What Your Media Says About Your Brand

We know that the news site, cable TV network, or magazine you advertise in doesn't just serve up a different audience. It also says something about your brand.

But what about entire swaths of media? If you advertise on TV, does that signal something that advertising on social media doesn't?

Why, yes. Yes it does.

The good folks at Thinkbox teamed up with house51 to do an ingenious experiment.

They told 3,000 folks that a fictional brand (a consumer good, cellular network, home insurer, or online retailer) was launching an ad campaign.

Holding that stuff constant, they then switched up one thing: the medium where the campaign would run: social media, magazines, newspapers, radio, online video sites, or TV.

Then they asked how people would rate that fictional company on a range of things like quality, popularity, trust, and financial strength.

Sure enough, the medium DOES carry some message. Not all of it, of course. But where you advertise has a halo on how your brand is perceived.

TV was highest across all metrics, which I lumped together into a "legit brand" score. Apparently "real brands advertise on TV." Social media & video sharing sites were bottom 2 on all metrics. Radio, magazines & newspapers were consistently in the middle.

The spread was highest for "financially strong" and lowest for "trustworthy". But the effect was large for all metrics.

We know this intuitively: sending an embossed paper wedding invite via a fancy, thick envelope signals things that sending an email or eVite doesn't. (Sorry eVite.)

The brand impact of this "costly signaling" is often forgotten about when just considering price & efficiency of media.

Ignore it at your own risk.

Read the whole report here: https://lnkd.in/ebRbrUnG

#advertising #socialmedia #brand #media #newspapers #radio#brandscience #marketingscience #marketingandadvertising