Making an impression with your media impression
Opinion
Media planning needs to focus on memorability and how media, targeting and creative work together to make brands memorable. Here’s how to hack the memory code.
2024 will be remembered for big global pitches and the increasing consolidation of agency brands.
The future direction of media at holding companies is increasingly being determined by investment honchos and tech executives. This is not to denigrate the people or companies involved, but it does mean media planning is facing some existential questions about its future.
Media proliferation has changed the hierarchy of needs that clients have for media agencies. Most big pitches test the capability of an agency operating system to find and buy media impressions at scale and at pace.
According to Amplified Intelligence, a shocking 75% of advertising delivered is not even seen by a human. In short, the media impression is not making an impression.
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Laws of memory
Buying media without understanding how an audience engages with that media is not just a waste of your money. It’s worse than that.
Dr Karen Nelson-Field and her clever team have found that, if you are not careful, your advertising that has been delivered in passively attended to media will probably be misattributed to the category leader. Your money is working for your competitor!
Data and tech have been infused into media planning to make us obsess about reach when we should focus on memorability. Less Byron Sharp and more buying sharper, if you will. Ironically, the inspiration for planning for memorability came from those lovers of reach: the Ehrenberg Bass Institute.
They explain that it matters very little what consumers think of your brand. What matters fundamentally is that they do. The thing is, the human mind functions efficiently when it comes to memorability — it discards what doesn’t feel important and holds on to what does. In a media world built for scrolling and skipping, this is a problem.
It’s never been more important to understand how media, targeting and creative work together to make brands memorable. At VCCP, we have been working with our partner business Cowry Consulting to do just that.
In our report Cracking the Memory Code, we identified the laws of memory that are so fundamental to how brands operate that they can be used as laws of marketing and a blueprint for the future of media planning. In effect, we are hacking the memory code in media.
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1. Memories that are never stored will never be recalled
To become a memory, brands have to survive two journeys. The first is sensory (being seen or heard) and the second is moving from short-term memory to long-term memory.
Last year, VCCP and Cowry coined the acronym CHESS (character, humour, emotion, surprise and sound): a handy reminder to brands on the key things to take into account to make brand campaigns stick in the mind.
This used to be largely the domain of the creative, but as Catherine Kehoe noted in her IPA Effectiveness Awards keynote, brands are now also built “on the ground by armies of influencers, brand partnerships and collaborations, and by in-feed and in-game activations”.
Media planners should be the most objective and informed people to understand how to leverage people’s relationships with their media. Therefore they need to take a more active role here, even if no media has been bought.
2. Things that get remembered together get recalled together
How do we know if brands will be remembered at the right moment, at the shop, the search engine or online store?
Memories are scattered pieces of information that get dug out when the right triggers are there. Media can buy the place and state of mind audiences are in to match it to the place, and state, we want them to remember us in. Think HSBC at airports.
The problem is we have gone too far — dynamically planning for the optimisation of everything, with no real clarity on what really shifts the needle.
In an AI world, media planning must understand and balance the latest production techniques with an understanding of the psychology of advertising to hack the memory code. Doing so will help the audience more readily associate the brand, the product and the trigger.
3. The more I remember you, the more I remember you
To remember things, you have to cherish them. You have to keep remembering them. If memory has no relationship to the things we think about every day, the pathway back to it is lost. We won’t remember to remember.
In advertising terms, this can often mean turning up with the same familiar cues in both media and creative. But there’s a tension. If we just keep saying the same things, in the same places, won’t people start ignoring us?
This means today’s media planners must actively choose what brand assets to use, how, where and when. Curating and combining platforms like Smartly and other data and tech mean the potential is there to do just that, both at pace and with quality.
So what of media planning?
We need to hack the memory code in media. Media planning is needed now more than ever, just not in its current guise. It needs to reimagine itself to play a more assertive role in how a brand’s assets work in all of today’s media landscape.
To do so requires a rewiring of talent to ensure a greater understanding of the psychology of how creative ideas work. Data and technology can then be curated and applied to ensure the insights and knowledge of the planning agency are of value in the planning process, not the tech itself. Doing things the other way round has hindered objectivity and efficacy — and that is where we have found ourselves today.
Perhaps this is why the close alignment of media buying — a money-making machine — with media planning needs further interrogation. If 2025 marks the year we began that process, it will undoubtedly be remembered for years to come.
James Shoreland is CEO of VCCP Media