Branded content is just the ad industry’s latest psychosis
In this opinion piece Eaon Pritchard argues that, at times, the industry slips in and out of a strange state of psychosis, with branded content and social media engagement two of the latest examples.
The term ‘salience’ – in marketing speak – refers to the likelihood that a particular brand will ‘come to mind’ easily in buying situations.
In ‘How Brands Grow’, Professor Byron Sharp uses the term to describe the idea of ‘mental availability’.
The easier a brand is to remember, in more buying situations, for more potential buyers, then the higher the overall mental ‘availability’ of the brand, ergo the more likelihood that the most salient brand will be bought.
Salience is also widely used in cognitive science, to describe the attention grabbing quality of things in general.
This is where ad people often get slightly confused.
While a campaign may be salient in the cognitive sense – its content is eye catching or entertaining for example – its effectiveness as a branding vehicle depends of how easily it is for those who view or interact will ‘remember’ which brand it was at an appropriate buying opportunity.
This requires subconscious (and conscious) brand cues throughout, fuelling the content-addressable memory. Branded neuro-richness, if you prefer.
Therefore ad salience and brand salience are two halves of the job.
Much of the so-called branded content out there seems to fail on these points.
It’s neither ad salient (i.e. brand content that is pitched as ‘comic’ is nowhere near as funny as regular unbranded comedy therefore does not stand-out) nor is it brand salient (assuming one has the mettle to stick it out through five or six minutes of sub standard ‘entertainment’) as the branding itself may fleetingly appear only on the end frame).
Medical conditions such as psychosis and schizophrenia are also now widely believed to involve, at least in part, a problem with the mind’s regulation of salience.
In states of psychosis ordinary or commonplace things appear more important or alarming than they should.
In extreme cases this can take the form of delusions or hallucinations.
This is much more than being mistaken or perhaps mild confusion. They can include disturbing states such as believing that your thoughts are being manipulated by aliens, somehow external forces are controlling your actions, or believing that people want to engage in meaningful relationships with brands.
This idea, ‘Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience’ was popularised by the psychiatrist Shitij Kapur.
Kapur’s Aberrant Salience Theory connects delusions and hallucinations to differences in dopamine function.
Dopamine plays a critical role in the function of the central nervous system, and is also linked with the brain’s complex system of motivation and reward.
Dopamine release can be artificially stimulated through the use of drugs like MDMA (Ecstacy), whereas instances where dopamine release would naturally occur include during sex, or when hugging your child, or when a Twitter campaign delivers a 1500 per cent ROI.
Kapur argues that dopamine is crucial in highlighting which things are ‘motivationally important’, how they stand out from each other.
Advertising’s adaptation of Aberrant Salience theory is known as the Rosser Reeves Fallacy.
Reeves was one of the most famous ad men of the 50s, and also inventor of the ‘unique selling proposition’. We can hang him for that one in another post, for this one we want to focus on his equally flawed method for measuring ad effectiveness.
In simple terms Reeves method involved taking a sample of your target customer, show them your advertising and see how many of them recognise it.
Compare scores for yay vs nay and there’s your effect.
The Reeves theory is grabbing the wrong end of the stick, the problem is that people are far more likely to notice and remember advertising for the brands they use and like.
And a brand’s Facebook fans or social media following tend also to be heavier buyers. Of course they are, that’s why they become fans in the first place.
They become fans of brands that they already know, already like and already use.
As Les Binet and Sarah Carter explain in their Mythbuster series:
These new digital incarnations of the Rosser Reeves Fallacy are particularly dangerous. Because they focus on heavy buyers, they lead to a flawed emphasis on loyalty over penetration, targeting over reach, and price promotion over brand building – all strategies proven to be less profitable.”
Just last week the annual Sensis SocialMedia Report asserted: ‘Marketers are failing to give consumers what they want on social media after mistakenly believing the public are keen to have a two-way conversation with their brand.”
All good so far.
84% of marketers are looking to open a conversation, [but] most punters want discounts (45 per cent), give-aways (35 per cent) and coupons (30 per cent). Exactly, customers don’t want to engage they just want to get the brands and products they already like and use, for cheaper.
Except, the Sensis report seems to indicate that this is what they should be given:
[its] important for brands to take a softly, softly approach when first building an audience base before moving to a more sales-driven message. People are engaging with businesses and once they have established a relationship they are absolutely open to…offers and incentives.”
Aberrant Salience Meets Rosser Reeves Uptown on Ecstacy. A problem with the mind’s regulation of salience.
States of psychosis in which the wrong things appear important.
Like:
- the focus on heavy buyers,
- the flawed emphasis on loyalty over penetration,
- Tight targeting over broad reach,
- And price promotion over brand building
All strategies proven to be less profitable, and yet still widely practiced and recommended.
Eaon Pritchard, is a Melbourne-based strategy consultant
Hi Eaon,
I always enjoy your articles and I have to say that this is one of your better (or at least funnier) ones!
Just a thought here through, or some questions perhaps.
Not all brands can afford to be as salient as some of their bigger spending rivals so may need to be more targeted in their approach in order to seem “as big as possible”. What do they do?
Also, I agree that a focus on loyalty is flawed as you are essentially preaching to the choir but what are your thoughts on driving advocacy via your loyal customers in order to drive recommendation?
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Agree 100%. The whole content marketing thing might work b2b but for consumer marketing its just another way marketing people can apply themselves to simple solutions when the real issue is complicated. Most agency people think Byron Sharp is the devil because he called bullshit on the fun stuff.
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@Matt, there are longer answers to both those questions which I can tell you about another time. Suffice to say smaller brands are best advised to think about advertising spending as a weapon rather than a cost – deployed based upon an analysis of the competitive situation.
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All other things equal, marketing budgets will be the deciding factor. Fortunately, there is one truly democratic competitive edge up for grabs: creativity – for which the only required capital is courage.
A truly creative campaign by a tiny brand is simply more memorable (generating saliency as well as PR/WOM) than a product-message carpet-bombing by a larger brand.
And this has nothing to do with tighter targeting. As Byron Sharp also has showed, a brand’s users consist of numerous infrequent and disloyal consumers.
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Hi Eaon, I agree with 99% of what you’re saying, but you’re kind of throwing the baby with the bathwater a bit here. Branded content can and should work, it can be salient, it can be consistent, it can help brands be visible over longer periods of times, and it can even help reach non buyers of a brand. It’s not because a lot of brands get it wrong that it’s a hopeless area – many get their advertising (very) wrong and yet advertising can still work 😉
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Thom Yorke on “content”:
http://thepunkrockshop.tumblr......e-over-the
It’s yet another bit of Adland jargon I’m completely exhausted by.
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Eaon. So much brutal truth in so few paragraphs. Tread softly for you tread on their aberrant salience dreams. “Ad salience and brand salience are two halves of the job.” If you don’t mind I’m going to borrow that, it’s nicely put. And why I think comments like Marius’, whilst technically correct are often dangerous. For most creative directors I have met, creativity means greater ad salience. Make it bigger, more ambitious, sexier, more award winning. All too often that comes at the price of brand salience. It doesn’t have to be that way as Shann says, but I share Tom’s sad state of despair at an Adland now so enamoured of its own talent it thinks its can make content that’s truly as entertaining as Netflix, HBO and other actual content makers, whilst still selling product. Possible? Sure. Likely. Well maybe not. (By the way I did see some spurious looking charts once that suggested maybe Facebook followers weren’t heavies, I never believed it, but do you have a source that shows the correlation between social media liking and consumption?) Thanks. Great post.
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Enjoyable and interesting post. Thanks.
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Interesting and all very theoretical. Can you cite examples of both the good and bad? Not all Branded Content renders useless on salience, not all social media either. If you think both fail, what works?
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@anonymous Yes, I can. but that’s how I get paid.
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The most disconcerting thing in marketing is disparity between amount of people who have read How Brand Grow and the lack of marketers who genuinely practice it and follow the proven methods.
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”People don’t want to engage in meaningfull relationships with brands”
No, but they can be charmed into it.
Ps. When I read articles like this that give no examples I smell gas.
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Peter and Anonymous – an example proves almost precisely nothing. In research we call that a sample size of 1. All a case study shows is that something CAN work (or not work), not that it WILL. This is why we turn to data or, more interestingly in this case, to theory.
For mine, this piece is note perfect. Thanks very much Eaon.
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