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.

Pull up five websites in your category and cover the logos. Can you tell them apart? If you are honest, probably not. That uncomfortable little test, posed by the research firm Wynter, captures the single biggest problem in B2B marketing today. An industry that prides itself on innovation, and somehow almost everything in it sounds the same.

The numbers are sobering. In the research with marketing leaders at 50 million dollar plus B2B SaaS companies, 94% admitted their brand messaging barely stands out, and only 6% believed they were truly distinctive. As Wynter’s founder Peep Laja puts it, “sameness is the default for most companies today.” The question is not really why this happens. It is why an sector with companies in completely different industry verticals keeps choosing to be forgettable, and what the brands that escape actually do differently.

Features stopped being a moat a long time ago

The first hard truth is that you can no longer win on features. This is something that David Cancel said out loud all the way back in 2017. Any feature that is meaningful and popular gets copied, usually within months. As soon as a something resonates with audiences, competitors build it too, and the category drifts back towards a grey middle. Laja is blunt about where that leaves most companies: only one or two per cent can realistically win on innovation. Everyone else is playing the “X plus one feature” game and wondering why nobody notices.

Because software is now so easy to build and deploy, Cancel argues, any market with serious demand fills up fast with products touting near identical features. His conclusion is unambiguous: “to win, you need to win on brand.” The market leaders will be the ones customers know, like and trust, precisely because the functional differences have all but disappeared.

This is why brand is no longer the soft, unmeasurable cousin of “real” marketing. It is the defence against being ignored or forgotten. Things have finite value, but the meaning and trust we attach to them compound over time. A strong brand is the one asset your competitors cannot copy.

The trap: when everything is measurable, everything converges

Here is the part that should give every performance marketer pause. The relentless drive to measure has quietly made the sameness worse. We have A/B tested ourselves into identical headlines, optimised the personality out of our brands, and data-driven our way to invisibility.

Cancel recently spoke about how he deliberately invests in things that are harder to measure but where attention is genuinely building. And he warns of the deeper danger of decision by dashboard: “If everything you do is based on consensus, then you will create junk, because you naturally go towards the mean and you will create something that’s average.”

Average is the enemy. In a sea of sameness, different is not the risky choice. Sounding like everyone else is.

Where traditional media comes in

Here is the connection that too many B2B marketers miss. Building a distinctive, trusted brand is exactly the kind of work that is hard to measure click by click, and traditional media is exactly where that work has always been done best.

Think about what print offers a B2B brand. It offers borrowed authority, because appearing inside a title people already respect lends credibility and implicitly signals trust. And it offers the slower, compounding kind of attention that builds memory and trust.

This matters even more in B2B, where buyers are cautious and the purchase is considered. People want to buy from names they recognise and sources they trust. Traditional media earns both.

Out of home belongs in exactly the same conversation. A well-placed poster cuts through. A taxi wrap is eye-catching. Tube advertising has the potential to be the longest dwelling time ad. The skill lies in precision rather than blanket coverage, planning around the movement patterns, commuter routes, working days and industry events of the people you actually want to reach, so the message lands at the right moment.

Used this way, out of home becomes a surprisingly sharp account-based tool.SaaS companies Mutiny and Ramp turned a single decision-maker’s LinkedIn post into a billboard in Times Square to win the attention of one target account, Snowflake, and to The Trade Desk reaching agency staff on their commute. Creativity in OOH is an evergreen LinkesIn conversation topic.

Bauer Media Outdoor makes a complementary point closer to home. Out of home delivers high visibility in business districts, near corporate offices and outside the very conferences buyers attend, and it reaches professionals when they are most receptive, thinking about work but not buried in a task. Their B2B examples show the brand-building job in action, from Lloyds using social proof, the reassuring “1 million businesses”, to win the confidence of small business owners, to Hiscox using large-format storytelling to dramatise a fear every decision-maker recognises. That is trust and memory being built in public, the same compounding asset that print delivers, simply on a different canvas.

How Hurst Media helps B2B brands escape the sea of sameness

This is the work we are built for. At Hurst Media, we place branded content, double-page spreads and advertorials inside trusted national titles such as The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and we extend that presence into out of home, from billboards near business districts to placements on the commuter routes and at the industry events your buyers attend. Both place brands in environments that confer authority rather than asking to manufacture it from scratch. That is borrowed trust, working in your favour.

Hurst Media Labs then makes sure the work is distinctive rather than average. As an extension of your team across design, copy and marketing.

If your category has started to sound like one long echo, the most valuable question you can ask is:with your logo removed, would anyone still know it was you? If you would like help making the answer a confident yes, we would love to talk.

Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediacompany.co.uk and we’ll be happy to make it work you.

Sources:

Wynter: Differentiation strategy
Wynter: Why your B2B SaaS brand sounds like everyone else (and how to fix it)
Codementor: The CEO of Drift on why SaaS companies can’t win on features, and must win on brand
Bauer Media Outdoor: Successful B2B advertising examples and lessons from leading brands

The headline number, and the more useful one beneath it

UK retail media is forecast to reach £7.88bn in 2026, up from £3.8bn last year, with three quarters (74%) of IAB UK members expecting it to take even more spend in the months ahead. Retail media has now grown for six straight years, from £1.32bn in 2019 to nearly £8bn this year, and is one of the engines pushing total UK ad spend past £45bn.

That headline is enough to put retail media on every marketing director’s agenda. But the more useful number sits one layer down. Online retail media alone accounted for £1.5bn in the first half of 2025, with industry sentiment driven by something simpler than novelty. Budgets are flowing towards channels that can prove three things in the same breath: trust, intent and outcome.

Retail media wins on all three. So does the wider buy that should sit around it.

Three things retail media is genuinely good at

When you strip away the hype, retail media’s pull comes down to a clean set of advantages.

Closed loop measurement. Brands can see the round trip from impression to till, often in the same week, often inside the same data environment. That’s a level of accountability that programmatic open exchange has been quietly chasing for a decade.

High intent audiences. A shopper inside a Tesco app, on a Sainsbury’s page or walking the Boots beauty aisle is meaningfully closer to a purchase decision than the same person scrolling a social feed.

Point of purchase context. Bauer Media’s supermarket DOOH network alone now spans 1,500 screens across Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, delivering a 20% fortnightly reach of UK adults. Add Bauer’s new Morrison’s contract for 300 in-store screens and you have a network that meets shoppers physically inches from the shelf.

So far, so attractive. The risk, though, is that brands treat retail media as a self-contained tactic, when the audience treats it as the final scene in a much longer story.

In-retail and proximity: better together

We’ve seen this play out for our clients across both sides of the moment.

In-retail campaigns convert the high intent shopper already inside the store or app, where the decision is being made.

Proximity campaigns, on commuter routes, supermarket forecourts, transport hubs, the high street, warm the shopper on the way in, so that in-store impression isn’t the first they’ve seen. It acts as a final decision catalyst rather than a cold introduction.

Run together, the lift is meaningfully bigger than running either in isolation. Both act as brand preference amplifiers, each priming the other.

For brands to get this right, there shouldn’t be a retail media line item simply added to the wider plan. As with other channels, it needs to be treated as one of the shelves in a much wider shop.

What this means for media planning in 2026

Three planning questions are worth bringing to the next quarterly review.

Is your retail media buy connected to the journey that precedes it? If it sits in isolation, you’re paying for the easiest part of the conversion and missing the part that earns it. Consumers need to havethat built in preference before encountering the brand physically.

Is your buy thought through for the right share of moments? In-retail and proximity each do a different job. The strongest plans give both a clear role rather than overweighting either.

Is your creative earning the environment? A DOOH frame on the route to Sainsbury’s, a press feature ahead of a category launch and a national newspaper spread before a peak season are all “point of purchase” in their own way, but only if the creative respects the moment.

How Hurst Media Agency plans retail media

At Hurst Media Agency we help clients place their brands in the right environments so that they can be the preferred choice of consumers, whether the shopper is in-store, in-app or on their journey.

We plan retail alongside print, digital, out of home, radio and TV in a single brief. That way each channel earns the moment only it can: print and national news for credibility, digital for retargeting and reach, OOH and proximity for path-to-purchase, retail media for closing the loop.

If retail media is on your 2026 plan, or about to be, we’d love to help you map it against the wider buy.

Book a free planning consultation with the Hurst Media Agency team

Drop us an email to buying@hurstmediaagency.com or call us at 020 3478 6017.

Sources

• IAB UK, Retail Media and TV+ take centre stage as UK ad spend forecast to hit £45 billion by 2026
• Press Gazette (citing AA/WARC), UK ad spend to exceed £50bn in 2026
• Bauer Media Outdoor, Supermarket advertising 2026
• Retail Media Age, IAB UK’s Adspend report spotlights retail media momentum

68% of Google searches in early 2026 ended without a single click to any website.

That is according to research from SparkToro and Similarweb, and it represents the fastest acceleration of this trend in a decade. Just two years ago, the figure stood at 60.45%. Ten years ago, it was around 45%.

Bain & Company puts the wider picture in even sharper relief: 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated summaries in at least 40% of their searches. Google referral traffic to publishers fell by a third between 2024 and 2025. At People Inc., referrals from Google have dropped 63% in two years.

For brands and media owners who built their marketing strategies around clicks and cost-per-click, measuring what happened before and after arriving with that click, building attribution models that tried to understand behaviour around it, this is not a blip. It is a structural unravelling of the model.

And yet, many marketing conversations still orbit the same metrics: CTRs, CPCs, paid and organic traffic volumes. We are measuring a world that is changing beneath our feet.

The uncomfortable reality is that clicks were never really proof of anything commercial. They were a proxy. A convenient shorthand that worked while Google (and later Meta) reliably funnelled audiences through to publisher content. That deal is deteriorating, and brands that cling to click-centric KPIs risk optimising for a vanishing signal while missing the audiences that actually matter.

What zero-click is forcing, perhaps usefully, is a question every marketer should have been asking anyway: what does this activity actually do for our business?

Commerce media is pointing to one compelling answer. The metric that matters is not the click. It is the customer.

As Toby Espinosa explained, a CMO becomes a more powerful figure, not a weaker one, when marketing is directly accountable to commercial outcomes: revenue, acquisition, brand consideration. This is territory that trusted media has always understood.

When Hurst places a brand’s message in a high quality environment, the objective has never been to generate a click through an algorithm. It is to build confidence, authority and purchase intent where engaged readers choose to spend time in.

National press, radio, OOH and retail audiences are not stumbling across content through a search model that is rapidly being disrupted. They are going about their daily lives experiencing relevant messages in a context they trust.

The WoodWing/MediaVoices report is direct about where the opportunity lies: brands and publishers alike need to “cure their click addiction” and refocus on the value they actually deliver to audiences. That means owned channels, direct audience relationships, first-party data and genuine commercial accountability.

SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin makes a similar point from the other side of the equation. His advice to brands is to stop treating website traffic as the goal and start building influence and recognition in the places audiences already spend their time, even when that doesn’t lead directly back to a website. Traffic can fall while revenue rises.

This means a 180 degree shift from chasing clicks to building a presence and a reputation that travels with the audience, wherever they happen to be.

The old model is not coming back. But the brands that understand what was always really working – credible messages, in trusted environments, in front of the right audiences – will have a load with which to climb this new mountain.

Especially when they have the right partners by their side… Chat?

Get in touch with us to help your brand gain the authority it deserves in this new era: buying@hurstmediaagency.com
or at 020 3478 6017.

Sources:
– The Zero-Click Content Shift, WoodWing/MediaVoices, 2026 (PDF report)
– In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click, SparkToro – https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/
– Google zero-click searches hit 68% in early 2026: Study, Search Engine Land – https://searchengineland.com/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717
– Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing, Bain & Company – https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/
– The CMO will only become more powerful, The Drum – https://www.thedrum.com/news/the-cmo-will-only-become-more-powerful-how-doordash-is-delivering-on-commerce-media-s-promise-as-marketing-s-growth-engine

In today's digital age, where online advertising and social media campaigns dominate the marketing landscape, the effectiveness of traditional print media advertising might be overlooked.