The voice of the mainstream

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There is an incongruity to travelling to Canary Wharf – that bastion of London capitalist vigour – to interview Trinity Mirror’s head of insight, Andrew Tenzer, about brands being too London-focused.

Passing from the shopping centre with its Paul Smith and Montblanc shops to a newspaper business on the upper floors of Canada Square is a long way from the Fleet Street of old. But everything is changing in the newspaper business, where it’s now all about digital-first strategies and the need for in-depth customer insight is greater than ever.

Indeed, there are even more changes in the time between interviewing Tenzer and publishing this article, because, following its purchase of Express Newspapers for £127m in February, it’s now being rebranded to Reach. The fallout of that has yet to reach Tenzer.  

Tenzer’s insight work has been broad and varied. It has caused some ripples in the industry for its exposure of just how alienated so many people in the country feel from the London-centric brand communications pumped out by so many advertisers.

It’s interesting that a man who’s spent his whole career in London working predominantly on media brands, has recognised and explored the disconnect between London-based media folk and the rest of the country so well.    

His mum worked for David Frost and John Birt, so the thrill of the media hit Tenzer – and his sister who also works in research – from an early age. After university and a brief spell trying to be a musician, he got into research, initially at IFF Research, before heading to Channel 4. He stayed there until 2015.

Working for brands he believes in, and has an affinity with, has been an important factor during his career path – as well as influencing the insight he’s worked on once there. 

So, while he talks about the training he got at IFF as being important, he also admits that doing a lot of financial research there wasn’t a particular passion for him – “partly because I never really understood it”. But Channel 4 was entirely different and working in its insight department had been an ambition of his. 

After a successful stint at the independent broadcaster and then the BBC – which included winning awards – Tenzer joined Trinity Mirror last year. It was another business that he felt aligned with his personal values. 

“The opportunity to come in and develop the insight function, particularly in the commercial space, really attracted me to the role.”

He has no time for the notion that newsbrands are losing their influence – citing the Mirror’s organ donation campaign and the Liverpool Echo’s work to gain justice for the 96 people who died at Hillsborough. More recently, Manchester Evening News’ (MEN) coverage of the Manchester bombing was, he says, very supportive and sensibly reported.  

But joining Trinity Mirror at the time of Brexit put the nature of our splintered nation in sharp relief. The political divide demonstrated by the EU referendum vote triggered research looking at the gaps emerging in how brands are trusted,  finding that many are increasingly negatively associated with the London-based establishment, especially by people who don’t live in London.

The report based on this first wave of research, ‘When Trust Falls Down’, became Tenzer’s calling card, as the evidence was clear that there was a significant gap in perceptions between agencies and the consumers they were looking to target. 

The idea for the Brexit research came from creative advertising’s annual awards festival. “We were talking about Cannes Lions and how ridiculous that whole event was. We were thinking of something we could produce, which could counter the elitist marketing and advertising industry perception on things. The idea that you’re out at Cannes Lions sipping champagne and celebrating creative awards that probably don’t have that much relevance.

“We felt we could legitimately talk about it, but we also knew it was quite provocative because I don’t think many media owners would want to talk about declining trust in advertising and brands," he adds. 

“I’ve probably presented When Trust Falls Down externally around 50 times. We also have our Brand Relevance Index (see box, p48 ) to measure how our brands are performing or resonating outside London. It’s a great door opener,” he says.

Tenzer worked with Ipsos on the trust report, saying: “For a subject like that, you need an agency with the gravitas of Ipsos to give it that extra layer of credibility.”

Research like this is useful for agency relationship-building and generating headlines, and Tenzer currently has four or five studies in the pipeline that are “all part of our process to prove that we represent the mass market of Britain like nobody else does – we are the voice of the mainstream.” You don’t say tabloid these days, it’s been rebranded to mass market. 

While much of the insight team’s work is focused on commercial and supporting Trinity Mirror Solutions – which incorporates working with its creative solutions team on innovation – they also work directly with editorial.

“We’ll do a piece about the repositioning of one of our titles, and then another title will get wind of that. It starts a domino effect. Primarily our budgets go towards commercial, but editorial are really supportive of the commercial side of the business.”

Ongoing tracking across all of its 150+ brands is a challenge. Instead, it runs its Mouthpiece panel – made up of 5,000 of its readers.

“We have a panel manager, because of the level of work required. In 2017, we probably did about 70 pieces of research through that panel. It’s quite relentless – we’re constantly recruiting,” he says.

The type of research for which it uses the panel varies. “It can be supporting pitches, coming up with content ideas for creative solutions, doing research about redesigns. It might be research about columnists, the level of sport within the Sunday Mirror – it could be anything.”

Trinity Mirror also uses Mouthpiece for joint studies with media agencies. Last year, this included a study ‘Breaking the Filter Bubble’ with Spark Foundry, part of the Publicis Groupe, which again looked at identity in a post-general election world. It has also worked with OMD to research the future of parenting.

Digital-first strategy

Trinity Mirror’s scale digitally is large – 40 million adults every month in the UK, across print and digital. And it’s not just a national phenomenon. “The Liverpool Echo or the Manchester Evening News have huge numbers – more than six million a month for each website. From a commercial perspective, we tend to sell packages to run advertising across our portfolio,” he says.

“The current conditions and societal shifts work in our favour. What we’re seeing is people retrenching from globalisation, to what is safe and trusted, which is local. I think people have an emotional connection with their local news brands.” 

The role of local and national journalism is slightly different; many argue that a strong local press is vital for democracy – to hold local government to account and represent smaller interests.

Tenzer says: “National and regional play a slightly different role, but they complement each other. We talk a lot about explicit and implicit geotargeting – explicit is about going into people’s own turf into a trusted environment like the MEN. People then think ‘these brands care about me'.”

The over-arching role, says Tenzer, is proving that Trinity Mirror’s content is premium. But his definition of premium differs from some. “Love Island, for instance, can make very successful news on our website, but there’s a kind of snobbery from advertisers that think that type of content is not premium. It is premium – premium doesn’t just mean highbrow,” he argues. “Premium is something that adds value to my life and makes me feel happy. You only have to look at the rise of the budget supermarkets to show you where modern Britain is at. I can understand, in the print world, why those biases take place, but I think it’s time for everyone to reappraise the concept of premium in the digital world.”

Tenzer is keen to introduce more innovative research techniques and will be doing more behavioural economics research with house51. Carrying on the declining relevance of brands and advertising theme, it will question if the challenges to re-connect with consumers are even deeper than previously thought.

It is building on the latest academic research on cognitive diversity, exploring how the marketing industry has a different ‘thinking style’ to the mass market. The premise being that thinking styles drive our behaviour at an unconscious level and that many people working in advertising have cognitive and behavioural biases that mean they see the world differently to the public. 

The theme of our disconnected society is running deep through Tenzer’s work at Trinity Mirror and he has been particularly affected by the findings of the different focus groups it’s run – seeing just how great the chasm is between the London focus groups and those from other parts of the country.

“We don’t want just to do focus groups in London and in Manchester. We want to go to places that aren’t traditionally used in market research because we want to get that additional viewpoint. You almost have to exclude London, if you want a real sense.”

He was particularly surprised reading through manuscripts, and talking to the people running the focus groups, from Newport. “I was shocked by the level of distrust and anti-establishment feeling taking place there, and how forgotten some of these people feel. Had I joined Trinity Mirror a year earlier and I was doing this type of research, I probably would have thought that we would vote to leave the EU.”

He found the same divide with the OMD parenting research. “It was amazing how out of touch brands are with parents. Only 19% believe advertising represents their experience of parenthood, and goes down to something like 5% for an older demographic. We had all this wealth of data, and then we had a panel discussion afterwards with a couple of young, London-based mother bloggers. It was amazing how most of the panel then just ignored all of the data that was presented to them and reverted back to their London bubble.”

Regardless of the Express deal, all newsbrands are under huge commercial pressure, so how does that affect the role of evidence-based research?

“Certainly here, the value of insight is very high. When I started in research, it was research and insight. Now it’s just insight. People don’t really like using the ‘research’ word, but you can’t get the insight without research.

“We know how important insight is, but I think it’s partly how you sell it in. The reason research or insight can get a bad name is if you produce insight that isn’t actionable. If it’s not actionable insight, then I’m not going to put it in front of someone, because it’s useless to them.”  

Brand Relevance Index

The first wave of Trinity Mirror’s Brand Relevance Index was launched last summer to measure performance or resonance outside London. It looked at 56 brands. 

“The thinking behind it is local identity is becoming increasingly important,” says Tenzer. “Brands have lost touch a little bit with mass-market Britain, particularly outside London. So, rather than focusing on brand metrics relating to the individual, we ask how well that brand speaks to people in a local area.” 

The second wave was released in February and was extended to 170 brands. “It’s a door opener to contact brands – it tallies with a lot of what they’re seeing and helps validate some of their own research.” 

Based on a survey of 2,000 UK consumers, each of the 170 leading brands were ranked on their relevance to consumers. That score was calculated by a brand’s ability to connect with consumers across the country and not just in London. 

The score for inside London is subtracted from the score outside London, to create the overall relevance score. A positive score implies the brand is connecting more with people outside London than inside, zero implies equal connection, a negative score implies the brand is connecting more with those in the capital. 

The top 10 brands were: B&M +31; Co-op +20; Aldi +18; Matalan +15; Screwfix +14; Asda +13; Dunelm +12; wilko +11; RAC +11 and Lloyds Pharmacy +9. Category-wise, supermarkets performed best (+1 ); all others were in the negative, with telecoms the worst (-17 ).

Overall, 74% of people in the UK said their local area is important to their identity – a stronger emotional relationship than nationality, region, postcode and the north/south divide.

In 2017, 61% agreed with ‘most advertising doesn’t portray the lives of people in my local area’, up from 56% in 2016.