Inexpensive programatically targeted digital display advertising outside Ebbing, Missouri?

Besides the brilliantly surreal storyline, fantastic acting and unlikely hero story, ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ has some important hidden teachings for media planners.

By now you know the story. Wronged by a local police force and reaching her wits end, Frances McDormand buys three large billboards on a rural road outside town to get her message out and talked about.

Had McDormand engaged a friendly local Ebbing media agency, her media mix might’ve looked a little different. I don’t believe GDPR has reached Missouri, so an efficient heavily targeted digital and social campaign would do the same job for less budget right? Maybe chuck a few Linkedin direct mail buys in there too. After all, why waste budget her small budget on OOH in a low traffic site out of town? And think of the creative costs!

That would be the logical response. But n picking her media carefully, the protagonist reveals a deep understanding of the nuances of media planning, human communication and behaviour change. She sees beyond eyeballs and looks at impact.

For her message to be heard, both the intended recipients, but more importantly the wider community needed to be made aware. Highly visible OOH could do this much more effectively than more targeted messaging, even though it looks illogical on a spreadsheet.

This is a lesson we can all learn from. The act of advertising in expensive, visible mass media, is a form of information itself. Brands are built through collective knowledge, not in silos.

Costly Signal

In the last decade our industry has become overrun by an approach to advertising that owes more to ‘adtech’ than ‘ad theory’. Too often, we see our role as delivering a message (any message), as accurately, inexpensively and efficiently as possible.

If advertising worked solely by the conveyance of messages, this would be sensible. But it doesn’t. To build fame, mental availability and salience, a brand must deliver costly signals through a certain type of mass media.

When you’re communicating to build a brand, you’re not just communicating directly with your target audience, you also need others who may not buy the product to know the value of it too. I’ll never buy a Ferrari, but the mere fact of me knowing how expensive and powerful it is has a benefit to the brand and the buyer.

It was Charles Darwin that initially revealed the importance of this costly signalling. While analysing animal mating behaviour, he found that females choose males with the best ornaments - elegant peacocks, deer with strong antlers and lions with large manes.

These signals have no evolutionary value. In fact they drain energy. Except that’s the point. If you can afford to waste energy than you’re obviously an animal with plenty of energy in the first place, and thus a good mate.

Metacommunication matters

This also holds in branding and media buying. Metacommunication matters and much of advertising’s real value comes from transmission of subtle cues, context and emotion. A billboard in Times Square does not have the same impact as a poster over a urinal in a dingy pub, even if the message is the same. A brand message delivered on some random illegal streaming site doesn’t have the same impact as one delivered on the New York Times.

In fact, paying a high cost can also be a positive.

In 1990, Oxford researcher Amna Kirmani examined how consumer’s perception of advertising cost impacted effectiveness and brand equity. Her findings were clear. People use the cost, amount and placement of advertising as a signal of quality.

The inconvenient truth is that efficient media buying, particularly in digital, is often an antonym for brand building. Buying in the most efficient way often means focusing on driving price down rather than driving up value to the brand.

But as the work of Kirmani and others like Tim Ambler and John Kay have shown, ‘the perceived extravagance of an advertisement contributes to effectiveness because it increases credibility’. Highly visible communication in expensive mass media creates impact precisely because it is perceived to be costly.  

This isn’t to say that personalised, tactical media doesn’t have value. Precision works, but the overly precise brand commits brand suicide by being culturally invisible. As VCCP’s Charles Vallance says,‘you have to create the brand aura for any personalisation to work. Otherwise it’s just brand scurvy, feeding the brand the wrong vitamins when all it needs is exposure to sunlight.’

In a recent article in The Economist, an unnamed senior ad executive stated that ‘the efficiency of targeted digital ads means companies can spend less for the same outcome in branding.' The implication being that targeted, personalised digital ads can do the same branding job as expensive, culturally impactful ads in mass media formats.

This is an all too pervasive opinion.

 But the evidence is stacked against it.

 Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness.  

Signalling means something.

High cost can be a good thing. 

And all these years later, the medium is still the message.

Just ask Frances McDormand. 

By Shane O'Leary

@shaneoleary1

Sign up for my newsletter here for more good stuff like this