Making Media Matter: Building Marketing Momentum
How Media Context Creates a Competitive Advantage
In the 1970s, a seasoned entrepreneur made an interesting acquisition.
The man known as the “biggest pearl trader with the biggest cachet in the world” decided to invest in a few dozen strands of pearls made from the black-lipped oyster, known to produce black pearls. And while these may have been seen as rare, the market merely perceived them as prosaic — unable to prescribe value to the unknown and unremarkable.
That was until the entrepreneur made a critical shift.
He placed them in the windows of the most luxurious jewelers. They sold instantly. The product didn’t change. The context did.
Like black pearls illuminated alongside high-status pieces, understanding media context — the spaces and places in which our ads show up — is key to smarter media planning. It also relates to one of the critical questions: “How can we gain a competitive advantage with our media planning?”
As part of the media planning process, CMOs and their marketing teams should explore ways to leverage media context to give their messaging a competitive advantage. To help, we have explored three ways media context can help build marketing momentum and ensure your campaigns will have a stronger impact.
Understanding Media Context
Media context is quickly finding its footing again as cookies continue to depreciate and programmatic solutions are becoming more sophisticated. This is because what we say in our ads, in many ways, is just as important as where that message shows up.
Media context can be categorized in three ways:
Audience Driven: What triggers — or moments in the customer journey — exists when your audience is most likely open to your message.
Environment Driven: What advertising formats or content alignment exist that will strengthen our messaging.
Moment Driven: What is going on culturally that my overlap with your messages to contribute to its impact.
At its most basic, the primary objective for advertising is to get noticed and remembered. Not an easy task:
· Only 16 percent of advertising is both recalled and attributed to the brand.
· Lumen study, only 9% of ads get looked at for more than one second.
· And with the deluge of media, decreasing budgets and the increased exposure to marketing messages, advertising is becoming less effective.
The advantage higher education leaders can bring to the table to combat these challenges is to understand how elements such as attention, environmental clutter, and brand prominence play a role in advertising performance. And while creative is one of top indicators of campaign success, as media become more fragmented, inventory continues to shift and evolve and digital advertising dictates an increasing amount of asset resourcing, media planners can help to leverage key contexts to improve media efficiencies and marketing effectiveness.
Building Marketing Momentum: Media, Moments and Messaging Contexts
Building Media Momentum
Media momentum starts with the audience. Exploring the customer journey beyond need states and touchpoints, gives marketers the opportunity to identify key triggers and influences that may facilitate an “openness” to communication or align with brand-building associations. The point is the find where media can enhance moments in the customer journey. For example, Snickers’ “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign seeks to connect “hunger triggers” with the brand to become salient when someone is hungry.
For higher education, think about the moments when your audience may be most involved in the college search process. It can be after an on-campus event, after signing up to be on your mailing list or key dates like College Signing Day.
Building Messaging Momentum
Messaging momentum starts with context — where our messages show up and the media environment the surrounds them. Media planners may not be involved in the brand or campaign platform but having a vast understanding of media platforms can help drive creative decision that can result in more effective advertising opportunities. What’s more, as the depreciation of cookies continue, context is once again an area of interest across the industry. We know that message congruency and contextually relevant advertising improves awareness and memory encoding, which means our ads are more likely to be seen and remembered.
There are two approaches media planners can take to explore the opportunities to combine media and creative. I call them mechanisms — the unique elements of channels — and mode — the way an ad shows relative to the media environment.
In terms of mechanisms, it’s about understanding the key characteristics of the media environment. To stand out, Lactaid disrupted the expected feed experience by creating cognitive dissonance — breaking what’s expended in the feed. By breaking what’s familiar, the mind is forced to make sense of it. The ad is successful because it uses a branded design element to disrupt the feed, making the brand part of the sense-making.
Mode considers environment as the content that surrounds an advertisement. This isn’t necessarily new. it’s a practice donned well before the age of Mad Men. Connecting our message to the content can amplify how its processed and its impact. While it’s easy to default to websites, out-of-home and experiential ads can offer unique opportunities (even that airport ad). For higher education, it could be planning specific messaging for college search sites, college prep sites and even sites with rankings. It could also be in-transit. While the example below may be spec work, it uses the context of travel and literally, physical context to elevate the message and reputation of the program.
Building Moment Momentum
Every day, there are things happening outside of our marketing bubble that we have the ability to connect our brands to culture that contextually strengthens what we hope to convey. This could be as real-time as Aviator Gin’s use of the Peloton girl or REI’s famed #OptOutside campaign launched during Black Friday.
In both cases, what’s going on in our message is heighten based on what going-on, or, talked about in audiences’ daily lives.
When it comes to media planning, higher education leaders should start with a cultural calendar that identifies moments that either create a unique opportunity to activate a campaign or find moments that allow you to evolve your messaging. We want to find moments that our creative might leverage to cut through more effectively. This could be as simple as NCAA tournament success or as complex as climate change.
It’s no longer reasonable to suggest that our competitor’s ads are the only thing competing for the attention of our audiences. To break through and create better enrollment outcomes, it’s crucial to understand media context as a mechanism to deliver an advantage. Start with your audience, explore the overlap in message and media environment and find the connections between your institution and what your audience cares about.
