions when consumers are actively weighing options, using first-party data to understand where these moments occur and how to influence them effectively.

Working Smarter with Automation

Automated campaign types, such as Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+, have transformed how media budgets are allocated. These systems excel at optimising toward immediate performance metrics (clicks, conversions, short-term ROAS) but operate within historical data constraints and don't inherently understand broader business priorities.

This creates an interesting challenge: how do you harness automation's efficiency while ensuring it serves strategic business goals rather than just optimising for past performance?

Some brands are finding innovative solutions. Fashion retailer Omoda utilises AI models to integrate custom product scoring into their Google strategy, resulting in a remarkable 50% increase in net profit per order. By supplying structured data that factors in inventory levels, margin contributions, and strategic priorities rather than letting algorithms optimise purely on historical performance, they've also reduced returned orders by 2% and lifted gross margins by 9%.

Taking this approach further, Omoda developed a methodology that optimises for net margin rather than pure revenue. By incorporating returns data into the optimisation equation, they taught algorithms to prioritise products that actually stick with customers.

Platform-Specific Opportunities

The key lies in working with automation rather than surrendering to it. In Google's Performance Max, this might mean using custom product scoring to influence what gets surfaced, weighting feeds to prioritise new SKUs or high-margin items.

On Meta's Advantage+ campaigns, it's about layering in business intelligence that ensures campaigns consider long-term profitability alongside immediate conversions.

This approach involves outsmarting platform algorithms by leveraging human intelligence in conjunction with AI, identifying the nuances that automation alone can't capture.

Strategic Evolution

The opportunity for media strategists lies in evolving beyond traditional funnel thinking toward approaches that account for how digital environments actually influence choice. Platform algorithms aren't disappearing, but they don't have to dictate strategy.

The most effective approach combines automated system efficiency with strategic intelligence about business priorities and consumer behavior. For established brands particularly, this means using media not just to maintain awareness or drive immediate sales, but to influence preference formation at crucial decision moments actively.

Success increasingly belongs to brands and agencies that can translate recognition into selection, and a data-driven media strategy plays a central role in making that conversion happen.

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