Appetite for complexity

I attended the Market Research Society’s annual conference earlier this month. The official theme of the event was ‘shaping our future’, but the message I got was that complexity is back in favour.

This motif was most stark in the discussion on purposeful marketing. While still broadly supportive of the practice, the panellists were happy to talk about its risks and limits, admitting that the answer to whether or not a brand will benefit from taking a stance on something is usually ‘it depends’. That felt new.

In the other sessions, too, I noticed speakers were more ready to leap on the trade-offs and shortcomings of emerging technologies and best practices. Synthetic data, for example, was downplayed as unreliable, unless it's tethered to human data.

In truth, I think I was already primed to pick up on signals about embracing complexity after listening to Karen-Nelson Field and Felipe Thomaz talk about attention for Media Week 2025 the day before.

Clarifying his previously stated objections to How Brands Grow, Thomaz, an Oxford University professor, said the idea that brands just need to reach as many people as possible with their ads was based on research that only looked at markets in equilibrium and populated by indistinguishable brands.

Once you step outside of those conditions — and unless you’re marketing defensively from a position of dominance — the argument for simple reach-based planning collapses, he said.

Nelson-Field, an eminent media scientist (and former colleague of Byron Sharp, who wrote How Brands Grow) was just as adamant about the folly of operating ‘reach-based planning in such an unstable media environment.’

Both Nelson-Field and Thomaz are proponents of measuring the quality of attention, but neither think marketers should make it their new obsession. It’s just another metric to add to the list.

Nelson-Field has been preaching the importance and nuances of attention — it’s not a binary thing, and if you’re a well-known brand with a strong CTA, passive attention is great — for eight years. She’s been doing it ever since she noticed the difference between how people responded to ads and how devices recorded those responses. The gulf between ‘seen and served’, as she puts it. But it’s been a slog to get marketers to listen, and Nelson-Field recalls being shocked at how many of them told her they ‘didn’t want to make things too hard’.

At least five or six of those past eight years were — in broad-brush economic terms — pretty favourable to marketers, though, and things are different now. ‘Post-Covid, we’ve noticed that performance marketing effectiveness has been on quite a decline,’ says Ian Gibbs, a data and insight director for the DMA and Jicmail.

Gibbs has been busy helping Jicmail sell the idea of ‘Super Touchpoints’ — media moments that generate excess attention. Jicmail is always looking for ways to get larger agencies to do ?direct mail marketing, and the Super Touchpoints framework serves that purpose, too, by getting planners to think about how they evaluate media. But Gibbs reckons they’re now more receptive to new, more complex models of effectiveness, since they’re no longer getting the same returns from their existing methods.

He and I may both be overly optimistic about people’s desire for more complexity, however. Ever since sociologist Zeynep Tufecki wrote about it in 2021, I’ve been following the arguments that screens and social media are nudging societies away from written culture and back towards an oral one. Out of self interest, more than anything else.

According to anthropologists, mass literacy is a recent phenomenon in human history, but it changed how populations think and behave by opening the door to complex reasoning and analysis. Before that, in an oral culture, information would only spread if it was memorable, by being witty, rhythmic or antagonistic.

Even social media that are text based — like X — seem to reward people whose communication style has more in common with oral psychodynamics than print ones, and that may be changing how we use our brains. The more recent arrival of infinite scrolls of curated content online, which encourage passive consumption and context switching, have probably done no favours for our appetite for complexity, either.

Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal has called the return to oral culture the ‘biggest story of our time’. It’s by no means a widely accepted theory, but the evidence is mounting.

At the end of 2024, Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor reported OECD figures that showed an alarming drop in literacy rates around the world (although not in England), with a spokesman for the organisation holding technology partly responsible for the regression.

And earlier this month, data journalist John Burn-Murdoch offered a tapestry of charts and data indicating that people’s ‘ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since’.

The good news is that, according to Burn-Murdoch, nothing indicates that people’s underlying brain capacity is diminishing — only how they choose to use it. It’s worth adding that a written culture is not inherently superior to an oral one, either.

I like complexity, though. I often don’t understand it, and I accept that it’s sometimes used to obfuscate, and to justify inaction. But all else being equal, I suspect that dogmatic simplicity does more harm, in marketing and beyond.

James Swift, editor, MediaCat UK

Partner Content

Polaris Leadership Summit & Awards

The Polaris Awards and Leadership Summit celebrate and inspire exceptional work in political and public sector communication. Join us on 13 June to exchange ideas and celebrate outstanding campaigns.

Local councils come for junk food ads

Food and beverage brands have just a few months left to prepare for the government’s ban on junk food ads, which will come into force on 1 October. While this ban will only affect TV and paid-for online ads, an increasing number of borough councils are taking action against unhealthy OOH advertising, too.

Twenty-one English councils have implemented healthy advertising policies so far, restricting advertisers from promoting HFSS products in council-owned spaces such as bus stops. But agency leaders and the Advertising Association doubt the effectiveness of such policies.

‘Extensive evidence shows that advertising bans will have little effect on reducing childhood obesity,’ said a spokesperson for the AA.

Similarly, Arena Media UK’s managing director, Hamid Habib, said that the government is ‘focusing on the wrong end of the chain’ and that ‘sugar taxes have a more direct and measurable impact than advertising restrictions alone.’

Last month, a study by the Toulouse School of Economics found that restricting advertising has ‘a relatively modest impact’ on the consumption of sugary drinks, reducing it by only 2.7%.

On the other hand, taxes on sugary drinks can reduce consumption by around 16.5%. If a sugar tax is already in place, imposing a ban on advertising is also unlikely to make a significant difference, with its additional impact being just 0.4%.

A sugar levy reportedly does more than sway customers away from sugary products; the study uncovered that it can also disincentivise advertisers.

‘Price-sensitive consumers also tend to be more advertising-sensitive, meaning taxes induce the most advertising-responsive consumers to switch away from taxed brands, thereby reducing the incentive to advertise,’ the researchers wrote.

Sowing wild quotes

— Unilever’s new CEO, Fernando Fernandez, in an interview with Barclays analyst Warren Ackerman earlier this month.

Unilever is going to move 50% of its advertising budget into social media, and Fernandez wants more influencers on the payroll. ‘That's a significant change,’ he told Ackerman. ‘It requires a machine of content creation very different from the one we have had in the past. AI plays a very important role in that, but I'm absolutely committed.’

The drivers of influence

What gives an influencer their influence? A meta-analysis out of the EBS Business School in Germany claims to have a good idea.

The authors of the paper reviewed and analysed 108 existing studies — many of which contradicted each other — and used qualitative and quantitative methods to discern what characteristics really determined whether an influencer will move the needle for a brand.

The researchers only looked at two brand metrics — customer engagement and purchase intent — but their advice to marketers in a nutshell is to look for several social media personalities that have a million or so followers combined, rather than one mega influencer, because after a certain threshold, more fans means less engagement.

Things like the attractiveness of the influencer, the similarity between the social media personality and their audience, and the congruence between the influencer and the product they’re promoting are better predictors of effectiveness. Influencers that post informative and functional content also tend to do better for brands than those that favour emotional outpourings.

Authenticity doesn’t seem to make a jot of difference, though. Who knew?

Ask Faris

Do you have a question about media, marketing or your career that you’d like answered? Ask Faris Yakob.

He’s a seasoned and celebrated strategist, creative, teacher and author, and he’s agreed to add another string to his bow as MediaCat’s agony uncle, of sorts.

Yakob has a world of experiences within agencies and as a consultant, and he wrote the book on Paid Attention. We can’t think of a better person to field your media queries. If we could, we would have asked them instead.

Just email us at [email protected] with your question and, if it’s selected, we’ll get back to you with the next steps.

You can even try your luck with a question that has nothing to do with media or marketing, if you like — Yakob seems like a pretty game chap.

The big stat

The amount by which TikTok’s CPM fell between January 2024 and 2025 as a result of its uncertain future in the US, where it faces a potential ban. Over the same period, Pinterest’s CPM increased 120%, according to AdRoll’s State of Digital Advertising Report. (Sourced via Digiday.)

Media opportunities: actual play podcasts

Brands looking for podcasts to sponsor or advertise against needn’t limit their horizons to the chat show, guru and true crime formats that make up the bulk of the listening charts.

Actual play podcasts attract highly engaged fans —- ‘grown theatre kids with disposable income’, says gaming strategist Jana Beck — and on some metrics at least, are more effective at connecting brands with buyers than influencer recommendations or music streaming ads.

The format is simple. People watch or listen as a group of presenters play a role-playing game, like Dungeons & Dragons.

One channel, Geek & Sundry, has 2.35 million followers on YouTube and 518,000 on Twitch, and Dimension 20 played live to a crowd of 20,000 people at New York’s Madison Square Garden in January.

But the critical hit is that 10% of Brits who take part in role-playing games say they typically find new products via ads or sponsored content on podcasts, according to consumer trends manager Shauna Moran, from research company, GWI. ‘This puts them ahead of music streaming ads, influencer endorsements, and vlogs,’ she adds.

The other big stat

The value of X following a spate of activity by investors earlier this month. It’s the same price that Elon Musk paid for the platform — then called Twitter — in 2022. In September, X was valued at just $10bn. Earlier this year, it was reported that brands were returning to the social media site after a hiatus from advertising on X. But the most likely explanation for soaring valuation is that investors feel more bullish about its prospects because of Musk’s proximity to US president Donald Trump.

Consumption habits

By James Swift, editor, MediaCat UK

On two separate occasions now, I’ve messaged people on LinkedIn and been sent a link to their newsletter in lieu of a reply. I don’t think my pride could withstand a third.

For the record, I have no issue with being ignored — truth be told, I sometimes prefer it — and I wouldn’t give it a second thought if a brand told me to subscribe-and-sod-off.

But to approach another person on social media in good faith and be dismissed with an automated invite to join their audience is crushing. I’ve entered into a social situation expecting to engage with someone as an equal, only to be treated like I’ve mailed an envelope stuffed with pubes to BTS — and that’s a hard landing.

This could be a peculiarly British thing, given our hangups with status. Or it could just be a me thing. I wouldn’t be the first editor with a large ego and low self-esteem. But I think there’s also at least some chance that this is one of those instances where social media and the brand-ification of individuals is chafing against the underlying social fabric. I would have loved to have explored this idea in more detail by talking to some experts, but I’m just not ready to reach out again yet.

PS: After I wrote this, the second person responded to my message and was perfectly lovely. The point stands, I think.