What Does Your Ad Spend Say About Your Brand?

Short answer: The way a brand uses paid space tells people what its product is worth before they read a word. A page packed with prices says volume and value. A page left almost empty says confidence and premium. Same spend, opposite message. Neither is wrong. The mistake is spending in a way that says something different from where your business actually sits.

What does the same page say at two different prices?

Say you've got $50,000 for a full-page spread in the Vancouver Sun.

One advertiser fills it edge to edge. Grapes at $2.99 a pound, deals stacked on deals, not an inch of paper left over. Before you've read a single price, you know what this is. A store selling a lot of things, cheaply, and proud of it.

Another advertiser puts one small photo of a handbag in the middle of the page. A Louis Vuitton logo. Nothing else. Same $50,000, and most of it spent on empty paper.

Why does empty space read as expensive?

Nobody looks at that second ad and thinks the handbag is cheap. The reader does the maths without noticing. If a brand is willing to pay that much to show you almost nothing, what it is showing you must be worth a lot.

Empty space is a cost only a confident brand can carry. That is exactly why it works. A discount retailer can't afford to leave paper blank, so blank paper becomes a signal that you are not looking at a discount retailer.

The same logic runs through everything a brand puts into the world. A label with room to breathe. A website that doesn't shout. A trade show booth with one product on a plinth instead of forty on a table. Restraint is a message, and people read it fluently.

Is a packed ad a mistake?

No. For a business that wins on volume and price, the packed page is the right answer, and it is doing its job well.

The mistake is a mismatch. A premium product dressed like a weekly flyer quietly tells customers to expect less. A value brand dressed up in luxury restraint confuses the people it needs most, who start wondering if they can afford to walk in.

The goal is not to look expensive. The goal is for every piece of spend to say the same thing about where you sit.

How do you work out where your brand needs to sit?

I call this scale: working out where a business actually needs to sit to reach the people it's trying to convince. It's one of the first conversations I have with new clients, and the newspaper page is the example I use to start it. A few questions get you most of the way there.

• Who are you trying to convince? Not everyone. The specific person whose yes matters most.
• What do they already pay for things like yours? That sets the range they expect you to live in.
• What does your current spend say? Look at your packaging, website and last campaign as if you'd never seen them.
• Do those answers match? If not, that gap is costing you, either in margin or in customers who never call.

For CPG and craft beverage brands, this shows up fastest on shelf. The can or label is the full-page spread, and it makes its case in the time it takes someone to reach past it.

Why did this land with a photographer?

I walked Ara Coutts, a Toronto photographer and director, through the newspaper example on a call this week. She told me she's going to quote me on it.

That meant something, coming from someone whose whole job is deciding what goes in the frame and what stays out. What you leave out of a shot shapes how people read what's left in. A brand works the same way, just across more surfaces.

The short version

Brand value is what the spend says before anyone reads a word. Before you buy the page, decide what you want it to say, then make every inch of it agree.

Serif + Gold helps brands work out where they need to sit, then makes every touchpoint say it. If you're not sure what your spend is saying right now, see the work or start a conversation at serifandgold.com.

Read next: "Make It Look More Premium" Is Not a Brief and The Handmade Premium.