Tim Ainsworth is Executive Director at McCann Experience, McCann Manchester and NDA’s new monthly columnist.
Call it nostalgia, call it a desire for manifestly physical experiences in a digital age, but you don’t have to be a Swiftie – or Taylor’s accountant – to have seen the renaissance in vinyl in the last decade.
Unlike singles on Spotify, albums have always been stories – with a beginning, middle and end – and the record, sleeve and posters have effectively brought those stories into the homes and inner sanctums of our lives. But, more importantly – in my humble opinion and for those uninitiated in the differences between compressed digital audio and vinyl – there is a profound difference in the sound you get: records allow the full dynamic range to be heard because they take their information from the “master copy”.
So, too, in the last few years, have we seen a significant renaissance in “old school” local media and a surge in the desire to blend digital media, personalisation and good old-fashioned printed media to the collective brand experience. Because, like vinyl, when done well it just hits the parts that compressed digital media targeting – and even wide-reaching national campaigns – just can’t. And, this is important because it’s become a dying art, woefully underrepresented in the way we teach the next generation of marketers, media planners and creatives.
This month, I sat down with McCann’s Head of Trading, Colin Malone:
“It is often overlooked that local is the true battlefield for many brands. And, local media has changed dramatically in the last decade. Newspapers have suffered audience declines, radio stations have been swallowed into larger groups and changed the way they engage locally, OOH has accelerated its journey into digital while retaining an enormous estate of paper and paste, and door drop options have largely centred around the Royal Mail. Retail media grows apace in this world, too. Meanwhile, digital platforms tick the local box as a targeting option among their many other strengths.
There is enormous potential for brands in this emerging ecosystem to take advantage of the best attributes of local promotions – grassroots engagement, conversion, increased brand awareness, and local footfall driving – while managing costs and improving the physical manifestation and effectiveness of the total brand experience, as well as the efficacy of their media buying.
But, first and foremost, you’ve got to get comfortable with the audience targeting framework. Local targeting via digital platforms is often promised at “postcode” level. To the many, this passes for “hyper-local” targeting and is heralded as the nirvanic solution. In truth, many platforms actually only target to Postal District (the letter and number at the start of a post code [e.g. M1 1AA or SK10 2BB]) or even worse, Postal Area (the letter at the start of the postcode M1 1AA or SK10 2BB). To put this into context – a postcode contains an average of 15 households, a postal area contains an average of 240,000, a postal district 10,000 households, and a post sector an average of 3,000 households.
So, in truth, some audience targeting solutions or parameters are not necessarily all they are cracked up – or promised – to be when you get under the bonnet. At McCann, for instance, we’ve developed real-time solutions that enable you to find and activate audiences at street level, as well being able to map the health of their disposable incomes in real time as macro-economical factors influence spending priorities across the country in vastly different ways.”
Why does this matter?
Bigger brands achieve a threshold of efficiency and acceptable wastage, which means they can afford to spread bet their reach and spend in a multitude of ways: benefitting from the economies of scale delivered through high impact, high reaching media optimised at a regional or national level. In that world, local targeting is covered as it becomes part of a broader strategy by proxy.
However, challenger brands, by definition, are shaking up the market, and that means finding ways to outsmart the competition rather than outspend it. Local-targeted engagement is increasingly becoming a way of:
a) getting boots on the ground and the brand in hand for these kinds of businesses,
b) providing a platform from which to test, learn and scale successes through the regions to a national footprint,
c) making a brand feel national but activated locally,
d) filtering out audience segments “street by street” to minimise wastage, which means you become national but with fewer up and down the country,
e) getting creative with the blend of digital and physical touchpoints to improve attention and engagement.
Interestingly, we are seeing clients like Just Eat migrating its investment increasingly into these territories, targeting millennials not just with TikTok, but with traditional door drops that put the offer directly into the hands of customers. And, the closer you get to peoples’ communities and daily lives – outside of the mobile phone and onto the streets – the more vinyl your brand becomes.
Variety is the spice of life and long may the renaissance in local continue, particularly as a sustainable way to grow brands outside of performance and the default to Meta to build brand preference outside of Google.
