Advertising Isn’t Part of the Research. That Doesn’t Make It Optional.

Only 21% of Mainers say they consult advertising when researching a major purchase. The number is accurate. The conclusion most people draw from it is not.

The first time I looked closely at this number in our Mindsets of Maine data, my honest instinct was to leave it alone. I run an agency. A statistic suggesting that four out of five Maine residents never look at advertising when researching a major purchase is not really the kind of thing you rush to put in front of clients about to approve next year’s budget.

However, I’ve come to think it’s one of the more useful numbers we have, because of what it actually says. It doesn’t say advertising fails in Maine. It says advertising isn’t in the room when Mainers research. That’s a very different concept. 

What the research phase actually looks like

When we asked Maine residents what they use when considering a major purchase, the answers clustered tightly. Sixty-four percent said online search. Fifty-two percent said the company’s website. Fifty-two percent said they’d ask a friend they know in real life, and 49% said they’d ask a family member. Advertising came in at only 21%, and when we asked people to name the very first thing they’d do, advertising barely registered.

Looking at the overall picture, the shape of the process becomes clear: Mainers’ research phase is a closed loop between what they can find and who they already trust. It is a verification exercise. By the time someone is in it, they are not forming an opinion about your category or discovering that your company exists. They are checking on something they’ve already heard, or narrowing a field they’ve already assembled in their head.

Advertising is not part of that loop because it can’t be. Verification requires a source the buyer considers independent of you, and your advertising is the one source that is definitionally not. This isn’t a Maine peculiarity so much as a Maine intensification. In a state where the referral network is this close and personal, the verification step arrives faster and carries more weight than the national playbooks assume.

The conversations you don’t see

If advertising isn’t doing its work during the research, the question becomes when it is.

The answer is earlier, and in a place you can’t see. When a Mainer asks a friend for a recommendation, that friend has to produce a name. Not a category, not a set of considerations, a name. Whatever gets said in that moment came from somewhere, and it was not from a search someone ran that afternoon. It was already sitting in that person’s memory.

That is the job. Advertising in Maine is not competing for attention at the moment of decision. It is competing for the small amount of mental shelf space in the head of someone who will one day be asked a question on your behalf, in a conversation you will never attend, cannot influence, and will never hear about. The payoff shows up two people removed from the ad spend, which is precisely why it looks like it isn’t working when you measure it directly.

Our research on how Mainers discover nonprofit organizations shows the same pattern from another angle. Half of respondents said they first learned about an organization from a friend or family member. Advertising on television or radio came in at 27%, and social media posts from the organization itself were even lower still. Discovery here is interpersonal. Advertising’s contribution is important, but upstream.

This changes what you make, not whether you make it

If advertising’s job is to be remembered rather than to be acted on, then most of what gets optimized in a typical Maine ad campaign might be optimized for the wrong objective. Ads built to compel an immediate response, measured by whether they compelled an immediate response, will underperform on both counts, because they are being asked to close a decision at a moment when nobody in the market is making one. Meanwhile, the qualities that actually determine whether your name shows up in someone else’s conversation — distinctiveness, consistency, and duration — tend to be the first things sacrificed when a campaign is judged on a short-term response.

I know that this sounds like a convenient argument for an agency owner to make. It would be, if I were telling you to spend more and measure less. I’m not. I’m suggesting that “is our advertising working” is a tough question to accurately answer as it’s usually posed, and that a better question is: when someone asks a friend for a recommendation in our category, is there a name they share, and is it ours? That question can be tested and measured. Just not with a click-through rate.

What this leaves you with

The temptation with a number like 21% is to treat it as permission. Cut the line item, redirect the money to the channels the research actually touches, and let word of mouth do the rest. I’d push back on that hard, because to be successful, word of mouth has to be about something. A referral network with nothing to talk about produces silence, and silence is not a lower-cost version of a recommendation.

What the number should do instead is separate two questions that most annual planning treats as one. Whether people are responding to your advertising is a question about this quarter. Whether people can name you is a question about whether you play a role in the market at all. The Maine data and my experience suggest the second one is doing far more of the work, and that almost nobody is measuring it.