We spent two years treating awareness as the top of a funnel, which meant we measured it like a funnel stage and got frustrated when the numbers refused to behave.

Awareness behaves much more like a prerequisite. It does not convert on its own and it does not decay on the schedule a media plan assumes. It quietly changes the cost of everything else you do.

The practical consequence is that you stop asking what awareness spend returned this quarter, and start asking whether your performance costs fell in the markets where you built it.