The TV Haters And TV Advocates Debate [INSIGHT]

The “haters” are the doomsday scenario fans that have declared TV dead, and long live digital! Then there are the TV-hater contrarians, who argue that TV is still a formidable medium in terms of reach, penetration, ability to engage, etc. Among this group is Ed Papazian, a former agency media research guy who now publishes many industry publications and has commented on many MediaPost articles about TV’s challenges in the U.S. I have been at the receiving end of some of Ed’s thoughtful arguments. Also part of this group is Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal, who’s always armed with the latest data points to help you understand the true state of advertising.

I am not a TV hater. I am a realist. My issues are these:

1.   Marketers spend anywhere between 50% and 80% of their budgets on TV, but do not spend nearly anything like that in actual time: time to discuss how to optimize, reinvent or innovate the way they advertise on the medium. They only want to talk cost and CPM.

Marketers spend between 5% and 30% of their budget on digital, but probably spend 65% to 75% of their time talking about digital. Digital is not unimportant, especially if you sell or service your customers directly via digital. But the balance is off, and because of that, marketers tend to think TV is not sexy, not relevant and not that important. And therefore TV budgets are flat or down.

2.   Which leads me to my post from last week, in which I tried to explain that the enormous advances that have been made in data and technology have translated only to advances in content distribution (device-agnostic) and sales (programmatic TV ad sales is here). But the way we use all these new opportunities for advertising is still stuck in last century’s advertising model of spots, break bumpers, sponsored messages and product placement. We are also still squabbling about how to calculate reach, frequency and impact for TV (Nielsen, Rentrak, comScore, etc.), as well as the definition of a rating (C3, C7, etc.). So measurement is still stuck in the last century as well.

3.   The slow decrease of viewership in mature TV markets is a signal that the TV industry, or perhaps the video industry as a whole, needs to watch, since it’s trending the wrong way. Ignorance is not bliss; just ask Kodak, Betamax, BlackBerry or MySpace. Or perhaps in today’s world, ask Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. The (slow) attrition of viewers is played up large in the media, and fits perfectly with marketers’ narrative that they do not need to spend a lot of time thinking about TV because it’s past its prime.

As an advertising medium, the video content platform is in trouble. The biggest platform is losing viewers (slowly for now) and money (also slowly, but at a greater rate than before, and more consistently than before). The digital alternatives do not (yet?) deliver the same proven impact. That is not a recipe for success, but a recipe with disaster written all over it.

By Maarten Albarda
Maarten has lived in five countries across three continents and honed his integrated marketing communication skills at JWT, Leo Burnett, McCann-Erickson, The Coca-Cola Company and AB-InBev. He now runs his own integrated marketing consultancy in partnership with Flock Associates, and has written the book “Z.E.R.O.” with Joseph Jaffe.
Courtesy of mediapost