A major new study from Newsworks has quantified the commercial value of culture for the first time, revealing that cultural relevance contributes to 15% of UK sales and is worth an estimated £147 billion to UK consumer spending.
Carried out among 4,000 UK adults and supported by modelling of sales and media investment data, the study sought to answer three key questions: what is cultural relevance, how much is it worth, and what role media environments play in creating it?
The research also identifies news brands as one of the most effective channels for building cultural relevance, delivering the strongest return on investment of any media channel analysed.
Conducted in partnership with Trajectory, the study analysed 80 brands across four categories and found that cultural relevance contributes to approximately 15% of sales across automotive, travel, retail and digital subscriptions.
The research also shows that advertising directly contributes to 20% of sales across the categories studied, with an additional 2% boost generated through advertising’s effect on cultural relevance. This highlights the role media plays in helping brands become more connected to culture and more relevant to consumers.
New Digital Age spoke with Heather Dansie, Research & Insight Director at Newsworks to find out more…
Why did Newsworks commission this new research?
Culture is the topic that should be explored this year. Discussions about culture are everywhere at the moment, about understanding it, how do we anticipate cultural movements, and how can advertisers capitalise on big cultural moments?
To date, advertisers have really been shifting their spend into social platforms in order to capture the excitement around big cultural movements, and I feel that the role of news brands in shaping culture has been undervalued to date.
What we really wanted to do was demonstrate how being culturally relevant is important for advertisers, and then actually prove its worth in commercial terms. That was the challenge that we set ourselves.
What were the headline findings?
The big headline finding is that cultural relevance does drive sales. We can now put a figure on it, and that it’s 15% really matters.
The other really important point is that when we looked at which media was driving the advertising that was culturally impactful, we found that, because news brands sit at the heart of culture, they contributed double the advertiser average uplift across cultural relevance compared to the other media channels measured.
The other big headline for us is that, from the media that we measured, news brands were driving an ROI of nearly £4 — £3.97 for every pound that was invested. So that’s really showing that advertising is worth it from a commercial angle.
Did any of the findings surprise you?
One of the surprises is that we looked at four categories and we purposely picked categories that were very different. We looked at long and short-term purchases, and high and low spend. The impact of cultural relevance was consistent across all of them. They were all around the 15% mark.
That consistency means that I feel really confident that if we then projected that up to total consumer spending, using the ONS figure, actually that’s quite rigorous for us to be able to do that. That would then suggest that cultural relevance has a commercial value of £147 billion, and I think that really makes it tangible from an advertiser’s perspective.
What does cultural relevance look like when we’re talking about advertising within a news brand?
Just to be super clear, we didn’t look at formats in the research. We really just tried to find out, from a media perspective, what media was driving cultural relevance and how we could put a commercial value on that.
But the question is a really important one: how can you then go and buy that cultural relevance through news brands? I think there are some obvious formats that will allow you to do it. We found that there are almost five dimensions of what makes a brand culturally relevant.
One of them is visibility. A cover wrap in a news brand absolutely gives you fantastic standout on a front page, the first thing people see. If you’re trying to drive authenticity, a content partnership where your content is being written by journalists that know their readers inside out is a really powerful way for you to align with people’s reality and day-to-day lives and build that authenticity.
So, I think for each of the five dimensions that we discovered through the research, there are some really clear ways that actually that can be bought through news brands.
Are there any wider trends in the marketplace that we should be particularly aware of at the moment?
I think the industry can get caught up looking at trends and fads in the zeitgeist.
Actually, we need to take a step back and ask how do you tap into deeper culture? Those current trends that pop and fizzle are one thing, but when you become more focused on the things that are slower to change but are actually a really powerful part of the human experience, established media brands like news brands provide a great way to tap into those longer term conversations and shifts.
I think that’s going to become increasingly important.
The full report is available at newsworks.org.uk
