System1’s Andrew Tindall says marketers are underinvesting in radio and outdoor

Andrew Tindall, chief growth officer for advertising at System1, argues that marketers are underfunding radio and outdoor despite strong evidence that both channels work, and that better creative would make them work harder still.

His case draws on new research from the IPA and Bauer Media, which across 569 campaigns associates radio and outdoor with better brand results.

Tindall says marketing has “a popularity problem”, funding and rewarding activity that is new, easy to measure and good conference material, while neglecting what delivers. “Nobody has ever been given a keynote slot for buying a bus shelter,” he writes, before admitting that he and a few others have.

He points out that radio accounts for around a fifth of people’s daily media time and that about 87% of UK adults listen each week, yet audio typically takes less than 10% of a media plan. That gap, he argues, has nothing to do with effectiveness.

“Marketers need to strap in and do what’s effective, not popular,” he says.

The research

The study, Winning The Great Brand Race, draws on 569 campaigns held in the IPA Effectiveness Databank and examines audio, outdoor and publishing, the three channels Bauer Media operates in. Where campaigns used all three channels, they reported a third more brand effects than where none were used.

Bauer Media has called this the Bauer Media Effect. Tindall says naming it after itself is “a little rich for my blood” but that the research is strong enough to overlook it.

He asks marketers to think back to the first audio or outdoor campaign that really reached them. His own was an outdoor ad wrapped around a black cab, his last taxi out of Diageo’s headquarters after working on Johnnie Walker.

According to Tindall, Databank campaigns that include outdoor or audio show a large rise in brand effects, matching what he found for audio in Effie data he presented with Mark Ritson at Cannes this year.

He accepts that adding any channel would probably lift the count, since bigger plans tend to report more. But the increase for outdoor and audio is substantial, while adding magazines on top makes almost no difference. “Publishing has been invited to its own party and is standing awkwardly by the crisps,” he writes, which in his view shows how much of the work the other two channels are doing.

The comparisons do not prove causation, he acknowledges, but a growing body of evidence keeps pointing the same way. He notes, tongue in cheek, that if Ehrenberg-Bass can call the link between penetration and market share a law, he does not see why he cannot do the same.

Trust

Tindall singles out trust as the more nuanced finding, one he has seen in separate datasets. System1’s Listen Up! research found radio to be a trusted medium, and its Double Take work found a 7% higher likelihood of people trusting brands that advertise outdoors.

Bauer Media’s figures show very large trust gains for 56% of campaigns using outdoor and audio, against 39% for campaigns that used none of the three channels. Adding magazines pushed trust and new customer numbers higher again.

He says this is unsurprising. A poster is public, so everyone knows others have seen it and the brand appears successful. And because people cannot close their ears, radio works while they cook, drive and scroll, a point he previously made about Jet2.

Average creative

Tindall’s twist is that these results reflect whatever creative happened to run, and most work in these channels is average at best. System1 has tested thousands of such ads, and he has previously written that 7 out of 10 outdoor ads do not work.

In Double Take, produced with JCDecaux, almost 40% of outdoor ads received a 1-Star score, the lowest score on System1’s emotional Star Rating, which predicts long-term effect. In Listen Up!, carried out with Radiocentre, the average radio ad sat nearer the low end of the scale than the high end.

The best work performs very differently. Strong posters delivered about double the measured commercial uplift achieved by weak posters. When radio ads were above average, 8.4% of listeners said they acted, compared with 0.2% for the rest, roughly 40 times as much from the same airtime.

Creativity also compounds, he argues. In System1’s global analysis of Effie campaigns, both audio and distinctive brand assets made a campaign about twice as likely to report profit, and combined they went further. Emotional campaigns with audio had double the chance of reporting profit.

Commitment matters too. Campaigns that ran audio for under a year performed worse on share gain than those with no audio at all.

In Tindall’s view, the Bauer Media Effect shows broadly what average radio and outdoor creative can achieve. He asks marketers to imagine every poster being instantly distinctive and clearly branded, every radio ad using an audio brand asset people already recognise, and each idea running for long enough to take hold and make people feel something.

“The unique power of the channel, coupled with the strategic advantage creativity brings. That’s the gold sitting right there for marketers in outdoor and audio,” he writes, proposing that this be called the Tindall Effect.

Tindall leads agency partnerships and advertising effectiveness research at System1 and previously worked as a brand marketer at Diageo and Bacardi.