Your media mix is not an orange, it's an orange tree

I half-remember a Simpsons scene where Homer teaches a marriage class by comparing it to peeling an orange. First the peel, then the pulp. Everyone's confused, and Grampa ends up yelling at him to just eat the thing already.

Now swap "marriage" for "media mix" and you've got the same scene in 80% of marketing meetings. Lots of theory about the peel, very little decision about when to bite. (I'm laughing as I write this.)

The peel is the funnel, and it's built on intent, not on platforms. Avinash Kaushik has been saying it for years with his See-Think-Do-Care model: there's no fixed channel per stage, there's an intent to solve. Meta can be your discovery channel for one product and your closer for another. Google Search can capture demand that already exists without ever opening the funnel. Purchase intent and a validated customer journey set the media mix, not the platform.

The right question isn't "where does Instagram go?" It's "what intent does this piece solve, on this platform, for this product?"

That's where analysis and experience come in: an impulse buy doesn't need the same mix as a considered purchase. TOFU/MOFU/BOFU allocation isn't dogma, it's a diagnosis you make product by product.

Then there's seasonality, and here the orange has two moments: you either nurture it or squeeze it. Byron Sharp keeps insisting that most brands overinvest in squeezing the same old buyers and neglect building a broad base. Les Binet and Peter Field put a number on it with the 60/40 rule: 60% brand building, 40% activation. Without the first part, the second one dries up.

Joke aside, the correction I care about most is this: it's not an orange, it's an orange tree.

Keeping the metaphor going, the difference is that you don't stop watering an orange tree after the harvest. You keep watering it, especially while it rests. That water is your CRM, your database, your first-party data. That's where the relationship grows, long before you squeeze it.

And the right moment isn't set by the calendar. Black Friday works for retail in general, not necessarily for your product. What sets it is the real relationship between your product and your customer: when what they bought runs out, when the need comes back, what the lifecycle of that relationship asks for. Peter Fader calls it customer centricity: stop looking at the one-off transaction and start looking at customer lifetime value.

In the end, the media mix isn't something you build once and repeat quarter after quarter. You review it by product, organize it by intent, and water it all year round, so there's something to squeeze when the relationship calls for it, not when the calendar does.