The Offensive Play: Get to New Channels First

The optimal strategy is offensive: discover the next untapped channel before the competition does. The best performance any channel will ever offer goes to those who arrive while it's still novel, cheap, and uncrowded.

This requires a tolerance for the unproven. Chen recounts pitching a new marketing idea and being asked, 'Have you seen anyone else do this?' His answer: 'No I haven't, and that's good. That means there's a higher chance of it working.' The instinct to demand precedent is exactly backwards in channel strategy: precedent means the arbitrage is already being consumed.

Practically, this means running small experiments on emerging platforms and formats before they can prove ROI, precisely because they can't yet. Most will fail. The one that hits pays for the rest, because you get its steep early part of the curve to yourself.