Author: Sara de Velasco

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

If you have never briefed a media agency before, that first conversation can feel daunting. How much detail do you need? What if you get it wrong? Here is the reassuring part: a strong brief is not about complexity. Research from the IPA and BetterBriefs found that UK marketers waste more than a quarter of their budget on poor briefs and misdirected work, and that almost three quarters of agencies say the briefs they receive from clients are not good enough. The businesses that get the most from their agency relationships are not always the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who walk in prepared.

This guide sets out exactly what to bring to that first conversation, the mistakes worth avoiding, and a simple checklist you can run through beforehand.

What your agency actually needs from you

You do not need a polished document. You need clear answers to six questions. Work through these before you pick up the phone, and your agency can spend its time on strategy and ideas rather than trying to fill in the gaps.

• Your business context. The honest version, not the website version. How long have you been trading? What has worked in marketing so far, and what has not? Are you trying to grow, hold steady, or break into a new market?
• A clear, measurable objective. “More enquiries” or “better brand awareness” are outcomes, not objectives, and no agency can brief against them. Try something specific instead: increase qualified enquiries by 30% in six months, or generate 50 leads a month at a cost per lead under £40.
• Your target audience. Go beyond age and location. Who has the problem you solve, and what does their life look like just before they find you? If you have data on your best customers, bring it along.
• A realistic budget range. You do not need an exact figure, but you do need a range. Without one, your agency is scoping in the dark, and will usually plan for the higher end. Be clear, too, on whether that budget covers agency fees, media spend, or both.
• Your timeline and expectations. When do you need to see results? What does success look like at 30, 60 and 90 days? Flag any fixed dates, such as a launch or a seasonal peak, from the outset.
• Your brand and previous agency experience. Share any brand guidelines, tone of voice notes or examples of work you admire. If you have worked with an agency before, be upfront about what worked and what did not. It is not about criticising anyone, it is about helping the new relationship start on the right foot.
• What kind out outcomes would genuinely make you happy. This is an opportunity to go beyond the figures on the paper, use it as a way to discuss what your media ambitions are.

The mistakes that quietly cost you the most

None of these mistakes feel dramatic in the moment. They just mean your agency is working with less than they need, which shows up later as wasted spend, missed timelines, or work that misses the mark.

Strategy mistakes

• Setting unclear objectives. Wanting “more enquiries” rather than a measurable goal leaves your agency guessing at what a win actually looks like.
• Treating the brief as a box-ticking exercise rather than a two-way conversation. The best briefs are a starting point for discussion, not a form to be filled in and forgotten.
• Booking something purely because a competitor is doing it, without asking whether it is right for your brand and your objectives.
• Chasing “shiny new things” for the same reason. New formats and platforms are worth exploring, but only if they earn their place in your plan.
• Continuing to book the same thing simply because it is what you have always done. Familiarity is not the same as effectiveness.

Information mistakes

• Withholding your budget. It rarely protects you from a high quote, it just means your agency is scoping blind.
• Missing historical or business context. Your agency cannot build on what has worked, or avoid what has not, if they do not know about it.
• Giving no real target audience detail. A vague audience produces a vague campaign.

Format and planning mistakes

• Trying to force one type of creative into another format, for example squeezing a TV ad into radio, or an out-of-home billboard into an MPU. Each format is built differently, and work that has not been adapted properly rarely lands as intended.
• Not considering the incremental effect of running campaigns across more than one channel at the same time. Channels working together often outperform the sum of their parts, and that is worth planning for, not discovering by accident.

Measurement mistakes

• Expecting only quick results. Some channels, and some objectives, take longer to show their full effect.
• Measuring sales, bookings or leads alone, and never brand lift. Short-term numbers only tell half the story of whether your marketing is working.

What good briefing looks like in practice

• Meet your agency, do not rely on email alone. A call or a face-to-face conversation lets you both ask follow-up questions and think out loud in a way that email never quite allows.
• Be open about what has worked and what has not. Share the things you have always wanted to try, and the things you wish had gone better. Your agency can only build on a true picture.
• Share your creative direction early. Even rough thinking helps your media agency start considering the right formats and placements sooner, rather than working it out after the creative is finished.
• Be open to new ideas. You know your business best, but your agency sees what is working across the wider market. The best results tend to come from the two of you meeting in the middle.

Your brief-ready checklist

Run through this before your next call with an agency, new or existing.

• Your business story in a few honest sentences: how long you have traded, what has worked, what has not
• One clear, measurable objective
• A description of your target audience that goes beyond basic demographics
• A realistic budget range, and whether it covers fees, media spend, or both
• Your timeline, and what success looks like at 30, 60 and 90 days
• Any brand guidelines, tone of voice notes or examples of work you like
• An honest account of your previous agency experience, good and bad
• A meeting booked in, not just an email sent
• An open mind for ideas you had not already considered

Not sure where to start with your own brief?

Book a free, no-obligation conversation with Hurst Media Agency and we will help you work through exactly what we need to get your campaign off to the right start. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will be happy to chat about what would work for you.

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

In our last post, we explained the 95/5 rule, the finding that only around 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given moment, and that the other 95% are tomorrow’s customers rather than today’s. That idea sits alongside another piece of research every ambitious brand should know: the 60/40 rule. Put the two together and you have a genuinely useful map for how to spend your budget.

Where the 60/40 rule comes from

The rule was published by Les Binet and Peter Field in 2013 on behalf of the IPA, drawn from an analysis of close to 1,000 UK advertising effectiveness case studies collected from 1980 onwards. Their finding was that, on average, the most effective campaigns split their budget around 60% towards long-term brand building and 40% towards short-term sales activation. Binet and Field call this “the long and the short of it”: long-term brand building and short-term activation are not rivals, they are two halves of the same job, and both need funding.

Two rules that apply to every brand

Before getting into ratios and context, it is worth being clear on the two things Binet and Field say hold true for every brand, in every category, no exceptions.

• All brands need brand building. It is the main driver of long-term growth, working by creating the memory structures that prime people to want to choose you. Without it, activation grows weaker, pricing power stalls, and profitability suffers.
• All brands need sales activation. It drives the short-term uplifts that keep the business moving today, and it works harder precisely because brand building has already done the groundwork. Strip it out and growth suffers too.

Neither one is optional, to ensure profitable brand growth you need to use both in a balanced way for your business.

Marketing consultant Tom Roach has a good name for the alternative: “wrong-termism”. Treating short-term and long-term as a choice, rather than a partnership, fails in two different ways, not one. Short-termism restricts how much a brand can grow. Long-termism, chased alone, restricts how much it sells today. Only the two working together avoid both traps.

Why the split matters so much

Brand building, the long game, works by creating memories, associations and emotional connections that make a brand easy to choose later. Its returns compound over time.

Activation, the short game, is the sharp-elbowed work of converting people who are ready to buy right now, and its returns tend to be immediate but do not build on themselves in the same way.

Binet and Field’s research found that brands leaning too heavily on activation alone saw short bursts of sales followed by a decline in underlying brand strength, while those investing properly in the long game grew more efficiently, and more sustainably, over years rather than weeks.

Is this the 95/5 rule wearing a different hat?

Look closely and the two frameworks describe the same market from different angles. The 95% of buyers who are not ready to purchase today are exactly who long-term brand building is for: the investment that keeps you front of mind until their moment arrives. The 5% who are in market right now are exactly who short-term activation is built to convert. A budget with no long-term brand spend is a budget that has quietly written off the 95% of your future customers who are still out there, simply not ready yet.

Binet and Field make the connection explicit themselves. Their research states that penetration growth, winning new buyers rather than simply deepening loyalty among the customers you already have, is always the main driver of growth, and that loyalty does not increase without penetration first. That is the 95/5 rule again, in their own words: growth comes from reaching the people you have not won yet.

Why performance marketing on its own hits a ceiling

It is easy to see why so many budgets drift towards activation. It is measurable, easy to defend in a meeting, and the results land in days rather than months. But chasing only the buyers who are ready right now means competing for the same small, in-market audience as every one of your rivals, in the most expensive, most crowded auction there is. Costs climb, returns shrink, and growth stalls, the pattern we described in our previous post as the “CAC Valley of Death”. Performance advertising is brilliant at capturing demand. It is not built to create it.

Tom Roach illustrates what this looks like in practice with two scenarios. Shift a brand that has leaned too hard on activation towards a proper 60/40 balance, and short-term peaks can dip briefly before both base sales and peak performance start climbing together as the brand strengthens. Shift back the other way, often when a new leader “does not believe in doing brand marketing”, and the pattern reverses: peaks shrink and base sales quietly drop away. It is a cautionary tale worth keeping in your back pocket the next time someone asks why the brand budget matters.

Not an iron law

Binet and Field have always been clear that 60/40 is a strong average, not a rule to follow blindly. Their later work, Effectiveness in Context, showed the ideal split shifts by sector and situation: closer to 50/50 for online-only brands, and roughly 46% brand to 54% activation for B2B businesses, based on their research with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute.

That same research, reported by Campaign, goes further and names six contextual factors that shift the ideal ratio for any given brand.

• Which sector the brand competes in
• How the brand is bought
• How the brand is priced
• How innovative the brand or product is
• The life stage of the category, whether it is emerging, mature or in decline
• The size of the brand itself

Category, brand size, loyalty and how established you already are in your market all move the dial. The number to take away is not 60, it is the principle: both halves need a home in your plan, and where exactly the balance sits is worth working out for your own brand rather than assuming.

It is worth being honest about how firm this actually is, too. The 95/5 rule has been tested and repeated across fifty years of category data, so that figure barely moves wherever you look. The 60/40 rule is a different kind of evidence: a strong average drawn from real campaigns, not a fixed mathematical law, and critics have pointed out it is genuinely harder to test, you can never fully know what a different split would have delivered. That does not make it less useful. It makes it a strong starting point to adapt for your own brand, not a number to follow blindly.

What this means for your budget

If your marketing is entirely search, paid social and email, you are almost certainly over-indexed on the short game. Even a modest, deliberate slice of spend on brand-building media, be that radio, out of home, press or a well-made piece of video, gives future buyers a reason to remember you when their moment comes. You do not need to flip your whole budget overnight. You need to make sure some of it is quietly working for the customers you have not won yet.

Not sure how your own split stacks up?

If you are trying to grow your business, become less depended on performance ads or expand brand penetration, this is a great time to have a consultation with Hurst Media Agency and we will help you find the right balance of long and short for your brand and your budget. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will be happy to chat about what would work for you.

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Sources and further reading:

• Campaign, “Binet and Field reveal key formulas for brand-building”: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/binet-field-reveal-key-formulas-brand-building/1495641
• Tom Roach, “The Wrong and the Short of it…again”: https://thetomroach.com/2024/06/15/the-wrong-and-the-short-of-it-again/
• ColourText, “Unraveling the clash between the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Binet and Field’s popular 60/40 rule”: https://colourtext.com/opinion/unraveling-the-clash-between-the-ehrenberg-bass-institute-and-binet-and-fields-popular-60-40-rule/

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

Our last post made the case for booking your Q4 media in the summer, and for many companies that is genuinely the right call. But we know that is not realistic for every brand. If you are a smaller advertiser, you may not have the cash flow to commit budget in July for a campaign that runs in November, or you simply will not know how strong summer trading has been until much closer to the time. That does not mean Q4 is out of reach. It means your plan needs to be built differently.

Booking early is not the only way to win Q4

The advice to book months ahead assumes a budget that can be committed early and a media mix, mainly premium out-of-home and broadcast, where the best inventory genuinely does sell out first. Plenty of smaller advertisers do not have that luxury, and trying to force an early commitment you cannot really afford is worse than waiting. The good news is that a meaningful part of the media mix has become far more agile than it used to be.

The channels built for shorter lead times

Digital out-of-home, digital radio and connected or addressable TV can all be planned and turned around in days rather than months, because the inventory is bought and traded far more flexibly than traditional static posters or fixed broadcast slots. That gives smaller advertisers a genuine route into the Q4 conversation without needing to commit budget before they know what they can afford to spend. The trade-off is that these channels reward speed and good buying relationships. Without both, you end up paying peak-week prices for whatever is left, rather than the well-placed, well-timed slots that actually work hard for your budget.

The channels this approach leans on are not a consolation prize. In Q4 2025, out-of-home advertising spend grew 4.5% year on year and radio grew 2.1%, while addressable and connected TV grew a striking 26.9%, according to the same AA/WARC Advertising Expenditure Report. Advertisers are not just tolerating these more flexible formats, they are actively shifting more of their Q4 budget towards them. For a smaller advertiser booking closer to the date, that is good news: the channels built for agility are also the ones with real momentum behind them.

Both figures come from the same AA/WARC Q4 2025 Expenditure Report, so they sit together nicely without needing separate sourcing. Happy to tweak the wording or pull in the Christmas retail spend figures too (£91.12bn across the six-week festive window, up 3.2%) if you’d like a consumer-side stat as well as the ad-spend one.

Why this is where Hurst Media Agency earns its keep

This is exactly the gap we exist to close. Because we buy across digital out-of-home, radio, digital and TV every single day, we have the relationships and the standing inventory access to move fast when a smaller advertiser is ready to commit, often within days, not weeks. We know which sites and slots are genuinely still available in the peak period, which ones are worth paying a premium for, and which are not. As channel-neutral specialists, our job is to make a shorter lead time work as hard as possible for your budget, not to sell you whatever is easiest for us to place.

What to have ready now, even if you are not booking yet

You do not need a locked budget in July to be ready for Q4, but a small amount of preparation now will make the moment you are ready to commit far more effective. Agree the key dates you want to be visible for, whether that is Black Friday week, the run-up to Christmas, or both. Have creative ready in flexible formats that can flex across digital out-of-home, radio and digital TV at short notice. And talk to your media partner early about what a realistic budget could achieve, even before you are ready to spend it, so that when you are, there is no time lost getting up to speed.

The risk of leaving it too late

Agile does not mean unplanned. Advertisers who wait until the last fortnight of November with no groundwork in place tend to find the same thing: less choice, higher prices, and a scramble that eats into the campaign’s own results. The advertisers who do well booking closer to the date are the ones who have already done the thinking, so that when they are ready to spend, the placements are agreed within days, not left to chance.

Ready to plan a Q4 campaign that fits how your budget actually works?

If Q4 feels like a bit of a scary thought right now, we are here to help. Drop us a line and we can talk about how to build you an agile Q4 plan across digital out-of-home, radio and TV that can move as fast as you need it to. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will be happy to chat about what would work for your brand.

Sources:
AA/WARC Q4 2025 Expenditure Report – Advertising Association, Nationwide Black Friday spending data,
Retail Gazette – UK festive retail spend 2025

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

It feels odd to talk about Christmas while the sun is still out, but for retail brands, the summer is exactly the right time to start. The best media slots for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas do not appear in October. They are booked, planned and often already selling out months before you see the first mince pie in the shops.

Q4 is a marathon, not a sprint

Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November, with Cyber Monday following on 30 November, but treating those two days as the whole plan is increasingly out of date. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday period has stretched into a season rather than a weekend, and retailers who spread value moments across October and November, through early-access windows, mid-month nudges and loyalty perks, have kept steadier engagement than those saving everything for one frantic week. The smart approach now is to treat October through December as one continuous value journey, not a series of separate promotions.

Why summer is the right time to plan

Premium out-of-home sites, press placements and broadcast slots for the peak weeks of the year are finite, and demand for them starts climbing long before the season itself. Booking in July and August, rather than October, means securing better sites, better rates and a proper run of weeks to build a phased campaign, rather than whatever inventory happens to be left over once every other retailer has already bought. The same goes for specific TV and radio sponsorships and premium press placements.

The scale of competition for those slots only grew last year. UK advertisers committed £12.9 billion to media space in Q4 2025 alone, up 8% year on year, according to the AA/WARC Advertising Expenditure Report. On the consumer side, Black Friday 2025 was the busiest shopping day of the year by some distance, with transaction volumes 62.5% above the average day and a record 11.9 million transactions processed by Nationwide, up 8.7% on 2024. That is not a weekend you want to be scrambling for inventory in. The brands who had already booked their slots by the summer were the ones who got to choose where they showed up. Everyone else took what was left.

This is the 95/5 and 60/40 rules in action

This is also where the ideas in this series come together. Right now, in the summer, most of your future Christmas shoppers are firmly in the “95%“: not thinking about presents, not in market, not ready to buy. The brands who spend the summer quietly building memory and familiarity, the long-term, brand-building side of the 60/40 split, are the ones who feel obvious and trusted the moment those same people tip into the “5%” who are actively shopping in November. Turn up only in October with pure activation spend, and you are fighting every other retailer for the same in-market shoppers, in the most expensive auction of the entire year.

A simple summer checklist

None of this needs to be complicated, but it does need to start now, while there is still time to plan properly rather than react under pressure. Here is where we would start.

• Review last year’s Q4 performance now, while the data and the lessons are still fresh, rather than in a rush come September.
• Book premium out-of-home, press and broadcast inventory early, both for availability and for better rates.
• Plan a phased campaign that runs from October through to Christmas, with distinct moments rather than one big push.
• Make sure some of that plan is doing quiet brand-building work through the autumn, so your activation spend in November has something to convert.
• Leave a portion of budget deliberately unallocated. Holding some spend back gives you the flexibility to jump on strong last-minute opportunities as they appear, or to top up digital TV, radio and digital out-of-home activity in the peak weeks themselves, when a little extra weight often makes the biggest difference.

If you are a smaller advertiser who cannot commit this far ahead, that is not a reason to sit the season out. We have written a follow-up piece on how to plan a agile Q4 campaigns that books closer to the date without losing out on the best placements.

Want your Q4 plan sorted before the autumn rush?

Let’s have a chat and let us help you plan and buy a Q4 campaign that works from October right through to Christmas. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will be happy to make a plan that will work for your brand.

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

Last night, as England lined up against Argentina in the World Cup semi-final, it was not only the players who were warming up. Brands across the country had spent the day sharpening tactical campaigns, ready to fire the moment kick-off arrived. It is a brilliant, live example of a principle we come back to often in this series: you do not need a huge budget to win attention, you need to be ready to move.

What happened on the night

Betting operator SkyBet unveiled a striking out-of-home campaign built around the tension of facing Argentine legend Lionel Messi, with his name clawed back to leave only the word “Lion” against a St George’s Cross. Paddy Power went after the officials as much as the opposition, running “England vs VARgentina” in print and on social media. Tesco turned an entire Wembley store fixture-by-fixture into a wooden shrine to good luck, right down to a lucky checkout lane seven and the removal of till thirteen. Sainsbury’s paired a giant hamburger bun with the phrase “Squeaky Bun Time”, a nod to Sir Alex Ferguson’s most famous line. Nike and Adidas synchronised push notifications and live-stream takeovers the moment the match began.

None of this required a bottomless budget. It required brands who had already done the thinking, so that when the moment arrived, they only had to press go.

Why this matters more for smaller and mid-sized brands

Big-budget brands can, if they choose, simply outspend a moment into relevance. Smaller and mid-sized brands cannot, and do not need to. A sharp, well-placed piece of tactical creative on a handful of premium digital screens or a well-timed social post can earn coverage, shares and goodwill worth far more than its media cost, precisely because it feels native to the moment rather than bolted on. Wit and timing are a great leveller.

How to build this muscle into your own marketing

A few habits make the difference between brands that are ready and brands left watching from the sidelines. Keep a live calendar of cultural, sporting and seasonal moments relevant to your audience. Pre-approve a small number of creative territories and tones so nothing needs sign-off at the eleventh hour. Build relationships with your media agency who can turn placements around in hours rather than weeks. And be honest about which moments are genuinely on-brand, because a tactical ad that feels forced does more harm than staying quiet.

We saw exactly this kind of quick thinking pay off for one of our own clients, Kamado Joe, who turned a global news moment into a BBQ season sales lift. You can read that story in our next piece in this series.

Ready to move fast when your moment arrives?

Let’s have a chat and we will help you build the media relationships and creative readiness to seize the moments that matter to your brand. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will be happy to chat about what would work for you.

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

Ask ten people what makes a good advert and you will get ten different answers. One will say it made them laugh, another that it had a great song, a third that it simply told them what was on offer. They are all a little bit right, which is precisely what makes the question so slippery.

The good news is that decades of research have quietly settled a lot of the argument. We now know a great deal about what tends to make advertising work, and much of it holds true whether you are buying a page in a national newspaper, thirty seconds on the radio, or a spot in the ad break. So let us take a friendly look under the bonnet. First at the principles that apply to almost any advert, and then at what changes when you move between print, radio and television.

The things every good advert has in common

Before we split things by medium, it helps to know the handful of qualities that show up in effective advertising again and again. Get these right and you are most of the way there, whatever the channel.

Say one thing, and say it clearly

The single most common mistake in advertising is trying to say too much. When a brief carries five messages, an audience usually remembers none of them.

Mark Ritson, one of the most widely read voices in marketing, puts it bluntly. Good advertising trades in obviousness, simplicity and clarity, because the market is mostly not paying attention, not interested and not especially involved. His advice is to distil your strategy down to a single, impactful idea and let everything else flow from it. Complexity, as he says, is a crutch. Clarity wins.

So before you worry about colours, jingles or scripts, decide the one thing you most want a person to feel or remember. If your advert does only that, but does it well, it is already ahead of most.

Lead with emotion, not just information

We like to think we buy rationally. We mostly do not. A large body of work by the IPA, drawing on the analysis of Les Binet and Peter Field, shows that campaigns built on emotion tend to outperform those built purely on rational messages, especially over the longer term. Emotion is what gets an advert felt, shared and remembered, long after the specific claim has faded.

This does not mean every advert needs to bring a tear to the eye. It means the feeling an advert creates is doing more of the heavy lifting than the facts it lists.

Make it unmistakably yours

Here is a sobering thought. An advert that everyone enjoys but nobody links to your brand is a gift to your competitors.

This is where brand codes come in, also known as distinctive brand assets. Coined by Professor Byron Sharp and Professor Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the idea is simple. Over time, brands build a palette of recognisable cues: a colour, a logo, a shape, a character, a tagline, a piece of music. Used consistently, these codes let people recognise you in an instant, even before they have read your name. Romaniuk’s research measures them on two qualities: how famous they are, meaning how many people correctly link the asset to you, and how unique they are, meaning how few rivals share them. The assets that score well on both are the ones worth protecting and repeating.

For a brand growing on a careful budget, this is genuinely liberating. You do not need a vast media spend if you use your codes so consistently that every pound of advertising compounds the last, rather than starting from scratch each time.

Do not forget the power of sound

Sound is one of the most underused assets in marketing, and the evidence for it is striking. Ipsos research has found that audio assets can be several times more effective than visual ones at driving strong advertising performance, and that a well-crafted sonic logo, a short, ownable piece of sound, was among the single most effective distinctive assets of all.

It makes intuitive sense. A sound can reach us when our eyes are elsewhere, and music connects to memory and emotion in a way that words alone rarely manage. Sonic assets matter most on radio and television, of course, but a consistent audio signature is something every growing brand should consider owning.

Now for the differences: print, radio and TV

Those principles form the backbone. But each medium has its own character, and a good advert plays to the strengths of the channel it lives in. Here is what changes.

Print: the headline and the layout do the work

The second is design. Good print design is not decoration, it is direction. The core principles, balance, contrast, alignment, visual hierarchy and generous white space, exist to guide the reader’s eye to the right place in the right order. A cluttered advert makes the reader work. A well-designed one leads them gently from headline, to image, to message, to what you would like them to do next. When in doubt, remove something. Space is what lets the important elements breathe.

Radio: earn attention in the first few seconds

Radio is the theatre of the mind. With no pictures to rely on, a good radio advert paints them with sound, voice and story, and it does so quickly.

Radiocentre’s best-practice research offers some wonderfully practical guidance. Grab attention in the first three seconds, with a sound, a voice or a question that makes someone stop half-listening and start properly listening. Establish who you are early, ideally within the first five seconds, so the attention you have won attaches to your brand and not just to a clever moment. Repeat your call to action at least twice, because a listener cannot glance back the way a reader can. And above all, be consistent. Using the same voice, the same music and the same audio cues across a campaign turns a series of separate ads into one recognisable brand.

The best radio advertising also does what all the research keeps pointing to: it makes you feel something. A clear setting, a character, a snippet of dialogue and a simple arc will do more than a list of features ever could.

Television: tell a story, and weave the brand in

Television remains the great storyteller of the media world, and storytelling is precisely where its power lies. Thinkbox research is clear that creativity is the most powerful driver of effectiveness within a brand’s control, and that longer formats earn their keep by giving a story room to breathe.

The most interesting finding for smaller advertisers is about how to feature your product. When an advert feels like an advert, an internal “ad blocker” quietly fires up and we tune out. Thinkbox found that weaving the product naturally into the narrative, rather than bolting an overt sales message on top, produces far more moments of genuine attention and memory. In other words, let the brand be part of the story, not an interruption to it.

For a newer or smaller brand, the primary job of television is to build awareness, to make you known and liked. A call to action is welcome, but fame comes first. And this is where everything connects: a TV advert that tells a warm story, lands one clear message, and signs off with your distinctive colours and a memorable sonic logo is an advert doing all of its jobs at once.

Out of home: a few words, a bold image, and split-second impact

Alongside brevity, three things matter. Make your branding large and unmissable, because an OOH advert that is admired but not attributed is wasted. Use bold, high-contrast design, since Nielsen research links simple, high-contrast creative to markedly better recall. And embrace white space, leaving a good third or more of the design clear, so the eye is not asked to work in an already busy street. This is also where your distinctive brand codes earn their keep. A famous colour or logo can communicate who you are before a single word is read.

Handled well, out of home is one of the most cost-effective ways to build fame and to appear, quite literally, close to the shops that stock you.

Pulling it together

A good advert, then, is rarely an accident. It says one thing clearly. It makes people feel something. It is unmistakably yours, through colour, character and sound. And it plays to the medium it lives in, a sharp headline and clean design in print, a fast hook and a consistent voice on radio, a well-told story on television. None of this requires the budget of a global giant. It requires clear thinking and consistency, which are available to everyone.

Where Hurst Media Agency comes in

Knowing what makes a good advert is one thing. Getting it made, and placed where it will work hardest for a sensible budget, is another. We combine both.

As independent, channel-neutral media brokers, Hurst Media Agency plans and buys across the full UK mix, from national press and radio to television, out of home and digital. Because we have no owned inventory to shift and no bias towards any one format, our advice is shaped by a single question: what is right for your brand and your budget? And through Hurst Media Labs, our in-house studio, we can craft the print, digital and audio-visual creative to the very principles set out above, so your advertising is not only well placed, but genuinely worth seeing and hearing.

Ready to make advertising that works harder?

If you want advertising built on clear thinking rather than a giant budget, we would love to help. Book a free, no-obligation consultation with Hurst Media Agency, and let us show you what the right advert, in the right place, can do for your brand.

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Sources and further reading:

• IPA, “The Long and the Short of It,” Les Binet and Peter Field: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/the-long-and-the-short-of-it
• Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columns: https://www.marketingweek.com/mark-ritson/
• Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on distinctive brand assets: https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/brands-of-distinction
• Distinctive Brand Assets framework (Fame and Uniqueness): https://umbrex.com/resources/frameworks/marketing-frameworks/distinctive-brand-assets-framework-ehrenberg-bass/
• Ipsos on the power of sonic branding, summarised in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlesrtaylor/2026/04/06/sonic-branding-the-most-underused-asset-in-marketing/
• Newsworks effectiveness research: https://newsworks.org.uk/effectiveness/
• Newsworks, “The Power of Print”: https://newsworks.org.uk/research/power-of-print/
• WARC on newspaper effectiveness, via Printpower: https://www.printpower.eu/experts/warc-newspapers/
• Figma, graphic design principles: https://www.figma.com/resource-library/graphic-design-principles/
• Radiocentre, “Creativity” best-practice hub: https://www.radiocentre.org/how-to-do-it/creativity/
• Radiocentre, “Listen Up! Emotion’s Defining Role in Audio Advertising Effectiveness”: https://www.radiocentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Listen-Up-FINAL.pdf
• Thinkbox, “Creative Drivers of Effectiveness”: https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/creative-drivers-of-effectiveness
• Thinkbox, “A Matter of Time”: https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/a-matter-of-time-the-importance-of-time-length-in-tv-advertising

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

We have all done it. You pop to the shop for milk and come home with a bar of chocolate, a magazine and a scented candle you did not know you needed. That is the impulse buy, the unplanned, spur-of-the-moment purchase, and understanding how it works is genuinely useful for any brand hoping to be the thing that ends up in the basket.

So let us take a friendly look under the bonnet. How is an impulse purchase actually made, what propels someone to reach out and grab it, and what does it all mean for how you build your brand?

What is actually happening in the shopper’s head

An impulse buy is, by definition, not planned. It is driven far more by feeling than by careful thought. When we spot something desirable, the brain releases a little hit of dopamine, the chemical of anticipation and reward. That flicker of “ooh, yes” arrives before the rational part of our brain has weighed up whether we really need it. Emotion moves first, and justification, if it comes at all, comes afterwards.

Interestingly, research suggests it is positive emotion that does most of the work here. We tend to reach for a treat when we are feeling good, celebratory or a little indulgent, more than when we are feeling low. A good mood lowers our resistance and makes the little “why not” feel entirely reasonable.

Marketers and academics often describe this using a simple model with an intimidating name, the Stimulus, Organism, Response model. In plain English it just means: something catches your attention (the stimulus), it stirs a feeling inside you (the organism, which is really just you and your mood), and that feeling produces an action (the response, which is popping it in the basket). Everything a brand does to encourage impulse is really about that first step, becoming the thing that catches the eye and sparks the feeling.

What propels someone to actually act

What propels someone to actually act

Plenty of things tip a passing glance into a purchase. They fall into two broad groups.

Inside the shopper, there are personal factors: how impulsive they are by nature, the mood they are in, how much self-control they have to spare in that moment, and whether a little treat feels deserved.

Around the shopper, there are the external triggers a brand or retailer can influence:

• Prominent placement, such as eye-level shelves, aisle ends and the checkout queue, where a product is impossible to miss at the exact moment attention wanders.
• A sense of urgency or scarcity, like “while stocks last” or a limited edition, which nudges us to act now rather than think it over.
• Social proof, the reassurance that other people are buying it and enjoying it.
• A tempting offer, since a visible discount is one of the most reliable impulse triggers of all.
• Low friction, meaning the easier it is to buy, the less time there is for second thoughts. Online, one-tap checkout and saved card details are the digital equivalent of the sweets by the till.

The common thread is this: impulse thrives on ease, emotion and the right prompt at the right instant.

In-store and online: the same instinct, different stage set

The impulse instinct is the same everywhere, but the setting shapes how it plays out. In physical shops, the classic and much-cited estimate is that a large share of purchases, often put at around 62%, involve some degree of impulse. The store environment does a lot of the persuading, which is why displays, queue layouts and packaging matter so much.

Online, the accelerants are frictionless design, urgency messaging, personalised recommendations and, above all, the speed of mobile checkout. A discount flashed at the right moment, combined with a card already on file, removes almost every pause between wanting and buying.

A quick word of caution on numbers. You will find plenty of eye-popping “impulse buying statistics” floating around online, and many of them are unreliable or inconsistent between sources. The safe approach is to treat the underlying human behaviour as the solid ground, and any single headline figure with healthy scepticism.

A very British plot twist: the HFSS rules

Here is a development that shows just how powerful placement is, and it is specific to the UK. In October 2022, the Food (Promotion and Placement) Regulations came into force in England, restricting where products high in fat, sugar or salt can be displayed in larger stores. That means no more chocolate and crisps at the checkout, the store entrance or the ends of aisles, the prime impulse real estate.

The effect was striking. Studies found that removing those products from checkouts led to a meaningful drop in their purchase, with one analysis reporting a reduction of around 15.5% in purchases of the affected items and a large self-reported fall in snacking on things bought at the till. Kantar data cited in the trade press suggested these products lost their impulse sales while keeping their planned ones, in other words, people still bought them deliberately, they just stopped grabbing them on a whim.

The lesson for brands is profound. When you take away the physical prompt at the shelf, a lot of the impulse simply evaporates. Which raises an obvious and important question: if you can no longer rely on grabbing attention at the very last second, how do you still get chosen?

What this means for your brand

The answer ties this whole series together. When the last-second prompt is weaker, or the shelf is more crowded, or the shopper is buying online in a blur of taps, the brands that still get picked on impulse are the ones that already feel familiar and trusted. The dopamine flicker of “ooh, yes” is far more likely to land on a brand you already recognise and feel good about.

In other words, impulse is not purely a moment-of-purchase game. It is powerfully shaped by the preference and trust you have built beforehand. A shopper primed to like you long before they reached the aisle is the one who reaches for you without thinking. Familiarity built earlier is what turns a fleeting glance into a purchase.

Where Hurst Media Agency comes in

Building that familiarity and warmth ahead of the shopping moment is exactly what we help brands do, and to a sensible budget. The aim is to make your brand a friendly, recognisable name well before someone is standing at the shelf or scrolling on their phone, so that when the impulse strikes, it lands on you.

As independent, channel-neutral media planners and buyers, Hurst Media Agency have access across the full UK mix, from national press and digital to radio, out of home near the stores that stock you, and television. Our job is to build your brand’s presence in the moments and places your customers care about, so you are the familiar choice when a decision is made in a heartbeat. And because we buy media every day, we make a modest budget work harder to build exactly that kind of recognition.

You cannot control every impulse. But you can make sure that when one strikes, yours is the brand that feels like the obvious, happy choice.

Ready to become the impulse choice?

If you want to be the brand shoppers reach for without a second thought, the groundwork starts long before the till. Book a free, no-obligation consultation with Hurst Media Agency, and let us help you build the familiarity and trust that win the moment.

Sources and further reading:

• “Factors Affecting Impulse Buying Behavior of Consumers”, Frontiers in Psychology.
• “Understanding the Psychology of Impulse Buying in E-Commerce: A Behavioral Review”, Journal of Marketing & Social Research.
• “HFSS placement legislation: assessing the impact”, Campden BRI
• Government impact assessment, restricting checkout, end-of-aisle and store entrance sales of HFSS products
• “What psychology knows about impulse buying”, New Neuromarketing.

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

If you have ever looked at the world of media agencies from the outside, it can seem like a maze of names, networks and jargon. So let us clear something up in plain English, because the distinction matters more to your budget than you might think.

Most of the biggest media agencies in the UK (and indeed the world) are owned by a handful of enormous global holding companies. While in recent years there has been consolidation, the Big 6, as they are known in the media world, own over 5,000 companies worldwide.

An independent agency is different. It is owner-run and answerable to its clients, rather than to the shareholders of a sprawling international parent. That single difference, who the agency ultimately works for, quietly shapes almost everything about how it behaves. Here is why that tends to work in your favour.

Advice you can actually trust, because there is nothing to sell you

This is the big one, and it links straight back to a theme running through this whole series: getting the right mix of media for your brand.

A large networked agency often sits within a group that owns other things: media inventory, technology platforms, trading arrangements, sister companies whose targets depend on selling you particular services. There is nothing inherently wrong with this model, but it does mean there can be a quiet pull in the background, a nudge towards whatever the wider group happens to need to increase sales of at any given moment.

An independent has none of that machinery to feed. With no owned inventory to move, and prices with media owners negotiated directly for the clients, the advice can be exactly what it should be: what is genuinely right for you. When there is no structural conflict pulling at a decision, the thinking tends to be clearer, and the channel plan you receive is built around your goals. For a brand trying to spread a sensible budget across the right places, that neutrality is worth a great deal.

Senior people, actually working on your account

In big networks, the experienced names who win the business are not always the ones who end up running it day to day. Accounts can be handed down to more junior teams, with the senior strategists reappearing mainly for the quarterly review.

Independents typically work the other way around. With leaner teams made up of experienced marketers, the people guiding your strategy are usually the ones doing the work. That means sharper thinking, quicker decisions and fewer things lost in translation. When you have questions, you tend to reach someone who genuinely knows your account, rather than working your way through layers.

Flexibility that fits you, not the other way round

Large agencies often deliver their services in fixed, one-size-fits-all packages designed for enormous clients. If you are a small or mid-sized brand, you can end up paying for a structure built for someone far bigger, and squeezing your needs into a shape that was never meant for you.

Independents are far more adaptable. They can act as your lead agency, or plug in as a specialist partner alongside an in-house marketer, and scale their support around how you actually work. That flexibility is precisely what growing brands need, especially when budgets are careful and every pound has a job to do.

Speed, agility and a partner who genuinely cares

With fewer layers of sign-off and less corporate process, independents can simply move faster. In a media landscape that shifts at lightning speed, being able to spot an opportunity and act on it quickly is a real competitive advantage.

There is a human point here too. An independent agency lives and dies by its reputation and its relationships. Your success is their success in a very direct way, which tends to translate into people who are genuinely invested in your results rather than treating you as one more account number on a global spreadsheet.

And no, independent no longer means “small and risky”

It is worth putting to bed an old assumption, that choosing an independent means trading down. In the UK, the independent scene is thriving. Independents are increasingly winning larger briefs, attracting senior talent and competing head to head with the networks. According to a recent study, independent media agencies have been growing considerably faster than the market as a whole. Independence is now a confident choice, not a compromise.

Where Hurst Media Agency comes in

This is exactly the model we are built on. Hurst Media Agency is a proudly independent, UK-based media agency working as trusted media partners for brands of all sizes.

Because we are independent and channel-neutral, our advice is shaped by one question only: what is right for your brand and your budget? We plan and buy across the full mix with no bias towards any one format and no owned inventory we are quietly trying to shift. You get experienced media specialists working directly on your account, the flexibility to lead your media or support an in-house team, and the agility to act when an opportunity appears. And because buying media well is what we do every single day, we make a modest budget stretch a great deal further than it would alone.

You do not need the biggest agency in the country. You need a partner whose only interest is your results.

Ready for media advice with no strings attached?

If you want a media partner who puts your brand first, plans without bias and treats your budget as carefully as you do, we would love to talk. Drop us an email to sales@hurstmediacompany.co.uk and let us show you what genuinely independent thinking can do.

A follow-up to our plain-English guide to media planning and buying.

In our last post, we made the case that you do not need millions to do media well. You need a plan, a sharp eye for value, and the discipline to spend where it counts. All still true. But there is a deeper reason that ambitious brands, whether they sell to consumers or to other businesses, so often hit a ceiling and cannot work out why. It has a name, and once you understand it, your whole approach to spending changes.

It is called the 95-5 rule, and it is one of the most useful ideas in modern marketing.

Only a small slice of your market is ready to buy right now

The rule comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and it was popularised by Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo through LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. The observation is simple, almost obvious once you hear it, but also somewhat uncomfortable.

At any given moment, only around 5% of your potential buyers are actually in market, ready to make a decision. The other 95% are not shopping. They are perfectly happy, busy with other things, or simply do not need what you sell today. They might, at some point, but not now.

Here is the part that catches people out. You cannot persuade that 95% to buy sooner. As the Ehrenberg-Bass team put it, marketers do not move buyers immediately into the market. Buyers move themselves, based on their own needs and timing. What you can do is make sure that when they finally are ready, yours is the brand that springs to mind. Or, in Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s lovely phrase, you “catch buyers as they fall”. The brand that gets trusted and remembered is the brand that gets bought.

This means that your marketing today is converting people that have been building associations with your brand for a while, and it is also working on your future customers. Instead of expecting immediate results, the majority of the effort should go to building memory with future buyers, with the rest converting the ones ready today.

This is not just a B2B idea

The 95-5 rule was first studied in business-to-business settings, where buying cycles are long and the maths is easy to see. A company might switch payroll provider once every five years, so only a small fraction are ever in the market at once.

But the principle holds for consumer brands, which is what often gets missed. It is simply a matter of purchase cycles. People buy a new mattress roughly once a decade, so in any given quarter only a tiny percentage are shopping for one. The rest are asleep on the one they already own. Even in everyday categories like snacks or household goods, most of your buyers are light buyers who purchase once or twice a year and are not thinking about you the rest of the time. Habit and familiarity do the heavy lifting in the moment of choice.

So whether you sell software or sofas, sandwiches or accountancy services, the same truth applies. Most of the people who will ever buy from you are not ready yet. They are tomorrow’s customers, and they are the biggest growth opportunity you have.

Why most budgets quietly ignore the 95%

The fix: be remembered before the buying moment

Brands with a growth mindset behave less like hunters chasing the next immediate sale, and more like farmers planting for a harvest that comes later. They keep capturing the 5% who are ready now, while patiently building memory with the 95% who are not.

In practice that means investing in work that is distinctive and emotionally memorable, and showing up consistently so your brand becomes familiar long before anyone needs you. Done well, by the time a buyer’s moment arrives, choosing you feels easy and obvious.

Crucially, this is not a question of one type of media being good and another bad. Reaching future buyers is about the balance of your spending, not a war between channels. Brand building can happen on television and on social, on a poster site and in a podcast, in the national press and in a beautifully made digital campaign. What matters is that some of your budget is deliberately working to be remembered, rather than every last pound fighting over this week’s shoppers.

And no, you still do not need millions

The old objection is that reaching a broad future audience is a luxury only big brands can afford. That is increasingly out of date. The media landscape has opened up. Connected and on-demand television lets smaller brands buy into the screen affordably. Radio, out of home and national press can all be bought in sensible, targeted ways. And plenty of brand-building can be done cost-effectively across digital channels too. The opportunity to reach tomorrow’s customers has never been more within reach of a modest budget.

The skill is in getting the split right, and in buying each piece well, so that your money builds memory and captures demand at the same time.

Where Hurst Media Agency comes in

This is exactly the balance we help brands strike, and it is harder to get right alone than it looks. Lean too far towards immediate conversion and you cap your own growth. If you take your eye off those who are ready the sales feel slow to arrive.

As trusted media brokers, Hurst Media Agency plans and buys across the full mix. Because we are channel-neutral, our advice is about the right blend for your brand and your budget, not about selling you one format. We help you keep converting the buyers who are ready today while steadily building the familiarity that wins tomorrow’s. And because we buy this space every day, we make a modest budget reach far.

You do not need a big brand’s budget to think like a big brand.

Ready to reach tomorrow’s customers, not just today’s?

If your results have plateaued, or your acquisition costs keep creeping up, the answer is rarely to bid harder for the same few shoppers. It is to broaden your reach to the future buyers everyone else is ignoring.

Book a free, no-obligation consultation with Hurst Media Agency, and let us help you balance demand today with growth for tomorrow. Drop us an email to sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we’ll be happy to chat bout what would work for your brand.

There is a quiet myth in our industry that clever media only works if you have a budget the size of a small country. Big launches, glossy TV spots, billboards in Piccadilly Circus. It all looks wonderful, and also impossibly out of reach.

The truth is far more encouraging. Good media planning and buying is not about how much you spend. It is about spending what you have in the right places, in the right order, in front of the right people. Done well, a modest budget that is carefully planned will go a long way. That is the whole point of this guide. So let us take the mystery out of it.

First, what do those two terms actually mean?

The industry loves to make simple things sound complicated, so here is the honest version.

Media planning is the thinking part. It is deciding who you want to reach, what you want them to do, and which channels will get you there most efficiently. It is the map before the journey.

Media buying is the doing part. It is going out and securing the space, whether that is a page in a national newspaper, a run of radio ads, a digital campaign or a poster site, and negotiating the best possible rate and added value while you are at it.

You need both. A great plan bought badly wastes money. A great deal on the wrong channel wastes even more. The skill is in joining the two up, and that is exactly what a media agency is for.

The fundamentals, without the jargon

Whatever your budget, the same handful of principles decide whether your money works hard or barely works at all.

Start with the audience, not the channel. It is tempting to begin with “we should do some TikTok” or “let us try radio”. Resist. Begin instead with a clear picture of the person you want to reach. What do they read, watch and listen to? When are they paying attention? Where do they already trust what they see? Once you know the audience, the right channels tend to choose themselves.

Be ruthless about your one objective. Are you trying to be remembered, or trying to make a sale this week? Both are valid, but they call for different media. Awareness rewards being seen in trusted, high-quality environments over time. Direct response rewards channels you can measure and adjust quickly. Trying to do everything at once with a small budget is the fastest way to achieve nothing. Pick your priority and let it guide every decision.

Match the channel to the job. Each channel has a personality, and the trick is using each for what it does best.

• Print and national press lend credibility and trust. Seeing your brand in a respected title says something a banner ad cannot, because the environment vouches for you.
• Out of home, meaning posters, bus sides and digital screens, builds fame and reaches people as they go about their day. It is brilliant for being unmissable in a specific area.
• Radio is intimate, frequent and surprisingly affordable. It is wonderful for building familiarity and prompting action close to a moment of purchase.
• TV, including the streaming and on-demand world, is no longer only for giants. Targeted connected TV means smaller brands can now buy into the screen with budgets that would have been laughed out of the room a decade ago.
• Digital is the flexible workhorse. It is measurable, adjustable and ideal for reaching defined audiences and proving what is working.

You do not need all of these. You need the two or three that suit your audience and your aim, working together rather than competing.

The mistakes that quietly drain small budgets

A few patterns come up again and again. Spreading the money so thinly across channels that none of them land. Chasing whichever platform is fashionable rather than whichever one fits. Paying rate card because nobody negotiated. Judging everything on the first week instead of giving good media enough time to do its job. And forgetting that the environment your ad appears in shapes how your brand is judged. Avoid those five and you are already ahead of most.

Why a good media agency makes a smaller budget go further

Here is the reassuring part. You do not have to learn all of this and become a media expert overnight. That is precisely what an agency is for, and a good one earns its keep many times over by saving you money, time and missteps.

This is where Hurst Media Agency comes in. We act as an extension of your marketing team, not a faceless supplier. As trusted media brokers, we plan and buy across print, out of home, radio, TV and podcasts, anything you can think of, which means our advice is about what is right for you rather than what we happen to sell. We know where the value sits, we negotiate hard on your behalf, and we place your brand in trusted environments that make every pound work harder. Crucially, we are proud to make sensible budgets deliver.

You do not need millions. You need a plan, a sharp eye for value, and a partner who treats your budget as carefully as you do.

Ready to make your budget work harder?

If you have a product you believe in and a budget you want to respect, we would love to help you plan it properly and buy it well. Have a chat with us and let us show you how far a well-spent budget can really go.