Intent

Intent is a lagging indicator of demand.

That’s not to say you don’t need to capture it. You do. But if your entire motion is to capture that which is at the “bottom of the funnel,” you are dependent on someone else growing the top of it. Maybe that’s OK. But it does feel risky.

Intent, it seems, is quite the topic these days. One of our favorite new newsletters is Media, Ads + Commerce, Andrew Lipsman’s newsletter on retail media networks. RMNs are near completely dedicated to “bottom of funnel” advertising—and they’re growing quickly.

Emarketer predicts that digital ad spend will grow by $100 billion by 2027, and Lipsman’s argument (and reason for the newsletter) is that RMNs are positioned to captured a significant amount of that growth, because they’re uniquely positioned to reach high-intent consumers and measurable in a way that Meta no longer is.

The question, though, is what happens when a high-intent consumer searches for a product category?

Does showing an ad for your product at the most down-funnel position possible work? What if the consumer has never heard of you before? What if you’re advertising alongside a product that’s well known?

Our obsessions with measurement and efficiency are leading us to a place where demand creation—we can debate what that word really means another time—is being left alone. It’s hard to do and harder to measure.

But if you don’t do it, who does? And how much of an “intent” audience is left after the brand that creates the demand captures the initial share?