Last year Reach (publishers of The Mirror and Express newspapers) produced a fascinating study into the differences between those in media agencies and the population as a whole. Reach (or rather Trinity Mirror as it was then) summarised their findings as follows: \u201cWe discovered that people in ad land unconsciously see, experience and interpret the world differently to large swathes of the UK population\u201d.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s<\/a> what the Cog Blog had to say about it at the time.<\/p>\n This year Reach has extended the original idea to explore the issue of empathy \u2013 and whether or not those in adland have any with the people we\u2019re trying to influence with our messaging.<\/p>\n Reach (and their research partners House51) conclude: \u201c..we\u2019ve identified the role that our moral intuitions play in driving a wedge between us and the mainstream audiences we seek to engage\u201d.<\/p>\n The study is called The Empathy Delusion, it\u2019s an interesting and revealing read, as you can see for yourself here<\/a>, along with a comment<\/a> from Dominic Mills.<\/p>\n Andrew Tenzer (Reach\u2019s Director of Group Insight, and the report\u2019s author) was kind enough to send me a pre-publication edition of the research, and to agree to respond to questions. I wondered whether this \u2018empathy delusion\u2019 exists amongst others who seek to communicate with the public \u2013 such as journalists.<\/p>\n I hope Andrew doesn\u2019t mind me quoting his response as it relates to Mirror journalists (note that his answer refers to a different study, although his conclusion is clearly relevant to the empathy debate):<\/p>\n \u201cInterestingly I measured .. Mirror journalists against the values framework from my gut instinct research last year. Although their values are slightly different to the mainstream, they (get) it spot on when estimating the values of (the) mainstream audience. On the whole, \u2018The Mirror\u2019 is very empathetic to working class issues (I think we represent them better than any other newsbrand) so I didn’t find this overly surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure Andrew is right \u2013 newsbrand journalists have no reason to reflect the values or issues of the entire population, or even a demographic subset of the population, but rather the views of their readers. And as readers most of us do of course choose those views that most closely reflect our own.<\/p>\n Which leads on to an interesting issue. Shouldn\u2019t we do more to tailor-make creative to the vehicles in which the message appears?<\/p>\n Years (and years) ago I was tangentially involved in some research into the respective merits of \u2018The Sun\u2019 and \u2018The Daily Mirror\u2019, one element of which involved asking the readers of one for their opinions of the other.<\/p>\n \u2018Sun\u2019 readers said they found \u2018The Mirror\u2019 too detailed, too wordy; \u2018Mirror\u2019 readers found \u2018The Sun\u2019 too pictorial, too shallow. So they largely agreed on the titles\u2019 characteristics; what was a positive to one set was a negative to the other.<\/p>\n Setting aside whether these views are in any way valid today, shouldn\u2019t we have been designing ads for \u2018The Mirror\u2019 differently from ads for \u2018The Sun\u2019?<\/p>\n Journalists are brilliant at doing this in their world. Julie Birchall, the columnist made her name at \u2018The Guardian\u2019 with a regular piece in the weekend magazine. When she shifted to \u2018The Daily Mail\u2019 there is no way she would have continued her \u2018Guardian\u2019 persona (note to overseas readers: \u2018The Guardian\u2019 and \u2018The Mail\u2019 are at opposite ends of almost every pole).<\/p>\n Julie wrote for her readership and did so extremely well.<\/p>\n Yes, there might be an element of \u2018chicken and egg\u2019 in this example, but the point still stands that if you want to communicate effectively with an audience you need to empathise with them.<\/p>\n The old argument for one-size-fits-all-within-a-broad-demographic ads was expense and production costs, but that is far less relevant today.<\/p>\n We are still largely bound by the old conventions of demography and location in targeting, which broadness in turns feeds through to the look and feel of the creative. It\u2019s not all that surprising that much of it often seems irrelevant to those seeing it.<\/p>\n With values and issues being front and centre these days, and with the research around to allow creative messaging to reflect far better how the audience thinks and feels we can and should do better.<\/p>\n Good on Reach \u2013 let\u2019s hope those responsible for currency measures take at least the principles of their findings on board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year Reach (publishers of The Mirror and Express newspapers) produced a fascinating study into the differences between those in media agencies and the population as a whole. Reach (or rather Trinity Mirror as it was then) summarised their findings as follows: \u201cWe discovered that people in ad land unconsciously see, experience and interpret the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}