The Media Leader Podcast
The medium is the message. A well-known phrase in this industry, but how do you quantify how much that is true?
Richard Kirk, joint chief strategy officer at EssenceMediacom, sat down with Ella Sagar to unpack what this means in practice through new research into “signal strength” and why it is more “enduring” than other measures media planners use.
He said: “It’s people’s perception of the cost of the media and people’s collective experience of seeing the media being consumed and consuming the media themselves. And, for that reason, I think signal strength is very likely to be an enduring thing that does not change much. We saw [in the research] it hardly changed from 2020 to 2023.”
In the podcast, Kirk also debunked some common misconceptions, such as time spent and actual cost of media correlating with how special or trusted consumers perceive a media channel to be.
Listen below or hit subscribe to play the episode on your choice of podcast player:
Highlights
01:04: What can we learn from God’s agency brief?
04:40: Signal strength and peacocks
08:55: Four big findings
13:09: Young people much more open to suggestion of advertising
16:39: Two key ingredients for signal strength
18:51: Communicating signal strength and outcomes to clients
20:19: How to use signal strength in planning
31:38: EssenceMediacom’s eight “out there” 2024 predictions
35:25: Why are you passionate about media?
Read the corresponding Strategy Leaders column: How to map media quality for physical and mental measures
Strategy Leaders features on the Thursday edition of The Media Leader‘s daily bulletin with thought leadership, news and analysis dedicated to excellence in commercial media strategy.
This episode was edited by our production partner Trisonic
The Media Leader Podcast is a twice weekly show in which our journalists interview some of the most influential people in advertising and media, as well as the next generation of future leaders and rising stars. We also review the biggest stories in media and discuss our featured columnists’ latest opinion pieces
