Two key things you’ll discover about any sort of media research, is that misattribution is common and secondly, that people rarely believe they been influenced by advertising.
So why do companies continue to shovel money into marketing and advertising if this is really the case? I’ve worked within the media industry for years, advising advertising agencies on media channels and routes to market. Yet, so often when the results come back from customer engagement studies, they find that people thought they’d seen a brand advertised on TV when it was only running in the Press, or on Radio. Results such as this can swiftly muddy the waters of effective post campaign research, making a mockery of the media planner.
But, aside from the troublesome nature of misattribution, there is the factor of our rather stoic mind-set of not admitting to being influenced by advertising. Adverts can be annoying, and there is a sense of pride in stating that we are our own people, and we shall certainly not be told to do something by the TV/Radio/Press. We make our own decisions when it comes to spending our hard earned cash.
The reality of the situation is of course, somewhat different and if this was a universal truth, the marketing and advertising business would become largely defunct.
The interesting thing here is understanding this phenomena and as a copywriter, learning how to communicate effectively to cut through the inevitable hurdles the science of marketing can throw at us. Because people still have needs and wants waiting to be fulfilled. It’s just that we don’t want to feel that companies are predefining what our needs are in anticipation of “selling” to us.
We are a generation of researchers. We like to feel in control of our purchasing decisions. So really, it has become more of a case of learning how to speak to your audience and to find a common ground, rather than selling to them. In the media world there’s a lot of talk about communicating effectively to audiences and reaching them at the right time. It’s not just about the audience, but the environment and “targeting” them in this way. I find it slightly unsettling that we still bandy around the phrase “targeting” as if your audience are a neat row of clay pigeons prepped and ready to be propelled into the advertiser’s firing line, but there is admittedly something to be said of thinking about reaching out, communicating in the right way at the right time.
This is where the creatives step in. The marketing and advertising professionals like to believe that know where these audiences fraternise! Where they are prime to be “targeted.” From a copywriter’s perspective, it is about having an intuitive sense of how best to capture their attention considering their environment. Someone settled in front of a Sunday paper for example, is going to be more likely to ponder the pros and cons of a proposition they have just happened upon in those pages, than someone walking past a poster in town, or a person using the internet and tapping a specific search term in to find that thing they are after.
Now, it’s not up to me to say whether we are kidding ourselves about having complete free will and being in control of what we believe we need, but I will say this – it is entirely the copywriter’s duty to understand what can turn a person on and how best to persuade them, befitting the environment. The rest as they say, is academic.