LONDON: The ongoing effort to achieve maximum impact from the marketing budget needs to look beyond reach to ‘engaged reach’ at which point marketers must rethink the crucial role of context, a leading industry figure maintains.

Writing in the June issue of Admap, Fiona Blades, president and chief experience officer of MESH Experience, argues that “brands can turbocharge the impact of their communication by identifying the optimum contexts for people to encounter their brand messages”.

In Optimise advertising context to attain engaged reach, she references MESH’s own research which has shown that brand experience (a proxy for reach) of packaged goods builds over the course of the day and peaks at prime time, but engagement doesn’t follow suit.

People feel most positive first thing in the morning and then later in the evening, she notes.

When MESH looked to see which touchpoints were driving these peaks, they found that it was online in the evening, when people are doing their own searches, but in the morning it was TV advertising: the cheery music and mood of packaged goods advertising brightens up the start to the day.

Not so for services, however: the most positive experiences for things like travel, utilities and financial services were encountered from 7pm onwards, when people have more time to take in a more complex message.

But time of day is only one of many potential contexts that marketers need to consider. TV programme content can affect response to advertising, for example.

If you have been watching a comedy programme, you might still be feeling upbeat and laughing into the ad break – which might be an appropriate context for some advertising content but not all, Blades says.

“Equally, if you are watching a serious programme, such as news or documentary, requiring attention, you may continue to pay attention into the ad break, potentially improving pick-up of more complex messaging.”

To complicate matters further, the context of other ads in an ad break can make a difference to how a brand’s ad is received.

Blades highlights several other examples where context can play a vital role, including retail partnerships, retail experiential, venue and screen, news and brand life cycles.

Sourced from Admap