ZenithOptimedia’s Richard Shotton argues that regionalisation is the clear winner for boosting brand noticeability and appeal.
How many ads do you remember from yesterday?
Two? Five? Maybe, at a stretch, 10? Even doubled that’s a pretty meagre percentage of the ads you were exposed to.
A few years ago the Guardian tried to quantify quite how few ads we actually recalled. They equipped a journalist with an eye-tracking headset which monitored all the ads he was exposed to and sent him off to walk around London. After a few hours he was asked to list all the ads he recalled; they made up less than 1% of the total he was exposed to.
Whilst this seems like a serious problem for advertisers, there are simple solutions. Relevancy is one.
Colin Cherry, a cognitive scientist at Imperial College, recognised that whilst we only register a small proportion of the information around us we subconsciously process far more. His realisation came when he noticed that background party chatter tends to be a blur but as soon as someone mentions our name our ears prick up. He coined the bias the ‘cocktail party effect’.
There are plenty of ways brands can boost relevancy: tailoring ads to mood, weather, editorial context, or timing for example. However, perhaps the most interesting is regionalisation. Its value is in its simplicity. Whilst obtaining accurate mood data is troublesome, tailoring a message to the city the viewer is in is cheap and reliable.
There are also benefits beyond noticeability. ZenithOptimedia surveyed 500 nationally representative consumers and told them about a new energy tariff. Half were told it saved the average household £100 and half that the savings related to their city.
When the message was regionally tailored 10.3 per cent of participants thought it was great value compared to only 4 per cent for the control. So regionalisation not only boosts noticeability but also appeal. It’s not exactly clear why this happens. It might be that tailoring the message boosts believability; an important consideration when consumers are so cynical about ad claims.
Some advertisers are already tailoring their messages by location. TV licensing and Google have both used targeted copy to great effect. However, these advertisers are in the minority.
This might be because advertisers have not yet realised how simply and cheaply digital copy can be adapted. Or, it might be that up till now there has been little tangible proof as to the impact.
Whatever the reason our hope is that far more campaigns will begin boosting their effectiveness by regionally tailoring their copy.
