Is TV Advertising Dead? #DigitalSense

A video that's been widely shared in marketing circles recently shows a crowd at a digital conference being asked if they watch fewer TV ads, or skip them altogether. Unsurprisingly just about everyone in the room puts their hands up and our onstage protagonist uses this to highlight that big advertisers are wasting billions of dollars chasing eye balls that just aren't there anymore. It's a wakeup call for sure, but what it really highlights is the weird bubble digital marketing seems intent on retreating to, and the remarkably flawed approach to data & research it sometimes falls back on to get there.

It's a bit like trying to evaluate the popularity of Twitter by Tweeting out a survey - surely I'm not the only one who wouldn't be shocked when the results show that 100% of people who respond use the platform? A digital marketing conference is about as equally an unrepresentative a sample as you could find, and yet somehow the attendees (and the many people who have shared it since) are more willing to buy a story built on it than the facts themselves.

Personally I actually find the facts themselves even more eye opening, though reassuringly easy to track down with a quick Google search. The average American watches a staggering 5 hours and 4 minutes of TV every day, and not only that but they watch 4 and a half hours of that live, when originally broadcast. It's a far cry from my own consumption patterns, or those of anyone I know, and probably the same goes for many of you too. For those accordingly who are not familiar with how TV works, you cannot forward adverts when you watch a live show. You could of course leave the room to make a coffee, or check out your phone, or other untold distractions... but it's simply not true that those ads aren't being seen to begin with.

I'm a huge advocate of digital marketing and have worked with big businesses for over a decade persuading & enabling them to do more. One of the things I've found constantly curious however is the wider digital industry's desire to heavily push that narrative at the expense of TV. Not only has TV been 'dying' for years, but its blanket approach of mass interruption is 'irreparably flawed' and 'surpassed' by new interactive approaches. If ever you've had the pleasure of working across the full media mix you should be a little perplexed by this too, after all TV consistently remains one of the most powerful ways of driving impactful reach and in most studies I've seen one of the very highest channel ROIs.

It's been a tough year for digital certainly - with debates around measurement, brand safety, viewability, ad fraud & more showing the stretch marks of a sector truly coming of age. There’s been a decade long gold rush to cash in on digital marketing and swept up in that momentum not enough tough questions have been asked, and worse still many observably false approaches have been perpetuated. Reverting to old stereotypes of dismissing traditional media however shouldn't be our response, in fact we need to come together as different agents within the industry to tackle this and if anything we can learn a thing or two from TV.

One of the reasons that senior ad executives are not terrified by the changing TV landscape (and of course it definitely is evolving, you'd be equally mad to dispute that) is that their measurement approach is not about counting eyeballs and where exactly they were looking, it's about measuring results. At the end of my campaign did I sell more products? Did I change the way people think about my brand? What part of that impact does detailed research show me TV drove?

By looking at the end impact of media you skip out a lot of the complication that interim measures bring. That's not to say the TV industry has done nothing in the face of these challenges either, media plans today are vastly different to those 15 years ago in response to evolving TV consumption. There's been a steady increase in the importance of big event TV & sports which get a high reach audience to tune in to one channel live for instance. At the same time planners have had to take into account a much longer tail of channels that are being watched and new ways people are choosing to do so, for instance shifting some budgets into specific 'catch up' TV products. There's even technology coming through which allows advertisers to target individual households and directly understand the impact those ads have upon them, potentially kick starting a new revolution for TV advertising.

The same principle can hold true for digital too. We need to find ways to first look beyond the mountains of interim data that channels churn out and demonstrate what overall business impact they are driving, quite often by using the tried and tested means we also use to capture the impact of traditional media. With an eye on that prize you can start to see which factors along the way help improve your impact, and which are more needless distractions. Certainly cutting out ad fraud and completely unseen inventory is going to help matters, whereas chasing engagement for the sake of it I'd hazard may not. Crucially much of what we need to learn in digital is how new channels work alongside and complement many of the traditional ones, not replace them entirely, though of course there are finite amounts of media to go all round. The distinction between channels is increasingly meaningless because it's all just marketing communications at the end of the day - we rarely consider the true impact digital could have on other elements of marketing.

So, whilst we’re in the mood for some non-representative thought experiments let’s also challenge the view that the future of advertising is all about having conversations & relationships with the brands we buy from – now picture yourself walking into a super market and tell me how hellish it would be if you had to have a relationship with every brand you’re allowed to pick up.