Don’t forget the little things as you plan your media for 2025
The ‘McRib’ campaign from McDonald’s last year was a sterling example of how to take a smaller bit of messaging and maximise its effectiveness.
By Ben Davis
The funny thing about the start of a new year is how quickly the past one recedes from memory. When I try to think of ads from 2024, and I write this mere days into January when it should all still be relatively fresh, there isn’t that much I can actively recall, other than Jaguar’s relaunch and John Lewis’ Christmas campaign.
Of course, that’s the nature of ads, they are very rarely cultural moments that happen to spring to mind as we go about our day. The memory of one may dimly flicker as you stumble into a category entry point, but the kids aren’t talking about ads at parties.
If you’re long enough in the tooth, you might put this down to the fact that media is now so fragmented. As Tom Roach and Grace Kite have argued, writing in Marketing Week, advertising is increasingly about a lot of little things (i.e. ‘big ads’ are a small and declining proportion of the industry’s output, and the effect a campaign has on sales/brand metrics increases as more channels are layered in).
