Content or context: which matters more?

At 7.51am on Friday January 12, 2007, a man in an ill-fitting jumper and baseball cap made his nondescript way to a grimy corner of the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C. He positioned himself against a wall, next to a garbage bin, unpacked a violin and bow, opened his case ready to take donations, and started to play. He played for 43 minutes. During that time, over 1,000 commuters passed within a couple of feet of him. People having their shoes shined or in line to buy a Lotto ticket listened to him perform entire pieces. In all of that time, only seven people stopped to listen, and only twenty more paused to give him money. The lady running the shoe shine stand considered complaining to the police about the noise. A woman passing by wondered why people bothered busking in this way. The violin player made just over $32.

Two weeks earlier, that same man had stood on a stage at Symphony Hall in Boston. There was no jumper and no baseball cap. He wore a sharp black suit and was surrounded by supporting musicians in white tie and tails. An expectant crowd, decked in their finest, strained to hear every sound that he would make. After all, they had paid a minimum of $100 each to hear him perform.

This was Joshua Bell. A man considered by many to be the greatest violinist alive. A man whose playing has been described as doing “nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” In both locations, he had played the same beautiful classical music on the same insanely expensive violin – and yet the response from his audiences could not have been more different.

Context vs content: a hard reality to come to terms with
Joshua Bell’s twin performances had been arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment into the influence of context on human perceptions – and the findings shocked plenty of people at the time. Heads of National Symphony Orchestras, in particular, found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that no crowd of people formed in response to Bell’s playing; that people couldn’t recognise the beauty; that, between 1,000 of them, they could detect no more than $32 in value.

The response of music lovers is understandable. In fact, it’s eerily similar to the reaction of many marketers when you try to convince them that the context in which their ad appears might be more important than the ad itself. When you are so invested in your message, it’s difficult to come to terms with the idea that the message itself might not matter – or at least, that it might matter a lot less than you thought. More than a decade after Bell’s DC metro gig, plenty of advertising strategies still assume that, provided you’re reaching the right audience with the right content, it doesn’t matter where you reach them.

Advertisers’ early use of programmatic buying was often based on the assumption that targeting trumped context. Being able to target people wherever you wanted allowed you to reach them far more efficiently. Since ignoring context lowered costs, it must be an improvement. Many strategies still apply the same logic, especially when it comes to response. If you can get enough people to click on an ad for a low enough cost then it doesn’t matter where your ad appeared, or how many other people saw it, in order to get that response. It’s tempting to use ever more advanced analytics to optimise marketing ever more efficiently around these outcomes. However, that would be a huge mistake – and the Joshua Bell experiment helps to explain why.

How context dominates our response to advertising
Context influences our response to advertising in powerful ways, on several different levels. It’s not just an instinctive response or a conscious judgment – it’s both. Human beings use context in sophisticated ways to make extremely quick decision.

Source: LinkedIn Sales and Marketing Solutions EMEA Blog