Why context trumps audience

…and what that means for wedding speeches

The best man cleared his throat and stood up. The assembled wedding guests took an extra slurp of wine and settled back in their chairs... “This should be good – he’s a funny guy”.

But after a brief introduction, his speech went downhill fast as he began a graphic account of the groom’s rather promiscuous past. Smiles froze on faces, but still the best man blundered on, digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself before finally sitting down to stunned silence.

But what went wrong? He’d told pretty much the same stories a week before at the stag night. Hey, all the blokes from that night were here today and they’d loved it last time. He just couldn't understand it.

The difference of course is context – whilst the message was the same and much of the audience was similar, the context was completely different.

Context is a hot topic once again in media, maybe as a backlash against ‘audience-led planning’ where it seems that as long as you reach the ‘right’ person, it matters less where or how you reach them.

In a recent media research project, I spoke to a range of digital media buyers and was stunned to hear that some were regularly planning major campaigns wherein they were unfamiliar with both the brand’s creative message and the media environment into which it would be placed.

For them, it was all about the numbers - using algorithms and optimising campaign performance via programmatic platforms with scant consideration for the real person who would be receiving their message.

For starters, this kind of (non) thinking about context can cause potential harm to the advertiser.

Consider the negative publicity following last year’s revelations by The Times that YouTube were allowing messages to appear in wholly unsuitable media environments. The resulting fall-out from advertisers worried about their brands led to some tightening of the rules and a potential boon for the Brand Safety industry

This issue can also lead to other unintended problems where digital advertising appears in contexts that are unfortunate to say the least – airline ads alongside news reports about plane crashes, or tourism ads next to stories about negative occurrences in the same location. Or this cracker from McDonalds...

But context is not just all about damage limitation. On the contrary, there are many potential upsides in utilising media context as a way of positively enhancing how a brand message is received by its audience.

This narrative is understandably being led by media that offer a premium context to advertisers and they are starting to amass a compelling body of evidence in support of their position.

In a recent white paper, industry bodies Newsworks and Magnetic collaborated to produce a joint point of view called 'The Power of Context', highlighting context as a key benefit of newspapers and magazines.

Newsworks then built on this theme in its neuroscience-based study, ‘Context Matters’, conducted in partnership with the Association for Online Publishing (AOP).

Channel Four carried on the baton, recently picked up the Grand Prix in the 2018 Mediatel Media Research Awards for its innovative ‘Contextual Moments’ project.

And Richard Shotton devotes a chapter to media context in his excellent book The Choice Factory.

But how does a regular advertiser tap into this thinking around context without the benefit of large research budgets or highly advanced analytics capabilities?

One simple technique I applied extensively during a previous role at a media agency was the ‘Mediacept’ – a qualitative methodology (a little like a media version of a creative Adcept), designed to identify the sweet spots where brand positioning, creative message and media environments intersect.

Its application led to some ground-breaking work at the time and was all achieved without the aid of machine learning, AI or programmatic platforms, just a deeper level of understanding about customers and their relationships with both brands and media.

The thinking behind this approach remains as relevant today as it ever was, challenging brand owners to think about the answers to three key questions:

Firstly, what do customers really come to your brand for?

Secondly, what do they go to (specific) media properties for?

Thirdly, how can your brand's messaging connect the two?

Whilst understanding audience remains a vital challenge for today's marketers, understanding (and leveraging) context provides an additional opportunity to differentiate brands in a way that can really resonate with customers. In an attention deficient world, surely that has to be worth a try.

And in the meantime, I hope that anyone reading this with a wedding speech looming on the horizon, heeds the warnings of the opening anecdote and goes a bit easy on the risqué jokes.