Why Does Every Influencer Have the Same Watch?

Watch Instagram has a frequency problem. It's costing brands money, and I don't think most of us have noticed it working on us, because while it's happening it doesn't feel like marketing at all. It feels like taste.

A friend called me about the new MAD Edition. He'd seen it, loved it, said it was the best jump hour he'd come across in a while. A few days later he was finished with it. The watch hadn't changed. It had simply turned up on every wrist in his feed, over and over, until wanting it started to feel like doing what he was told.

I've had the same reaction. Mine was the Baltic SpaceOne, which as far as I could tell launched on every continent at the same hour. I passed on it. Although if I handle one in person someday and a good example shows up on the secondary, I'd probably buy it, which is a peculiar thing to say about a watch that supposedly turned me off.

So what's the number? How much promotion is too much, and does all that exposure actually push people away?

I spent the first part of my career in advertising, and we had a framework for this question that I have never once heard anyone apply to watches.

Why do watch brands seed so many influencers?

Because they're trying to buy reach, and handing out watches is the cheapest way they know to get it. What they're actually buying is frequency, which is a different thing entirely and behaves nothing like reach.

Reach is how many people you talk to. Frequency is how many times you talk to each of them. The budget is fixed, so you're always trading one against the other. All reach and everybody hears you once, which usually accomplishes nothing. All frequency and you end up yelling at a small room until they resent you. Somewhere in between is a zone that works, and past that zone is a well-documented cliff the industry calls wear-out, where every additional exposure stops helping and starts costing you money.

Media planners obsess over where that cliff sits. Nobody in watches is measuring it at all, and I think two things follow from that.

The first is a counting problem. When a brand seeds two hundred watch accounts, somebody in that room added up two hundred follower counts and wrote down a very impressive number. It's fiction. Those audiences overlap almost entirely. You and I and everybody we know are sitting inside all two hundred of them, so the brand thinks it just bought reach when what it really bought was frequency, piled onto the same small duplicated group with no cap and nobody watching. There's no Nielsen for watch Instagram. Impressions get reported as if they were people and no one really catches it.

The second is worse, because it's a strategy problem rather than a math problem. Launch-day saturation is an opening weekend movie plan. Studios front-load everything because the product spoils in ten days. A watch doesn't spoil. The consideration cycle on a five-figure purchase runs months, and for some of us longer than that. Burning the entire frequency budget in seventy-two hours against a decision somebody's going to take until spring to make isn't aggressive marketing. It's just wear-out, arriving on schedule... and a blown marketing budget.

Does seeing a watch everywhere make you want it less?

Sometimes it does, and I think the reason is peculiar to watches. This is the piece I haven't seen written anywhere but frankly, I haven't looked too far.

In most advertising, frequency delivers a message. You can see a soda ad forty times and you still don't have the soda. All that repetition can do is make you thirsty.

Watches are different, because the photograph is doing a meaningful share of the work the object does. The dial in raking light. The case profile. Lume shots, wrist shots, the thing at nine angles under better lighting than you'll ever have at home. If some of what you're buying is the private pleasure of looking at a beautiful object, then two hundred posts hand you a real portion of that for free, and the purchase has less left to give you.

Which means over-frequency in watches isn't only irritating. It quietly satisfies the appetite it was supposed to build.

And if your taste runs toward the understated, as mine does, one of the things you're paying for is that not everybody has seen it. Saturation stops being a marketing failure at that point and starts eating the product itself.

This is a nice theory and I checked it against my own buying and it came apart in about ten minutes.

Three watches

The VPC Type 39VM is the one that should embarrass me. I got absolutely bombarded. Launch posts, videos, the whole community rallying behind it, some of that because the founder came out of Fratello. This is precisely the saturation I claim to hate and I bought the watch anyway.

When I think about why, three of my objections were missing. I was already in market, so all that noise showed up inside my consideration window instead of shouting at somebody who wasn't shopping. The creative was varied and some of it was genuinely beautiful, which matters more than people realize, since wear-out is largely a function of seeing the same execution repeatedly. It's why agencies pool out multiple versions rather than running one spot into the ground. Morgan Saignes shot it, and Saignes is one of the photographers I study. And the enthusiasm was earned rather than bought, so the posts still told me something true.

Same volume as the MAD. Completely different outcome.

The SUF Vetehinen doesn't really test anything, because I jumped on the stone dial before saturation was even possible. But it gave me something I like better. It launched, got a burst of attention, went quiet for a while, and is only now coming back around as people start receiving theirs.

That two-hump shape is what genuine demand looks like. Owners post when the box shows up. A seeded launch produces one spike and no second wave, because everybody who ever had the watch already posted it on day one. Look for the trough and the return. It's free to check and I've never seen anyone suggest it.

What's stuck with me about SUF isn't the marketing anyway. It's the dial they had to change and how straight they were with everybody about it.

Then there's the Red Submariner 1680. No exposure at all. I saw it in the case at Shreve, Crump and Low and bought it on the spot. I still haven't photographed it or posted it. One encounter with the actual object beat any amount of media, and no media buy on the planet can manufacture that. A retail relationship can, which is an argument for the AD that doesn't get made often enough.

Notice what all three have in common. The want came first every time. I'd wanted a thin dive watch, I'd wanted a SUF, I've wanted a Red Sub for years. Frequency never once created a want for me. It either found one that was already sitting there or it was beside the point.

So my complaint is about targeting

I had no want for the MAD or the SpaceOne before either of them showed up. The frequency landed on somebody who was never a prospect, and against a non-prospect there's only one thing frequency can do.

Same tactic, different result, and volume was never the variable.

I should also admit to a confound, because I want an Andersen Genève jumping hour. I haven't committed to one and there's no slot with my name on it, but it's been on the list a long time and it isn't coming off. I've written before that you shouldn't buy the lesser version of the watch you actually want, because the substitute never scratches it and you end up paying twice. A cool jump hour showing up while the one I actually want is still sitting there unbought is exactly the scenario that rule was written for. It's entirely possible the influencer flood handed me a respectable excuse for a decision I'd already made, and let me feel like a person of taste while I made it.

The part a CMO should worry about

Go back to what I said about the SpaceOne. If I like it in person and one turns up on the secondary, maybe.

That's not lost demand. That's relocated demand, and the brand eats the entire cost of it. No margin, no customer record, no relationship, no shot at selling me the next one. Some flipper collects the difference instead. It's countable, and I'd worry about it long before I worried about annoying enthusiasts in the abstract.

Meanwhile the best thing that's happened to me this year came out of a reach of one. I've got a souscription slot with Qian GuoBiao that took more than a year of Instagram messages and email to earn. I've never met him. I don't own a single one of his watches. Low frequency, one person, sustained over a long time, and it worked better on me than any launch campaign I've ever been on the receiving end of.

One last thing, because it'd be cheap to write all of this and pretend I'm standing outside it. I post nearly every day. I've shot the same watches more than once. If frequency is the disease, I'm out here spreading it.