The summer lull is a good excuse to take stock of the year so far, and one thing I think is worth reflecting on is the notion that marketers should treat media like a distinctive asset.
This means that, just as the consistent use of colours, logos and jingles by brands creates associations in the minds of audiences, so too can media placements.
The first person I heard articulate this idea in terms of distinctive assets was Jack Bellamy, VCCP Media’s head of strategy and creative partnerships.
‘Usually, that language belongs to the creative agencies,’ he said in an interview with MediaCat in July, ‘and I think it’s something that media agencies could adopt… We have this huge opportunity to help clients craft a distinctive media behaviour that actually extends their brand world and gives them another edge over their competitors.’
Bellamy isn’t the first person to think about ad placements as vectors of brand identity, of course.
A media agency leader I spoke with earlier this year was driving at the same point when he lamented the ‘lost art of in-channel planning — buying media within a specific channel in such a way as to make a brand distinctive.’
Jen Jones and Sally Weavers, the founders of Craft Media London, have also long championed this kind of thinking, as part of their philosophy of creating a ‘body language’ for brands.
But now feels like an especially good time for marketers and media agencies more broadly to reacquaint themselves with this aspect of media planning, and then to take it even further.
Whatever Google may say to the contrary, it’s pretty clear that searches resulting in clicks to third-party sites have declined significantly and will continue to do so, as more people content themselves with the information provided by AI summaries. This is fundamentally changing the dynamics of the open web, robbing online publishers of a stream of visitors who arrive at their site with their intent pre-declared.
In response, publications are catering more to their most loyal and active users, and developing their own brands and points of view, rather than just trying to siphon as much search traffic as possible. For different reasons, online platforms are doing something similar — creating products and services to monetise core users more efficiently, as absolute growth is harder to come by in a mature market.
The likely consequence of these trends is that platforms and publishers — those that survive, at any rate — will become less homogeneous, creating more distinctive media environments. For brands that want their media placements to say more about what they are and who they’re for, this is a good thing.
At the same time, a lot of media agencies’ work is repeatable and data-based, and technology is making that work either a lot more efficient or automatable. The only way that media agencies are going to keep their margins is by moving up the chain and incorporating more brand building-expertise into the services that they offer.
There’s already some research about how media contexts affect consumer attitudes, but it’s fairly coarse, focusing on broad categories such as ‘premium’. If the industry was to put more time and effort into exploring the ways that media placements can operate as a distinctive brand asset, I’d bet there’d be a hell of a lot more to learn — and earn.
