The Zombie Strategist guide to… Audience.
A QUICK INTRODUCTION
The advertising industry thinks its dying.
Constantly.
It is a connoisseur of hypochondria.
This week it’s dying of AI.
Before AI it was dying of, in no particular order, Inhouse Agencies, Adblock, Young People, Remote Working, Old People, Going Back to Office Working, the Internet, Youtube, Photoshop, Television, Netflix and Myspace.
This isn’t to downplay the utter shambles of a job market that’s out there at the moment, but the industry isn’t dying.
Rather, it is undead.
Constantly shuffling about, moaning to itself, seeking out the audience so that it can devour their brains…
As a man in my mid-forties, I have chosen to embrace this fact. Far too young to retire, and yet ancient by the industry’s standards, I have chosen to become that which the industry has made me. Ladies and gentlemen… I am the Zombie Strategist, and I’m here to fulfil your D.I.E requirements.
YOUR DELICIOUS AUDIENCE
As any self-respecting Zombie knows, to survive you need to go where the people are… the juicy, succulent people… As a member of the Undead community, WFH just isn’t an option.
And to do that we need to be brave enough to remove our own personal biases. Life can’t be all guttural moaning around cranial canapes.
At the moment advertising and marketing at some of the highest levels seems to have a certain homogeneity of outlook. Take the recent reaction to Donald Trump winning the election. The UK comms industry has been making quite a few posts about this, and I’ll be honest, they don’t seem keen. Very unkeen in fact.
I can feel their pain. Watching the first debate between Trump and Biden as a Zombie was a bit like having to choose between two very old petrol station pasties. You know you’re going to regret eating either one, and that for the rest of the evening you’ll be picking weird flaky bits out of your sweater.
But this was very similar to the Brexit reaction. And the Boris reaction. And again, I’m not taking a side. I’m a Zombie. If the platform isn’t based at least marginally on ‘Make Brains Great Again’ I’m a bit ‘muuuurrrggghh’.
But it does speak of a disconnect between the country as a whole and an industry which is disproportionately younger than the average [1]. Which is more likely to be a graduate than it has ever been [2]. 50% less likely to be working class [3]. And statistically much more likely to be aware and positive about the Net Zero programme [4].
None of which is bad, or wrong. But it does start to illustrate a distance between the industry and the audience.
Which started to remind me of what came to be known as the ‘Shy Tory Factor’ – in the 1992 general election polls predicted the Tories would get 1% less of the vote than the Labour party. In fact, the Tories got a majority of 7.6%. The Market Research Society held an inquiry and found that “2% of the 8.5% error could be explained by Conservative supporters refusing to disclose their voting intentions” [5].
People didn’t want to tell people they were voting Tory.
Which meant the research came out wrong. Which meant the ad spend was put in the wrong places at the wrong time. Which meant the creative was wrong. Which meant the money was wasted.
In the 2015 election, there were similar problems, but this time “the polls appear to have had too few ‘older old’ people (ie 75+); and that politically engaged younger people were over represented” [6]. Or, to paraphrase – the people doing the polling approached people like themselves.
As a side-note “The [US] polls have underestimated the Republican candidate for President three elections in a row” [7].
The thing to take away from this is that it’s easy to sample older people if you try. They can’t run very fast and are scrawny but delicious.
I suppose the other thing to take from this is that the industry, not just the ad industry, but the marketing industry, is in danger of hearing its own echo. The research bias keeps coming out on the same side. Which means I think we need to start questioning what the audience is telling us – especially about potentially contentious issues that the industry believes to be ‘wholly good’.
This makes understanding your audience even more important. Because right now, there’s a huge amount of consumers out there with disposable income who your team might not know anything about. Or understand. Or who have given you incorrect information because they didn’t want to be judged.
They know the view they are supposed to have on Net Zero, or DEI or any number of issues. They will tell you what you want to hear.
But perhaps they won’t tell you what they think. Which will impact the research results. Which will impact the creative.
You could almost call them ‘Shy Consumers’.
So, how do we fix this?
Well, that’s a longer conversation that involves putting small branch offices in towns across the country, and hiring locally. It’s about developing relationships in communities. About building trust. And it’s about hiring from a broader age range and educational background.
But that’s a conversation for tomorrow.
For today, let’s concentrate on advertising ultra-processed high-fat foods to teenagers.
The wobbly ones are easier to catch.
Braaaaaaaains.
#advertising #marketing
[1] https://www.isba.org.uk/knowledge/all-2023-key-findings
[2] https://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/site-content/industries-advertising-advertising-why-the-uk
[3] https://www.isba.org.uk/knowledge/all-2023-key-findings
[5] https://www.survation.com/twindex-use-with-caution/
[7] 538 Politics Podcast, ABC News,11/11/24.
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