Where you advertise says more than what you say
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Advertising does not only deliver a message; it is one. New research on how the public reads media placement suggests planners price channels on delivery while consumers price them on meaning, writes Ross Sergeant.
An old idea in evolutionary biology keeps forcing its way into marketing because it keeps being right. Costly signalling: the peacock’s tail persuades precisely because it is expensive.
Applied to brands, the argument runs that advertising works partly as a public display of confidence. A brand seen to spend on a big stage must expect to be around long enough to recoup it, and audiences draw that inference without being asked.
The theory is decades old. Tim Ambler and Eva Hollier put numbers on perceived expense in 2004, showing that the sense that a campaign cost serious money does real persuasive work.
This spring, as part of a nationally representative study of the UK news category, we had the chance to watch the mechanism in the wild.
Everyday People asked 2,017 UK adults two unusual questions about seven news brands. What do you think it costs to advertise with each of them? And which of them makes you think the brand must be doing well?
Two things stood out
First, the public carries a confident mental price list. Most people have never bought a spot in their lives, yet they consistently rank news brands by what advertising there must cost.
Second, brands assumed to be expensive are the ones that confer success on the advertisers seen with them. The statement tested was blunt: a brand that can afford to advertise here is doing very well. The two rankings track each other closely. Perceived cost and perceived endorsement are, to the public, close to the same thing.
For planners, this is an awkward finding, because the industry prices media on delivery: reach, frequency, attention and cost per thousand.
The public, it turns out, is pricing the same media on meaning at the same time. A cheap impression is not free of signal; it signals cheapness. Fishing where the fish are is half the job. The other half is what your presence in the water says about you.
None of this argues for vanity buying, and the fitness signal is one input among many, not a strategy on its own. But it does mean two schedules with identical reach curves are not identical.
One may be quietly telling the country the brand is thriving. The other may be telling it nothing at all, or something worse. That difference never shows up on the post-campaign report, which is precisely why it is worth planning for.
The peacock does not itemise its tail. The audience still gets the message.
Ross Sergeant is chief revenue officer at GB News. The full Signal findings, including the perceived cost questions, are available on request from [email protected].