THE PLANNING ADVANTAGE HIDING IN BRITAIN’S COMMUNITIES

As you read this, the largest World Cup in history is under way, with England and Scotland both in it, and the nation already pacing its hope accordingly. Someone in your office has organised the sweepstake. You have been assigned a team you had to look up. For the next five weeks, living rooms, pubs, fan parks and group chats across Britain will fill with people who have chosen to feel something together, and once the football ends, Wimbledon, The Open and a home Commonwealth Games are waiting to take over the rota.  

You’d be hard pressed to design a better summer that disproves the idea of a country divided. 

And yet, the prevailing story holds that trust is eroding, communities are fracturing, and people are retreating into feeds built for an audience of one. Next week in Cannes, much of the industry will circle the same concern from a different angle, asking whether a media world so focused on maths and efficiencies has flattened everything into sameness and where the human in the work has gone. 

More in Common opened the year reporting that a record two thirds of Britons describe the country as divided, the highest since they began tracking it. Ipsos puts the figure at 85%. And that’s without going into the headlines this year. Read all of that in one sitting and you’ve be forgiven for thinking Britain is coming apart. 

However, those studies measure how people feel about the country. They say very little about how people live their week. And that’s when a different Britain appears: one where people may believe the nation is divided, but still turn up to five-a-side on Thursday, still run the fantasy league, still show up for choir, the allotment, the group chat.  

This year sees the second wave of Belonging in Britain, our study into identity and community in partnership with Global, and it’s pointing somewhere more interesting. The research found that 91% of UK adults belong to at least one community; the average person now belongs to four, up from three a year ago; and the depth is growing alongside the breadth: 35% describe a genuine emotional sense of belonging to their communities, up from 30% in just 12 months.  

Far from pulling apart, people are deliberately finding each other, in communities built around the things they love. 

Now, why should this be considered in planning? Modern planning basics mean that every media plan constrains a bet on where attention and trust live. Recent reports show search and online display took 83% of UK ad spend in the third quarter of last year, according to AA/WARC. These channels form a cohesive component on a plan, but we should not depend on them solely.  

In practice, that concentration means most of the market is competing for the same scrolled moments, in the most saturated environments in media history, increasingly using the same automated tools, aimed at people who have become expert at not looking. Nielsen has found that nearly two thirds of consumers now take deliberate action to avoid advertising altogether.  

So how do you resonate when attention is this hard won? Not by shouting louder. People are remarkably good at telling the difference between a brand that understands them and one that’s guessing, and what earns attention, and the trust that follows it, is the feeling of being genuinely known. There’s no shortcut to that, it comes from understanding someone’s world well enough to bring something of real value into it, and our research points to exactly where that understanding lives.

People are organising their attention and their trust around chosen, collective experiences: fandoms, shared interests, local networks, the groups that give shape to a week. And a person who has turned up on purpose, among people they trust, ready to feel something, responds differently to what they encounter than someone mid-scroll. It gets noticed more, trusted more, and acted on more. 

The strange part is that we already know this. Kantar found that only 14% of marketers believe demographic targeting alone leads to effective campaigns. Nielsen found that three quarters of us say audiences are harder to engage than five years ago. The instinct is already in the industry. The opportunity is acting on it early, because the moments of chosen, collective attention remain some of the least crowded and most receptive spaces in media, and the brands that learn to show up well in them now will be the ones communities already trust by the time everyone else arrives. 

None of this is an argument against precision, and nobody is suggesting we hand back a decade of hard-won efficiency and accountability. Precision targeting can locate a 33 year old woman in Leeds who searched for running shoes, and reach her again and again with remarkable efficiency. But these are binary traits. 

She doesn’t think of herself as an ABC1, 25 to 35 female in a retail intender segment. She thinks of herself as a runner, and everything a brand needs in order to matter to her lives inside that word: the Sunday long run group that got her through February, the parkrun WhatsApp chat, the shared grumbles about race entry fees, the unwritten etiquette of giving kudos. A brand that learns that world and turns up inside it with something genuinely useful, knowledge, encouragement, a fix for a real runner’s problem, is received as a welcome member of the club, while the same brand interrupting her feed because she fits a profile is just more noise to scroll past.  

Communities are where identity lives. They are the nearest thing we have to people telling us who they are in their own words, week after week, and an open invitation to build communication around what genuinely matters to someone rather than what a database holds about them. 

So, as we write the briefs that will shape autumn and Christmas, it’s worth asking: what does this know about the people it reaches, and does it bring them anything they’dgenuinely value? The difference between reaching a segment and joining a community will be on display in every fan park, sweepstake and group chat in Britain for the next few weeks.

To explore the key insights from 2026’s Belonging in Britain, and be the first to receive the full report, click here.