{"id":1951,"date":"2026-06-16T14:42:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/?p=1951"},"modified":"2026-06-16T14:42:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:42:29","slug":"who-cares-about-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/who-cares-about-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Cares About Content?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last Thursday, Advertising: Who Cares?<\/a> organised a 3-hour event called Who Cares Wins. The centrepiece was two long-form discussions, one on \u2018content\u2019, the other on \u2018safety\u2019, preceded by a review of research that concludes, over and over again that the context within which an ad appears impacts its performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Who Cares About Content panel comprised Stephen Colegrave, Founder of Byline Times, Mel Leach, CEO of the independent TV producer South Shore, Dom Ponsford, Editor-in-Chief of Press Gazette, and Damian Collins, ex-Government minister and sometime chair of the DCMS Select Committee, moderated by the freelance journalist Omar Oakes. Their conversation took place within the context that around two-thirds of UK ad revenues ends up with three US-based channels: META, Google and Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I said in my introductory remarks, nobody is suggesting that Facebook et al have no place on advertising plans. It\u2019s a matter of balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, generations even, we\u2019ve all known instinctively that advertising that appears on multiple channels always outperforms campaigns that focus on one channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To use a hackneyed metaphor, you don\u2019t make a cake with one ingredient. You consider, you mix, you compliment, you combine, you experiment, you learn. With practice you get better. You learn that mixing metric and imperial measures is not a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite all the evidence pointing in one direction, despite decades of learnings across any number of celebrated examples, brand-centric advertisers continue to do what has been shown not to work. They continue to spend behind performance activities, not as well as but instead of using tried and tested methods to build their brands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result, as outlined in many places (including at the launch of Advertising: Who Cares?) by Michael Farmer, is clear. Sales of many brands within categories traditionally built on brand marketing are as good as flat. The flatlining correlates with the same brands\u2019 move to increased spending on social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it\u2019s brand building you\u2019re after there are many better channels than social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a niche blog, written for people in the advertising and marketing business. It\u2019s tempting to ignore society, or the common good, but occasionally advertisers\u2019 interests and society\u2019s coincide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all, advertisers included benefit from a varied mix of available media. I may loathe news-site A and favour streaming channel B but the world would be a lot less interesting if everyone agreed with me, or, worse if everyone had to agree with me simply because all other choices had vanished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Brits are good at creative services. We are good (as Mel Leach reminded us on Thursday) at creating TV formats. We are good at advertising (the UK is the second largest exporter of advertising services, according to the Advertising Association<\/a>). We are good at measurement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet our ad supported media sector is struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nick Manning wrote here<\/a> on the slow, inevitable Americanisation of our media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would argue that it\u2019s not only the content of the media, but also media thinking that has been driven by our American friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The American media buying market has always been about the biggest number wins.<\/a> And on that criterion the social media platforms (who of course define their own numbers) win every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Planning across media channels, the consideration of content and context, the measurement of attention, all come as second nature to UK strategists and planners, whereas they\u2019re comparatively recent innovations in the USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have strong trade bodies like the AA, ISBA, IPA here. We should continually remind them that a healthy, pluralistic media sector is good for advertisers for sure, but more importantly is good for the country, our economy and society as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday, Advertising: Who Cares? organised a 3-hour event called Who Cares Wins. The centrepiece was two long-form discussions, one on \u2018content\u2019, the other on \u2018safety\u2019, preceded by a review of research that concludes, over and over again that the context within which an ad appears impacts its performance.<\/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\/1951"}],"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=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1953,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions\/1953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}