Industry comment: Solving the context crisis
Last month Mediatel, in partnership with Newsworks, Magnetic and Rezonence, hosted a debate on the future of published media. Our panels discussed the issues of content, context and quality – asking if industry needs to reassess the building blocks of media planning and review preconceptions about published media. Here, some of those who took part in the debates share their thoughts on what needs to happen next.
Tom Laranjo, managing director, Total Media
Although the importance of context seems to be one that is top of the agenda currently, and it is great to get industry leaders in a room to discuss its importance, it is something that has always been at the heart of how we approach media planning at Total Media.
Context is fundamentally all about understanding the factors that frame an event, so the location, time of day, mindset, even the weather.
These are the variables that will govern whether people take notice of your ad at all. If you consider the fact that the average person sees 4,000 commercial messages a day and only 12 of those are acted upon – we start to understand why context has and continues to be so important.
For too long we have valued reach and scale over depth of analysis, which has led to a shift towards short-term planning. Most importantly for all of us, campaigns should be planned using media that is going to be the most effective to clients business outcome and there is never any reason to discount any one medium from your campaign strategy, unless it doesn’t deliver that business outcome.
Going forward into 2018 media owners need to insist that agencies articulate a clear business goal and use that as a metric to measure against. If brands and agencies can define the tangible business problem that we needs to be addressed and translate that into an imperative for media or behavioural planners, then we will start to see our campaigns more effectively executed and measured.
It’s clear that publishers of editorial content are facing a crisis. It might be due to the “Context Crisis” but it’s also clear that they face a variety of other challenges which also need to be solved for them to truly profit from the value they create.
The hoovering up of adspend by Google and Facebook ultimately means that there’s less to go around for publishers but they don’t help themselves by competing against each other and offering a bewildering array of formats, buying mechanics and pricing options to the agency buyer. Furthermore, their ability to use technology is vastly inferior to that of G&F. The result, it’s simply easier to spend on the big platforms.
So, what’s the solution? The fact is, there isn’t a single silver bullet but the only way to fight the big platforms is to offer an alternative unified platform for editorial media. If the large publishers came together to create such a platform they would have the scale, reach and data to satisfy every advertiser. If they pooled their resources and operated in an agile manner they would also be able to take the fight to G&F from a tech point of view.
Ultimately, media can be thought of as a commodity that’s traded on various exchanges. For sellers to attract buyers, they need to offer their goods in a manner that allows the buyers to buy what they want, at a price that’s attractive and most importantly, in a manner that minimises the cost of the transaction.
If publishers can get this right (which Google and Facebook have done), then advertisers will flock to them, especially because they offer a superior product – great context.
I’ve spoken before about the parallels that exist between news and magazine brands and the opportunity to collaborate. Magnetic and Newsworks combining to bring together spokespeople from publishers and agencies was a positive step to get this ball rolling.
Trust in magazine brands comes from professionally produced, platform-specific, premium content that engages audiences. Unfortunately, one of the biggest issues facing our industry is a lack of investment in the emotional side of a brand. Content, context and environment have been overlooked in the reductive rush to buy audiences as cheaply as possible due to the overly short-term metrics that advertisers have focused on.
But the pendulum is starting to swing back. We’re seeing the word trust used in briefs more frequently, and in this increasingly fragmented world, we have lighthouse brands that our audiences feel a powerful connection to. Campaigns that put their brands in the right environment, at the right time and in front of the right audience will reap the rewards.
While distribution platforms are undoubtedly great businesses with scale and clever ad products, they are utilities that rely on media owners for premium content. These platforms need the positive associations our brands bring. We should be confident about this and embrace it.
What we must focus on now is working hard to put the value back on the branded environment and the context we sit in. Looking at the most recent IPA Effectiveness cases, the evidence shows that campaigns that included either news brands or magazines are twice as likely to report an increase in customer acquisition effects, and this effect is quadrupled when both are used together.
We have to be more on the front foot about our extraordinary positive proposition, we have to shout louder and we should better work together.