If you are not a lover of classical music, the name Joshua Bell may not ring a bell and, of course, no one will crucify you for that glaring oversight. But for the purposes of this story, it is imperative that you meet and know him.
Joshua is arguably one of the finest violinists of our time – a maestro if you will. His usually fully packed concerts staged in some of the world’s grandest theatres go for anywhere between KES 10,000 and 15,000 a person. You will never catch him playing anything but the finest violin money can buy. Perhaps even the rare Stradivarius. But that is highly unlikely, given that the legendary violin maker, Stradivari, produced just 1,100 pieces and only 600 are thought to still exist in the world and most live in museums.
Yet on the Friday of January 2007 when Bell stood unkempt and rough-looking next to a garbage bin in a grimy corner of the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C. to do what he did best in life, his audience was scanty, his presence a public nuisance, his net effect, near zero. For the 43 minutes he played his usually surreal masterpieces on his expensive instrument, 1,000 commuters passed by and only 7 stopped to listen and only 20 more gave him a tip. He collected a measly KES 3,200 that day playing the kind of music that would have made him hundreds of thousands in just one show. So what happened?
Joshua, that day at the metro station, had been part of an experiment commissioned by the Washington Post to explore the influence of context on human perceptions. The findings shocked many people at the time. The idea that context rather than content had such a profoundly significant role in human behaviour and the decision-making process had never been laid bare this way before.
The same beautiful music that would usually attract high-paying audiences now, played in a different place, could not even pay for a single concert ticket. This same odd human behaviour, it seems, cuts across the board even in marketing. A spectacularly designed online ad placed on the wrong platform does not seem to do as well as a modestly designed ad placed in the right space. Clearly, context reigns supreme over the content. This discovery has fundamentally affected the way advertising is modelled today.
Context influences our response to advertising in powerful ways, on several different levels. It is not just an instinctive response or a conscious judgement. It is both. Human beings use context in sophisticated ways to make extremely quick decisions about the value and credibility of what is being presented to them. As a result, it is impossible to consider an ad objectively, without being influenced by where you are seeing it. The context in which people see your brand will have a big influence on their judgement of your brand, both in the moment and in the future, and this applies whether they click on an ad or not.
Bob Hoffman, the author of The Ad Contrarian blog, explains this superbly. He draws a distinction between what marketers communicate in an ad (the “message”) and what the ad actually says about them (the “signal”). According to Hoffman, the type of ad format you are using and the place where that ad appears contribute far more to the signal of what your brand is really about than the content of the ad itself.
When audiences decide which brands to trust with their time, interest and money, they automatically use context to make the assessment. In the same way, commuters assume with confidence that musicians who play on the subway are not the best musicians in the world however good they might be – but musicians who play in expensive concert halls might be.
Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group has long argued that this was the real value for brands in advertising on TV in the 1980s – it still is even in today’s digital space. A brand that chooses the most expensive ad slots communicates that it intends to be around for a while, in order to recoup its investment.
This signals credibility and trustworthiness far more effectively than the message of the ad itself. Contrast this with a direct response ad that follows you around the Internet and clearly cares only about persuading you to click as cheaply as possible. It sends a very different signal about what the brand stands for.
There is a need to start conversions around your organisation on what this will mean for your online advertising strategy. Does it make a difference to you that the signal and not the message matters more to people? If so, what decisions, both financial and technical need to be made to orient your brand in this direction? Feel free to drop your views by leaving a comment below.