Greg Newman, Strategist, Craft Media London
You wouldn’t think it reading the trade press, but January 2024 might be the best month for broadcast TV for the last 10 years.
In a little over a fortnight, television has birthed a new national sporting hero, stripped a ghoul of her honour and exonerated 500+ innocent people, glued millions of people to a game of wink murder, and reignited the lycra industry.
What all of these programmes have in common - what TV always does when it’s at it’s best - is that they give ordinary people the opportunity to show themselves to be anything but. Mr Bates, Luke Littler and the cast of The Traitors are all people who would appear unremarkable to a cursory glance, but reveal themselves on closer inspection to be absolutely fascinating - exceptionally talented, tenacious, complex, resilient, and absolutely dreadful at spotting liars.
When TV is rubbish it’s generally because it looks down its nose at people. When it’s brilliant it’s generally because it celebrates them. It allows audiences to properly empathise, because in real life nobody is ordinary, and everybody is interesting.
At Craft we believe empathy is a key ingredient of really great planning. Too much work never gets beyond crude pen portraits based on single surveys or broad demographic target audiences.
Great planning goes way beyond this. Working out who you want to reach is the starting point, working out what makes those people tick is where the gold is.
Anyone can run a report on the media an audience consumes - but to really understand them you need to go deeper, go and consume it for a bit, work out why they choose it and what they like about it.
Anyone can build an audience of main shoppers - going further means understanding where they shop, for who, what they usually buy, what new product they might be buying for the first time. It means understanding if they’re trying to eat a bit less meat, or lose a bit of Christmas weight
Socio-economic status is so common a currency that it's largely ignored lots of the time - but what people do for a living is a defining part of who they are and the life they lead. It informs the hours they work, how they think when they’re not on the clock - are they taking it home with them? It dictates if they’re bringing in enough money to make ends meet. If they’re not, it probably informs every purchase decision they make and preoccupies their thinking at every moment we have a chance to communicate with them.
It probably won't change a channel mix or a buying audience (though it sometimes does), but this detail informs all the choices that give your plan body language, the way you show up and the thing that gives audiences a reason to notice you: context, partner selection, when your ads run, what format you use, the right spot length, a great partnership brief, a great creative brief, etc.
If everything competes with everything, then our ad campaigns are competing for notice with some of the best TV in recent memory. We could do a lot worse than copying it a bit.