Updated Oct 2026: Eleven years ago I compared marketing to Where's Wally: the buyer is already in the crowd telling you what he wants. It's still the simplest way I know to explain intent marketing. Originally published 2015-03-09 on phillipohren.com.
If you think about it, marketing is a lot like a game of Where’s Wally.
Wally is the customer and is looking to buy your product.
The people surrounding him are the noise, the people aren’t interested.
39.2 seconds – the average time it takes to find Wally
In marketing, what we normally find Wally is using paid media, which, for all intents and purposes I’m going to label as interruption media.
However, Wally knows what he wants already. He’s likely already expressing his intent in Search or his interest in Social.
If Wally is the most likely to convert, why do we as marketers waste our time and clients money reaching those who aren’t interested?
Effectively, Wally gets shown relevant while the rest of the audience are bombarded with advertising that isn’t relevant to them.
Granted paid media is unmatched in its ability to drive awareness, build fame, and frequency.
However, if you do too much of this you end up alienating the wider audience. Hence the terms ‘creative fatigue’.
For me, ad fatigue caused by lazy marketers who won’t take the time to filter out the noise and do their best to speak only to Wally.
The hardest games of Where’s Wally are those that have a lot of noisy people in them. In media, our audience data is now better than ever – so why isn’t the game of Where’s Wally getting any easier?
We must use this data to make smaller, quicker & easier games to play.
Consider using channels that are inbound or pull. Search is a no-brainer here. Why does Wally search? Because he has a problem that he wants resolved.
At the moment, I can’t seem to shake this metaphor from my working life.
We need to start thinking about speaking to Wally without alienating, or rather interrupting, the surrounding people
Images are linked to their Wayback Machine copies for now and need re-hosting before publishing. Archived from the Wayback Machine, October 2026.
