POV: What We’re Learning About Brand Awareness by Trying to Build Our Own

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As Dugbe works to build awareness for our own brand, we’ve had to confront an uncomfortable truth:

Social ads, on their own, aren’t going to cut it.

That’s not because the ecosystem is broken. It’s because everyone—including us—has access to the same playbook. Same formats. Same hooks. Same targeting logic—everywhere. And when everyone plays the same game, differentiation becomes really hard.

We started with a simple gut check: if Dugbe showed up as an Instagram ad, would it actually stick with anyone?

Scrolling through our own feeds made the problem obvious. Most ads today are designed to blend in:

• Creator‑style user‑generated content (UGC)

• Short, familiar copy formats

• Creative optimized to stop the scroll, not leave an impression

  
  

Social ad impressions happen fast—usually while people are multitasking, scrolling quickly, often with sound off. That’s not a criticism of the ecosystem; it’s simply how people use it. But as we evaluated our own goals, it became clear that awareness requires a different kind of attention—attention that isn’t borrowed mid‑scroll, but chosen.

That kind of attention takes:

• More time

• More focus

• More space for a story to sit with someone

  
  

Here’s the paradox we keep running into.

Social ads still look good inside the dashboard. The metrics are clean. CPMs are efficient. Everything appears to be “working.” And yet, the more brands rely on social ads as their primary awareness channel, the more interchangeable they become—including us.

When everyone buys the same inventory and follows the same rules, the channel itself fades into the background. It performs—but the brand disappears.

This is especially relevant for small and growing businesses. When resources are limited, it’s tempting to treat social ads as the primary path to brand awareness because they’re accessible, measurable, and familiar. But when those ads look like everything else in the feed, they rarely create the kind of lasting impression that awareness actually requires.

For smaller brands, the risk isn’t that social ads don’t work—it’s that they work just well enough to feel like progress, without ever building real distinctiveness.

This process has changed the way we think about awareness, not just for our clients, but for Dugbe.

Social isn’t something we’re cutting out. We’re reframing its role. We’re learning that social works best when it:

• Reinforces interest that already exists

• Supports a story told elsewhere

• Helps people stay connected once they know who you are

  
  

It’s a powerful supporting channel. It’s rarely the channel that creates awareness from zero.

The takeaway (for us)

If our awareness strategy looks like everyone else’s social strategy, it probably isn’t an awareness strategy at all.

It’s performance marketing doing its best impression of one.

As we think about how Dugbe grows awareness, we’re spending less time chasing visibility and more time asking a harder question: where does real attention actually exist—and how do we earn it? Social still plays a role, but as part of a broader ecosystem, not as the thing carrying the whole load.

— Dugbe

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Disclaimer: This post was refined with the help of Microsoft Copilot for clarity and structure. The thinking and perspective are entirely ours. We use tools thoughtfully. We still think for ourselves.