We all know that a postcode can seriously affect the price of property. Proximity to a good state school means some postcodes have seriously inflated prices.
We know too about the various “postcode lotteries”, which can influence health and of course likelihood to be a crime victim. If you live on the “wrong” side of the Finchley Road you can wipe a million quid off the value of a property that looks identical to one on the “right” side.
The visibility of the postcode makes a big difference to those with status anxiety which leads some to lobby furiously for change. One group living in Windsor and Maidenhead are petitioning to swap the SL in their postcodes for WM in order to distance themselves from any association with Slough.
According to standard.co.uk residents of Whitton, a town in the leafy and affluent borough of Richmond-Upon-Thames, are angry that their TW3 postcode classes them in the neighbouring, more deprived borough of Hounslow.
They say that this affects everything from house prices to insurance premiums and have petitioned the Royal Mail to change it.
Kim Tasso, 53, said: “My daughter goes to a Richmond school, we pay council tax to Richmond council, the police consider us a Richmond address, yet when I put ‘Whitton’ as my address my post arrives two days late, with ‘Whitton’ crossed out by the Post Office and ‘Hounslow’ written in its place…..Either we should be called Hounslow and pay our rates to Hounslow borough council, or keep paying the higher Richmond rates and be able to call ourselves Richmond.”
Can you imagine the uproar in the area once those residents are shown different TV adverts to the people living in Richmond too? New targeting systems will allow different copy to run in different households depending on their socio-economic data based on real purchase habits. Should one share a postcode with people who buy a lot of samphire for instance, one can expect a different class of copy from those who share a postcode with people who sustain themselves with pop tarts and pot noodles.
We must applaud the potential for better targeting effectiveness, less wastage and the ability to encourage new brands onto TV that these targeting systems will provide.
This targeted approach on TV will concern people more, once it takes hold, than similar targeting that already exists in other media. No-one takes the ads they get served online too seriously. If we notice erectile dysfunction ads or the ladies equivalent of drastic cosmetic surgery we can laugh them off.
Outdoor doesn’t ghettoise you either as any local targeting is offset by travel catchment areas and commuter routes which means that quite downbeat areas are graced by huge posters targeted at commuters sweeping through in limousines.
Ads on TV are another thing again. Which kinds of ads you see on TV will become a talking point, from stand up comedians to school gate chatter.
SL postcode deniers will have a new worry – what TV ads they see. Could the presence of, or lack of an advert featuring Heston lead to swings in house prices? In the future, you are what you are ad served.
Newspapers and prosperity
Thursday, February 27th, 2014The business model for newspapers – newsbrands if you like – still troubles the industry. It remains a subject for debate, despite the fact that the audience that they delivered in the good old days is easily obtained in other media. Yet, and yet, a desire to see recovery in the sector still permeates the ad industry and beyond into the world of finance.
It occupied a good deal of the afternoon of the recent Enders Deloitte Beyond 2014 conference. Ashley Highfield CEO of Johnston Press talked about recovery in the regional newsbrand field, through mass localisation and allowing readers to contribute directly to publications web pages on local events. Mike Darcey, CEO of News International argued that the “relentless focus” on print sales alone is “misleading and myopic”, demanding an industry metric that aggregates and de-duplicates readership across all platforms – print, website, mobile and tablet.
“I want to explain how newspapers can do more than simply survive in the 21st century, they can thrive.”
Whilst there are attempts by several media owners to establish unilateral metrics across platforms, we seem to be a long way from a single metric which will satisfy all media planners, buyers and clients. I have spoken to advertisers of global importance recently, who are appalled at the stultification of the industry in this respect.
At ABC’s conference this February, Rupert Howell, Trinity Mirror’s group transformation director and chairman of Sunday brands, said journalists “can’t just do words, you have to have video”. Mark Wood, chief executive of Future, added media owners need quality content to attract and retain audiences. Well of course. Personally I don’t like to start the week without the Sunday Times take on business and culture and in fact the relative resilience of its print circulation often passes unnoticed and unremarked when the chronic spiral downwards of other titles circulation are discussed.
Newspapers have a long heritage. They were invented in the 17th century by Johan Carolus who proposed turning his weekly newsletters into print if his local council in Strasbourg would give him a monopoly. There was a business proposition built into the birth of the medium. A more robust one in fact than that which emerged in the late 20th Century when newspapers gave their product away online, yet still hoped to sell print copies too.
Early modern Europeans were famous for their appetite for news. Most of it however they received for free, from neighbours, family or in town squares. At the start the idea that a wide public would pay for a sophisticated news service seemed unlikely. Early newspapers relied on the state to survive. Two factors changed their fortune. First, rising prosperity, which meant that people had money to spend on non-essential items. We can hope that the recovery in the economic climate can help the medium, but it would be significantly better if there was clear and transparent industry cross platform, indeed cross media, data to feed our econometric models to prove the worth of the medium. The second factor was social cachet. Andrew Pettegree comments that the eighteenth century Somerset squire might not know why the Duke of Brunswick was gathering troops, or even where Brunswick was, but to be offered this information was to be admitted into the previously closed world of the politically informed. “For the status it conveyed, rather like wearing a sword or riding in a carriage, the cost of the subscription was money well spent.”
Traditional newsbrands seem to have lost some of this social aspiration cachet to other media. To media that facilitate drinking games, and trolling. This is a big mistake for newsbrands and as problematic to the business issue as the research issue is. The status can and must be reclaimed – with wit, with quality relevant content and with strategic investment in the brands.
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