You Can Change the Channel Without Changing the Audience Strategy

Nostalgia Can Bring an Audience Back, But Can It Move the Brand Forward?

The VMAs moved to CBS for the first time in 2025 and drew 5.5 million viewers — the largest audience since 2019 and a 42% increase from the prior year. Busta Rhymes performed, Mariah Carey won the Video Vanguard Award, LL Cool J hosted. The show leaned into a format that would be recognizable to anyone who watched MTV in the 1990s, and the broadcast numbers validated the approach.

The social conversation told a more complicated story. As Breef has explored, nostalgia is powerful. It collapses psychological distance between a brand and its audience, creates warmth and generates the kind of emotional engagement that purely forward-looking content often can't. Nostalgia is also a return mechanism, not an acquisition mechanism. It brings former audiences back, but it doesn't automatically make a brand relevant to audiences who don't share the memory being invoked.

The Reddit thread that spread in the days around the show captured this precisely: Millennials finding it absurd that MTV (a network that stopped airing music videos decades ago) was still presenting awards for music videos. The joke is recognition that the brand is running the legacy playbook for an audience that's old enough to know the legacy playbook isn't the whole story.

The question for any brand in this position isn't whether nostalgia works, but what nostalgia is for, and whether the audience it attracts is the audience the brand needs.

A Wider Channel Strategy Is Not the Same as a Clear Audience Strategy

Adding CBS to the VMAs' distribution significantly increased reach. More households, more casual viewers, more people who happened to be flipping channels on a Sunday night. That's real and it produced real numbers.

But reach and relevance are different things. The CBS move gave the VMAs access to more households, but it didn't give the VMAs a clear answer to the question of who those households represent and what the VMAs are specifically for them. The show performed well on CBS because CBS has broad reach. Whether it built anything durable for the VMA brand with new audiences (think younger viewers who don't have the 90s reference point, or older viewers who never had a relationship with MTV in the first place) is a harder question.

This is the channel trap that brands fall into regularly. A new platform, a new distribution deal, a new format expands access, but doesn’t create audience relevance. The brand still has to answer why it belongs in the new space, what it's offering that audiences who didn't already know it have reason to engage with, and whether the positioning that works in the existing context translates to the new one or requires adjustment.

One Cultural Moment Can Serve Several Different Audiences

The 2025 VMAs did something more sophisticated than a simple nostalgia play, even if the coverage around it flattened the distinction. The show was intentionally programmed for multiple audience segments simultaneously: Sabrina Carpenter and Doja Cat for younger audiences, Busta Rhymes and Mariah Carey for Millennials, J Balvin and Ricky Martin for Latin audiences; the cultural moment was designed to be divisible.

This is a genuinely useful model for any brand running multi-channel campaigns. A single event or campaign can serve different audiences on different channels if it's designed with that purpose in mind from the start. The show becomes the shared artifact. What different audiences take from it, and where they engage with it, can be meaningfully different.

The mistake is assuming the primary broadcast moment is the whole strategy. The VMAs' social numbers (1 billion global video views, 81.1 million engagements) didn't come from people watching the CBS broadcast. They came from clips, reactions, commentary and participation on platforms where different audiences engaged with the moment in ways that made sense for their context. The broadcast was the source material while the internet was where the cultural moment lived.

The Cultural Moment Is No Longer the Broadcast. It's the Reaction

Billboard's review of the show noted that its biggest challenge every year is deciding who it's for. That challenge is real, but it's also beside the point in one important way: for the audiences who engaged with the VMAs primarily through social media, the broadcast itself was secondary.

The clips of Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande at the show before the ceremony, screenshots of the Vanguard Award performance, commentary from music fans about which performances were worth watching and which weren't, and fan edits and reaction videos that went up within hours. These weren't secondary to the show because for millions of people, they were the show.

A brand planning a broadcast-first cultural moment that doesn't have a corresponding strategy for how that moment travels across social, who is creating the clips and commentary, and what the intended participation looks like is planning half a campaign. The broadcast is the source;  the reaction is where the audience engagement happens.

Why Every Channel Needs a Specific Role

The instinct in multi-channel planning is often to figure out how to get the same message to more places. The more productive question is what each channel is specifically for and what a person who encounters the brand in that channel needs from it.

A digital marketing strategy that treats every channel as equivalent broadcast real estate tends to produce content that's designed for nothing in particular and resonates with nobody specific. A strategy that assigns each channel a distinct role (think this channel builds new audience familiarity, this one deepens engagement with existing audiences, this one drives conversion, this one captures the cultural reaction) produces content that's designed for the context it's going to live in.

Organic social in particular requires this kind of intentionality. Social isn't where brands broadcast; it's where audiences engage, share, react and interpret. The brand that shows up on social with the same energy as its broadcast campaign is a brand that doesn't understand what social is for.

How to Adapt One Campaign Without Fragmenting the Brand

The VMAs' multi-audience programming worked precisely because it happened within a coherent identity — the show was still recognizably the VMAs, even as it served different segments in different ways. The Mariah Carey moment didn't make the show irrelevant to the Sabrina Carpenter audience (and vice versa) because the show had enough shared identity to hold both.

This is the brief for ad creative strategy in a multi-channel environment: how do you adapt tone, format and focus for different audiences and contexts without losing the coherence that makes the brand recognizable across all of them? The answer is almost always that the adaptation happens at the execution level while the positioning stays consistent. The message is the same; the translation is specific.

Market research makes this possible in a way that intuition doesn't. Understanding what different audience segments need from the brand in different contexts (not what the brand assumes they need) is what makes adaptation feel native rather than forced.

What to Ask a Digital Marketing Agency About Multi-Channel Audiences

The agency conversation that matters here isn't about which channels to add, but whether the agency has a clear method for assigning specific roles and audience strategies to each channel rather than simply distributing the same content more widely.

The questions worth asking:

• How do you determine what each channel is responsible for in a multi-channel plan?
• How do you determine what each channel is responsible for in a multi-channel plan?
• How do you measure channel performance against channel-specific goals rather than against a single unified metric?
• How do you ensure that content adapted for different channels maintains a coherent brand identity rather than fracturing into disconnected executions?
• How do you build in the social reaction layer rather than treating broadcast and social as separate campaigns?

Agencies that have clear, specific answers to these questions are thinking about channels as they function for audiences. Agencies that default to "we'll make sure the message is consistent" are thinking about channels as distribution infrastructure which is a start, but not a strategy.

How Breef Helps Brands Find Agencies for Multi-Channel Campaign Strategy

Building a multi-channel campaign that works — assigns specific roles to each channel, designs for the reaction as well as the broadcast, and adapts without fragmenting requires agency partners who understand how audiences move across contexts rather than just how content moves across platforms.

Breef helps brands find vetted agencies across digital marketing, social, market research and creative who can contribute to this kind of thinking. Share what you're trying to accomplish and Breef will invite agencies to pitch who understand that a wider channel strategy requires a clearer audience strategy, not just more distribution.

Ready to find agency partners who think about audiences before channels? Book a demo call with Breef and build the kind of multi-channel strategy that knows what it's for.