We made the funny videos. Early on, like every young agency in Lebanon, we learned the grammar of the feed: the hook in the first second, the trending sound, the joke that lands, the comment section that lights up. The views came. The clients were pleased for a month. Then the same clients asked the question that every owner eventually asks, and that no view count answers: where are the customers?
That question is the reason our creed exists. Roots before reach. Depth before noise. Meaning before marketing. It is not a rejection of attention. We are in the attention business. It is a refusal to buy attention that has nothing underneath it, because we watched what that attention costs.
The comedy trap
Fun content is easy to approve and easy to make, which is exactly why it is dangerous. It gets a reaction, and a reaction feels like a result. But the mechanics of memory do not care that people laughed. They care whether the laugh was attached to the brand, whether the brand was attached to a reason to buy, and whether the person laughing was ever going to be a customer in the first place.
Most viral content fails all three tests. It is remembered as “that video”, not as “that brand”. It says nothing that would make someone choose you at the moment of purchase. And it travels to audiences who will never walk into your store, because that is what the algorithm rewards. Bill Bernbach saw the problem before there were algorithms:
Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
Bill Bernbach
The impression is the asset. The count is the noise.
How brands actually grow
Marketing has more evidence than most people in it admit. Three bodies of work, decades apart, say the same thing in different words.
Positioning. Al Ries and Jack Trout argued in 1981 that the battle is fought in the prospect’s mind, and the winner owns a simple idea there. A brand that stands for six things stands for nothing. A brand that stands for one thing, consistently, for years, becomes the default.
Mental and physical availability. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showed with data across categories and countries that brands grow by reaching all the buyers in a category, being easy to think of at the moment of need, and being easy to buy. The engine of that is distinctive brand assets: the colours, marks, sounds and shapes that make recognition instant. Consistency is not a creative preference. It is the mechanism.
The long and the short. Les Binet and Peter Field, working through the IPA’s databank of effectiveness cases, found that campaigns balancing long-term brand building with short-term sales activation delivered far more profit than activation alone, and that the strongest balance sat around sixty percent brand to forty percent activation. Activation on its own spikes and dies. Brand building compounds.
Put the three together and the comedy trap becomes obvious. A funny video that is not built on a position, that does not carry distinctive assets, and that is not part of a long-term plan, is one hundred percent activation with zero percent brand. It buys a moment and leaves nothing behind. Marty Neumeier’s definition explains why the moment does not become a customer:
A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap (2003)
Gut feelings are built by repetition of the same thing, not by a parade of different things.
What roots look like in practice
Roots are not slower. They are cheaper, because they stop you paying for the same attention twice. This is what they look like in a business, not in a deck.
- One position, written down, defended. The sentence a customer would use to explain why you and not the other one. Every piece of work is tested against it.
- Distinctive assets, kept for years. The mark, the colour, the line, the voice. Recognisable in half a second, in a feed, on a highway, on a shelf. Changed only when the strategy changes, never because someone got bored.
- A reason to buy, in the work. Not a discount every time. An offer, a proof, a demonstration, a story that makes the product worth its price.
- Sales built into the marketing. The team that answers the phone knows what the ad said. The WhatsApp reply is as considered as the reel. The website closes what the campaign opened.
- Media that respects geography and margin. Views from people who cannot buy you are not reach. They are waste with good numbers.
- A measurement that the owner cares about. Revenue, leads, footfall, basket, retention. Engagement is reported, not celebrated.
A billboard the whole country repeated
In August 2026, Citifurniture put a line on billboards across Lebanon: “Comfort’s on us, the biscuit’s on you”. A sofa on a giant biscuit, a joke in the vernacular, and within days people were saying it to each other, remixing it, using it in their own posts. By every measure of attention it was the loudest thing we have done.
It worked because of what was underneath it. Four years of steady, consistent work for the brand: the same colours, the same warmth, the same claim about comfort, month after month, on social, in the showroom, on the website, in a full-production TVC. The country did not repeat a random joke. It repeated a brand it already recognised, saying something in character. Reach was the harvest. The roots took four years.
The same is true of the Marquise story that started this agency: seven thousand dollars of sales in eight months, then close to seventy thousand in five. The campaign that did it was not louder than the competition. It was clearer, more consistent and aimed at people who could actually buy.
How to audit your own noise
Sit with your last twelve months of marketing and ask six questions. Be ruthless; nobody is watching.
- If I removed the logo, would anyone know this was us? If not, you have content, not brand.
- Could a competitor have posted this? If yes, it built their category, not your brand.
- What did we ask people to think, and what did we ask them to do? If you cannot answer both, the piece was decoration.
- Who saw it? If the audience could not buy, the reach was a vanity metric.
- What did the sales team hear afterwards? If nothing, the marketing and the business are not connected.
- What will this be worth next year? Roots appreciate. Noise depreciates to zero by Friday.
The business case for depth
Depth is not a moral position. It is a financial one. Consistent brands pay less for each sale because recognition does its work for free. They hold price because the position gives people a reason beyond cost. They survive shocks because memory does not evaporate when the budget does. And when they do decide to be loud, the loudness lands, because there is something for it to land on.
Peter Drucker, who understood business better than most people who have written about marketing, put the goal in one sentence:
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
Peter Drucker
That is roots. Everything else is weather. If you are ready to stop buying weather, start a conversation with people who will tell you the truth about your noise.
