We all have been there: some comments, video clips, pictures just felt strange, just to realize that this is because we did not know the full story. Things taken out of context have a different meaning or no meaning at all.

One day a world-known violinist played an expensive violin in a busy subway for free, but no one paid attention. A couple of days pass by and the same pianist played for a full house audience with great success, for a ticket price of $100. So what happened? Context happened!

Let’s face it, we have a biased perspective of the world. Even worse, context is always changing, it is like shooting a moving target. It’s the who, what, where, when, why, and how of communication.

So how can we navigate the advertisements into the right context? Always ask yourself who your audience is. How will this audience take what you have given them and what will they do about it? Make sure that your messaging always makes sense and pushes people to be on your side.

Put your messages on the right platforms. Consider who is on different media platforms, why they’re there, what they’re looking for, and what drives the most engagement.

Think about which pieces of your marketing will be complimented the best by which media platforms. Create content that’s primed to perform well. 

All in all, you want to speak to the correct audience where they are, in the way they want to be talked to, with messaging that tells a clear and engaging story.

A great example for choosing the right context is Apple, which does not participate at CES but does its own event, where the audience’s attention is focused solely on them, and not spread around on multiple vendors. This way they are the ones that influence the context and the message as well.

But there is another perspective to this context story. The whole advertising market is focusing on external communication when it comes to context. But we must not forget that communication with the customers can be successful, only if the whole team knows what, when, and how to communicate it. Marketers need to be agile and understand the market trends, salespeople have to take decisions fast based on the client’s reactions, employees have to know the latest company strategies. But how can we make sure that our colleagues and partners are in line with our latest ideas? Are we confident that what we communicated went through to our employees as we wanted to, or do we just hope for the best?

Scattered brand assets lose value, and meaning without context. So it is not enough to just flood everybody with information, we need to organize, and tell the full story about every content we made, most of all in the right light. A digital asset management software does exactly this: it simply makes sure that only the relevant assets are communicated, but those are always in the right context.

Oh, and what happened to our guy with the violin? After the experiment was shown on TV he went back to the same station to play. But now, everybody knew who he was and what he did, so with the changed context, he played for a huge crowd.