Sizing up the Media: Signal Strength as a Quantifier
April 10, 2024

It goes without saying that the media plays an integral role in marketing. Usually, choosing the proper media channels for promoting a brand or product entails tallying up quantifiers such as viewability, shared viewing, dwell time, and attention. 

However, experts are now finding that looking at these factors alone is not enough, according to EssenceMediacom. Signalling strength as a quantifier of media effectiveness is being studied, and the latest learning is that the power of the message can be quantified.

The idea behind it is that the way brands are perceived can depend on the media, with its financial status, its popularity, and the trust based on it being contingent on this.

Sizing up the Media: Signal Strength as a Quantifier

This idea seems to resonate with what was said by Canadian educator, philosopher, and media theorist at the University of Toronto in 1964, Marshall McLuhan, that media, and not the content they carry, should be studied in depth. This was known as ‘the medium is the message’. It was McLuhan’s view that the medium used in a certain society affects that society by the characteristics of the medium itself.

This is the age of digital marketing. And if the medium is the message, spending money on the best design and allocating the highest budget will not always do the trick. The content that gets ahead can often be content that uses the tools at hand and platform parameters better than the market competitors.

What media signalling does

When we use various media over time and other people we know to do the same, this shared consumption of media results in a stronger signal value being established.

The recent research conducted by EssenceMediacom showed that campaigns that are creator-led, podcasts, online, video, and radio, tend to produce the idea that a brand is probably more popular than others, rather than communicating the quality of the product and the confidence it holds. 

However, this does not mean the time spent on certain media builds media signal strength. While in the recent past, it was felt that eyes-on-screen time, viewability, and so on were good quantifiers of media viability, now these are considered inadequate measures. 

Research has found that generally, across all age groups, TV, cinema, radio, and news were the better forms of media to signal brand strength. 

Therefore, how consumers understand advertisements depends a great deal on the medium they use, which demonstrates that a traditional medium such as television can be as effective or even slightly more effective than online mediums.

This means that brands need to establish themselves with mediums which are perceived as trustworthy as this affects the audience’s perception of the brand.

Customer perception of media signal strength

Interestingly, studies have found that consumer estimates of media costs seem to affect their perception of media signal strength.

Overall, younger audiences are the most persuaded by the signal strength of the media. So, reaching such audiences means carefully selecting one’s media channels, and not only sticking to digital media as the latter is always assumed to be the most popular among the younger generation.

Cinema and TV are the media channels that seem to hold greater signal strength amongst the adolescent generation, with cinema still remaining quite popular. 

Making it worth the money

The study by EssenceMediacom also conveys that signalling data is related to long-term return on investment (ROI) numbers that are associated with media, but not so much with short-term ROI. 

Therefore, the consensus is that if marketers are to ascertain the true value of their advertising, they should be studying the data over a significant period of time, such as over three months.

On the whole, media signalling is something that should be taken into account along with the other more popular quantifiers such as viewability and eyes-on-screen time. It is worth noting that the former may be more important than the latter because the latter may be misleading. This is simply because viewing an advertisement does not mean that one has actually understood the brand and engaged with it. 

So, if nothing else, the trust and authenticity factors concerning a brand will only come into play with the audience’s perceived media signal strength. 

(Anouk De Silva)

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