Tags: B2B, B2C, branding, creativity, innovation, internet, marketing
Hamish Pringle, strategic advisor, 23red and co-author of Spending advertising money in the digital age:
In 2006 the Wall Street Journal asked: “As 30-Second Spot Fades, What Will Advertisers Do Next?” And a year later CNN/Money reported: “The death of the 30-second TV commercial: Devices like the new Apple TV box and digital video recorders from TiVo, Motorola and Cisco could help bring an end to the traditional TV ad.”
How wrong they were! Like too many marketers and agencies, they vastly over-estimated the rate at which a new channel like the internet would gain share at the expense of the dominant medium of TV. They also didn’t grasp that as the bandwidth increases the online experience becomes increasingly like television with the audio-visual power to create emotional engagement, nor did they appreciate that all new media to date have been complementary to and leveraged by TV.
A recent report from Nielsen in the USA shows that TV remains the most popular medium in the US despite the rise of digital channels such as online and mobile with 114.7m American households having at least one television set, 28.3m owning three or more and 35.9m with more than four. Nielsen data reveals that the typical American spends just under 33 hours viewing traditional television a week, compared with four hours accessing the web via a PC.
The picture is pretty much the same in the UK with BARB confirming that people are watching more TV than ever – just over 33 hours per week. TeleScope reports that people now have an average of 2.4 rooms with TVs in them, and by 2020, expect that to rise to three. Over 9.5m TV sets were bought across the UK in 2010 – double the number sold in 2002. The most dramatic sales increase has been of flat screen TVs with screens 40” or bigger, from fewer than 600,000 sales in 2006 to over 2 million in 2010, according to market specialists GfK Retail & Technology.
Web-enabled and HD sets are also booming and there’s a steady increase in “two-screen” viewing with people watching TV with their laptop open and using it to enhance their enjoyment of the programming, to comment on it via social media such as Facebook and Twitter and of course to participate in voting. Video-on-demand is growing and the hidden potential of the “cached hard drive” in set-top boxes is enabling “addressable TV” whereby ever-more precisely targeted communications can be served to customers with the power of the prime audio-visual medium.
There are five key roles for media, so by all means use additional channels to help generate the vital components of advocacy, information, price, and availability, but don’t forget that television is still by far the best at creating brand “fame”, the most important element of them all. The good thing is that there is a myth that online is where it’s at, and that TV is old hat. Multitudes of marketers and agencies continue to believe this and this is opening up a great opportunity for those people who know the facts to gain competitive advantage.
