Don’t underestimate the power of the postcode
Strategy Leaders
In a post-Covid world, where people have discovered a newfound love for their local area, our media plans to need to better reflect changing behaviours.
It may have been running for over two decades now on Channel 4, but only now is the pearl of wisdom behind Location, Location, Location being fully realised by advertisers.
Kirsty and Phil’s well-trodden mantra over 35 seasons essentially boils down to compromising on your dream home, as long as it was in the area that best fitted you and your lifestyle.
And they’re right, local has always been where the heart is. People tend to gravitate towards areas which they feel fit into the way they want to live, meaning in turn, over time local communities become more cohesive in terms of the types of people who come to live in them.
Cohesion has recently been explored by BBH Labs where they created a ‘Group Cohesion Score’ in an attempt to calculate relative like-mindedness of a group of people.
Using the average majority view of 419 TGI lifestyle statements they were able to create a national benchmark and debunk how generational cohorts, such as Millennials, are not homogenerous communities and who only marginally (1.3%) are more likely to agree as a group than the average.
Inspired by this cohesive analysis, I set about testing my own hunch around location being a better indicator of cohesion. The good news for me, Kirsty and Phil is that the added variable of geography was found to improve the cohesion score by up to x10 versus general demographics proving the power of postcode to unites us.
People want to know ‘what’s near me’
Is this surprising? For me not really, when you think about all the things you do at the local level that shapes you as a person.
Local is where your kids go to school, it’s where you attempt to exercise, it often defines who you do (and don’t) support in sport, it’s where you take on a new identity as a good, bad or indifferent neighbour, it’s where you club together as one community, it’s where you cast your vote …
In a post-Covid world, where people have discovered a newfound love for their local area, these cohesive elements are only going to become stronger.
Two-thirds of people say that the pandemic made them re-appreciate the importance of their area, over half saying they now have a stronger emotional attachment, and searches for “near me” at a five-year high.
Indeed, with a greater number of people balancing more time working from home and less time commuting, this is only going to add to an audience’s appreciation of their area.
Joined-up buying
However, the current routes to buy media locally are not fit for purpose with broadcast channels like TV, radio and print covering town, country and region, while digital precision struggles to accurately scale IP addresses or often relies on inaccurate GPS.
Furthermore, and probably more importantly, there isn’t one joined-up buying option, which is both inefficient for our advertiser’s investment and ineffective through unnecessary audience bombardment.
We’ve spent the last two years developing ‘Unmissable’, a new product to allow our brands to profile specific areas down to a granular level, then target single campaigns across multiple channels including VOD, display, video, audio and OOH.
Brands can add their own data into the mix and those less data-rich can still take advantage of a completely cookie free solution with boundless addressable creative potential, essential for any brand looking to achieve greater relevance in the era of data uncertainty.
In short, move over personalisation, for me its ‘location, location, location’ where I’d put my media mortgage on.
John-Paul Major is head of programmatic futures at MediaCom
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