Above-the-line advertising, held to below-the-line honesty.
Broad reach isn't old-fashioned. It's the most consistently effective thing in advertising — when someone's honest about measuring it.
Definition
Above-the-line advertising is broad-reach brand communication — television and connected TV, online video, out-of-home, print, radio, cinema — aimed at the whole category rather than a retargeting pool. Pinstorm plans and produces ATL on the effectiveness evidence: excess share of voice, reach over frequency, distinctive creative that brands itself — and measures it against baseline sales, penetration and share of search.
Above-the-line advertising has an accountability problem, and the industry likes it that way. The TV campaign wins an award, the agency reel gets a new entry, and nobody can quite say what it did to sales — which suits everyone except the advertiser who paid for it. Meanwhile the performance camp declares ATL dead every year, and every year the effectiveness data disagrees.
The data says broad-reach advertising remains the most reliable driver of long-term growth — when it's planned for reach rather than repetition, branded well enough that the fame accrues to you rather than the category, and sustained rather than switched off the quarter the CFO gets nervous. That's the ATL we run: big-canvas creative, evidence-based planning, and measurement honest enough to tell you what it's actually doing.
Reach the many, not the converted
Growth comes overwhelmingly from light buyers — people who buy the category rarely and think about it less. They will never be in your retargeting pool, which is exactly why broad-reach media still matters: TV, video, OOH and audio are how a brand gets into memories that performance media can't touch.
So we plan ATL the way the evidence directs: maximise unduplicated reach across category buyers, maintain presence over time instead of bursting and going dark, and weight budgets toward excess share of voice — the measure that has predicted share growth for as long as anyone has bothered to check.
Creative that brands itself
The most expensive failure in ATL isn't a dull ad — it's a brilliant ad people attribute to the wrong brand. Nearly half of advertising's potential value is lost to misattribution, which is why our creative work is built on distinctive assets from the first frame: your colours, your shapes, your sound, your codes, doing the branding even when nobody reads a super or remembers a tagline.
And because it's Pinstorm, the campaign is measured like it matters: baseline sales lift, penetration, share of search and pricing power over honest horizons — not a day-after recall score or an award-show shortlist.
What's included
- TV, connected TV and online video campaigns
- Out-of-home and transit — classic and digital (DOOH)
- Print, radio, audio and cinema
- Campaign planning on reach and excess share of voice
- Distinctive-asset-led creative development and production
- Cross-media integration with digital and performance channels
- Effectiveness measurement: baseline lift, penetration, share of search
Frequently asked
What is above-the-line (ATL) advertising?
Above-the-line advertising is broad-reach brand communication — TV, video, out-of-home, print, radio, cinema — aimed at the whole category rather than a targeted segment. It builds the mental availability that drives long-term sales, and the effectiveness evidence consistently shows it remains advertising's most reliable growth driver when planned for reach.
Is ATL advertising still worth it in a digital-first world?
The evidence says yes — emphatically. Broad-reach campaigns keep outperforming tightly-targeted ones on long-term growth because growth comes from light buyers no retargeting pool contains. The channels have evolved (connected TV, DOOH, online video), but the maths of reach hasn't.
How do you measure ATL campaigns?
Against effects that matter on honest clocks: baseline (non-promoted) sales lift, penetration growth, share of search and pricing power over quarters — with market-mix thinking rather than last-click attribution, which structurally can't see ATL's contribution.
Does Pinstorm handle production as well as planning?
Yes. Strategy, creative development and production for TV, video, OOH, print, radio and cinema — run as one system with the media plan, so the creative is built for the reach plan rather than retrofitted to it.
Related services
Want above-the-line advertising that's paid on results?
If you'd like a marketing partner who only gets paid when you grow, talk to us. If you'd like to understand the philosophy first, read about outcome-based marketing and evidence-based marketing.