Media owners! De-weaponise your spreadsheets

The one thing media owner trade bodies should avoid is picking fights with other media, writes Dominic Mills.

I have been thoroughly enjoying the spat between Thinkbox and Google/YouTube. Like all journalists, it’s always more fun to write about a punch-up than it is about an outbreak of peace and love.

But after reading an excellent blog from Alex Steer and Tom Dunn of Maxus, I’m starting to feel a bit guilty.

“We’re asking both YouTube and Thinkbox to put down their sharpened spreadsheets and to back-up the headlines with evidence,” they plead.

They’re right: the one thing media-owner trade bodies should avoid is picking fights with other media. Yet here I am sitting on the sidelines cheering them on as they throw punches.

I feel so strongly about this that, when the magazine body Magnetic invited me last year to set them some targets for their first year, one of my priorities was to say that they should look to co-operate with their peers, not fight them or trash them. (I also advised Magnetic to find a pet neuro-scientist – advice they took, I’m glad to say).

Essentially, this is what I said (and it applies to all of them):

– be useful and helpful
– there’s no such thing as a solus media schedule, so don’t pretend you’re the only media game in town
– co-operate with other media
– debate with your critics (and enemies), rather than shout at them
– where you can, advance the industry’s overall understanding of complex issues.

And they do, and I think we should credit them for that.

Last week I attended two events where media owner bodies produced research that, while obviously supporting their cause, also contributed to the general stock of knowledge and understanding.

The first was Outsmart, the newest kid on the block with its first foray into the research market.

Its study looked at how OOH drove a significant – and yes, it surprised me – uplift in smartphone engagement with brands.
[advert position=”left”]
So, for example, 9% of the sample took some on-device brand action. Across all 35 campaigns Outsmart looked at in November last year, there was a 17% uplift in smartphone brand actions versus those unexposed to the OOH. Against the 20 best-performing campaigns, the uplift was 38%.

So that’s OOH spreading cheer to Google, Apple and the mobile industry, as well as tooting its own contribution.

Outsmart is now sitting on an absolute ton of data from the respondents to its survey, and we can expect to see a lot more really interesting stuff come out, such as which device, OOH exposure vs time spent with brand, the role of search and so on – all tied back to OOH.

One area that could also be riveting is an analysis between the best-performing OOH campaigns and their creative execution. I am not suggesting that this can be reduced to a painting-by-numbers exercise (i.e. the logo should take up no less than 10% of the top-right corner, and no word can have more than two syllables), but I think some useful guidance, as opposed to rules, could be drawn.

The second session I attended was with Newsworks, unveiling the results of a study with PwC into attention. You can see the full slide show here.

As the battle over whether time spent equates to share of ad budget hots up (again), Newsworks is effectively waving its hand in the air and saying “Hang on, we need to think about attention too”.

And they’re absolutely correct. Attention is by no means correlated with time spent, but too lazily conflated by many (especially those with a vested interest) as linked.

Today’s technology means that attention matters in media planning in a way it didn’t 15 or 20 years ago – times when you couldn’t really engage with more than two media at once (i.e. print and radio, or print and TV).

These days, we can engage with multiple media across multiple devices, and so figuring out which ones we pay most attention to (and when) really matters. I might spend a significant amount of time flicking through my mobile, but how much am I really taking in?

I might be reading the Times on my tablet and listening to the radio, but which one gets my attention?

It won’t surprise you (or me) to know that print newspapers do best, but it did surprise me that they outperformed magazines and radio quite significantly. Anyone with long memories might recall the famous ‘ironing board’ study from 1981, repeated in 1995, which measured the impact of radio listening as a secondary activity (i.e. sticking a load of people in a room with a basket or ironing and asking them later what radio ads they recalled).

So I have no hesitation in saying, even if the results suit Newsworks’ stakeholders, this research is significant for the whole industry.

They’ve even come up for an equation for attention. It’s this:

Attention = solus media + (multimedia x high focus). I’m not sure how you calculate ‘high focus’, but I’m sure there’s an algorithm for that.

I also learnt from Newsworks that attention studies is now an serious academic subject, and that the word advertising is derived from the Latin advertere, which means to draw attention to or turn towards.

By and large, spats such as that between YouTube and Thinkbox are rare. We should applaud the media-owner trade bodies for the broader contributions they make. They don’t always get the credit they should.

(Disclosure: From time to time, I have done work for Thinkbox, Newsworks, Magnetic and Outsmart – either speech-making or editorially-based work. It makes up a small proportion of my total work, but I find it stimulating. Plus they’re grown-ups, and I like the people who contract me.)