Rethinking Reach
In an article published last week by Marketing Week, Diageo’s Global Marketing Effectiveness Director Kiel Peterson used the stage at the IPA’s Effweek to suggest that an ‘ever changing climate' post pandemic was leading to significant challenges for brand’s seeking ‘quality reach’.
The cause of this shift is changing consumer behaviour - characterised by a move away from the ‘monoculture’ of TV in the home and a departure from major urban connurbations; factors meaning that buying reach through mass communication is becoming harder and harder for advertisers. For brands seeking the opportunity to reach large numbers of people at the same time, things are becoming much more challenging.
It is easy to suggest that the pandemic is the primary cause of this shift in consumer behaviour. In reality, it’s been a catalyst that has accelerated nascent behaviours and carried them further along the diffusion curve. We’ve seen the equivalent of 5-10 years of change in the last 18 months. Just look at eCommerce.
If the dawn of Web2.0 at the turn of the millenium brought about the first significant wave of media fragmentation, the arrival of Web 3.0 will be responsible for a second further and potentially more significant wave of fragmentation. In recent years digital - and digital advertising especially, actually started to consolidate again - with big, totemic centres of gravity forming around the ‘walled gardens’ of Facebook and Google. The fragmentation of the noughties turned into consolidation of the 2010s... Web 3.0 has the potential to undo a lot of that consolidation - bringing new opportunities and challenges with it.
Matt Webb spotlight on exactly what characterises Web 3.0 is incredibly useful - especially at a time when there is so much noise around this phrase.
This is a good way of seeing things!
— Matt Webb (@genmon) October 3, 2021
But a bit of history: what we *thought* we were doing with Web 2.0 was user-controlled platforms. There would be 10,000 social platforms connected by interop. Tools like Ruby on Rails and protocols like RSS levelled the playing field https://t.co/HyQiEGEwKZ
The arrival of Web 3.0 will bring with it new platforms, new technologies and new behaviours. The fabric of the internet is changing and therefore the way in which people interact with it will change too. The biggest problem with advertising on the internet was the fact that we transposed an old model (interruptive, standalone adverts) into a new context. We took the advertising of the old media world and transposed it onto a new technology. We assumed that video streaming on Youtube was a bit like TV. We thought that web pages were a mix of print and OOH. We built advertising formats accordingly. People found ways to block these interruptive, polluting messages quite quickly.
Today, people don’t even have to worry about ad-blocking. The new platforms gaining traction in the current landscape are not ad funded, by and large. People are moving into digital spaces which are behind paywalls. They are moving into spaces which are free of conventional advertising. The routes to reach are closing down. Digital media, long the cause (and answer) to declining reach in traditional broadcast channels is now faced with the same problem.
The importance of reach is well documented. The doctrine of Byron Sharp and How Brand’s Grow has been the dominant school of thought in the advertising and communications business for over a decade now. Empirical evidence from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute has told us that brands are built through meaningless distinctiveness, that brand size is a more accurate predictor of loyalty/retention and that in order to grow a brand, you’re best off deploying broad reaching media that targets as many people as you can. Les Binet cannily summarises this thinking - and the wider learnings of analysis of the IPA Databank into this useful tablet of stone.
We are a generation of Planners weaned on this thinking. A focus on reach and recency - with the aim of the game being ‘salience’ - is the order of the day, especially for Media Planners.
Marketers in some very specific categories – such as gambling, quick service restaurants, alcohol and tobacco – have had longer to prepare for this scenario than most. These brands talk about ‘dark markets’ where changing regulatory context often mean than they find themselves without full, unfettered access to the powerful lever of ‘broadcast media’. But media darkness could be coming for brands who have long relied on these channels to establish their mental availability. If for the sake of argument, we extend the current trend lines deliberately to an imagined nth degree, our ability to buy audiences effectively could disappear altogether.
This poses an interesting question: How do you do need to think about communications in a world where reach is not easy to come by?
Peterson’s suggested solution is a move toward personalisation. One assumes this means leaning into the fragmentation and moving away from the one -to- many approach that many FMCG/CPG brands are built on, instead adopting a one-to-one style approach which sees brands attempt to be all things to all people, mirroring needs with appropriate messaging…
I wonder if the answer lies elsewhere. I wonder if the answer lies in moving back to a model of communications thinking which directly preceeded Sharp and his scientific view of the world. I wonder if the answer lies in ‘engagement’. For a group of Strategists and Planners brought up on Byron Sharp, engagement can be a bit of a dirty word. We’re trained to believe the people don’t want to engage with brands. Brands are a shortcut to behaviour; heuristics which help aid decision making. I buy this, I really do. I’ve never wanted to engage with my chewing gum, or toilet cleaner or my car even. Having said this though - in a world where attention is scarse and advertising impressions are even more scarse, could the answer to generating reach lie in creating communications platforms which are genuinely engaging in and of themselves? We’re not faced with a distribution challenge - consumers are spending massive amounts of time with media. The issue is that the old advertising vehicles which we’re so skilled at making are increasingly incongruous in the media landscape which is emerging.
Take the Balenciaga / Simpsons tie up or Drive to Survive referenced in my previous posts - or even better still, what about Nike’s Breaking 2? They are all ideas and executions which are magnetic in and of their own right. They have a legitimate place in the cultural context - and crucially, they all sell. No one is questioning the commercial imperative for advertising to continue to build and satisfy future demand, as per Les Binet’s chart, but what perhaps is in need of questioning is the form which that advertising takes.
Our definition of advertising is often far too narrow. The definition of media, narrower still.
The suggestion that broadcast media withers to nothing is perhaps too extreme. There will always be a form of broadcast reach available to advertisers. However, the role and prominence of these channels in the broader communications mix will likely change - from one of primary importance, to secondary support. The use of paid for advertising may change from one of pure message transmission as we currently see it in the Sharp model of the world, to one where it is signposting and demonstrating the things which brands are doing in culture, helping add noise and scale to ideas which are desperately fighting for attention in their own right, by driving engagement and interaction. Documentary Advertising, perhaps.
As with so many things in life, the answer will inevitably not be an ‘either/or’ but an and - so, engagement and blind reach, will continue to work alongside each other. In spite of this though, many brands will have to grasp this nettle sooner rather than later - audiences are beginning to disappear from view. This will mean marketing departments and their agencies will have to learn how to think in new ways, about new types of communication and they will have to get their hands dirty learning how to commission, design and make the things - content, experiences, events - which are appealing enough to warrant engagement in a world that is slowly drifting away from big, broadcast ‘monoculture’ media.
