Dear John

You make a few points here that have caused me some concern, so I wanted to send you a reply. Apologies if it’s a bit long, I wanted to post asap and didn’t have time for brevity.

Underpinning my reply is the fact that although TV is not the only effective ad medium, I can properly, rigorously prove that it does work better than any other medium, pound for pound. It creates more profit for advertisers, which is what I call effectiveness. I’ll add that multi-media campaigns work better than solus media.

I’m not sure that ad agencies have a vested interest in proving that TV works. It’s a common accusation these days but they are now so intimidated by it that many feel guilty recommending TV, despite believing in its strengths. If anything, the reverse is happening, with both creative and media agencies anxious to prove their online credentials by promoting that ahead of other media. Every agency we know takes its neutrality and responsibility to invest advertising money wisely very seriously. If you know otherwise, maybe you should name names.

I know it’s crashingly dull and makes bad copy for journalists, but perhaps the reason there is so much evidence of TV’s effectiveness is because it is effective. The most obvious answer is often the correct one. Also, the evidence that exists about TV’s effectiveness is sound, proven over time, proven across all categories, over a variety of tasks and is very robust.

It is also worth pointing out that we have all been measuring TV the wrong way to date and yet it still comes out as the most effective medium. We now know a lot more about the crucial role of emotion, the power of the implicit mind, and the way we process ads. This new knowledge makes TV’s contribution to ad effectiveness clearer and even more powerful. We still don’t measure those effects properly (via tracking studies etc.), but TV still comes out on top.

You say that TV enjoys a massive built-in bonus so it’s no surprise TV ‘works best’ because no other medium stands a chance of proving its effectiveness. But look at all the advertisers who have been reported (usually with a great fanfare) as ‘coming off’ TV. They all give other media a chance to create the same effects but almost invariably come back. TV has never been under such a spotlight – especially against the ‘accountability’ of online (which is itself proving to be fuelled by TV) – and this is partly why many of these studies have been commissioned. In the end, TV continues to stand up as the most effective ad medium, however the data is examined.

You also suggest that TV’s success might be to do with more money being spent on it, always intensively and at the start of an advertising campaign. I’d like to deal with those points separately:

According to last year’s Advertising Statistics yearbook, TV took only 20.3% of ad revenue, while print took 41% in total and newspapers alone took 25.9%.  Looking at display only, newspaper advertising is very nearly as high as TV.  There are plenty of campaigns where TV takes a minority of the money, but where the inclusion of TV has been proven to make a big difference to the outcome. Direct Mail at 12% and internet at 15.6% also take a significant share of marketing budgets so are not lacking in robust figures to base econometric studies on.

I’d argue that TV doesn’t take a big enough share of ad budgets when you look at its dominance within consumers’ media diets.  The recent Touchpoints2 survey shows that TV occupies a vast amount more of consumers’ media time than anything else.  Commercial impacts are at a record high, 11% higher than 5 years ago.  TV reaches nearly 90% of the population every day in an impactful and engaging way.  It’s memorable, it’s persuasive and still one of our most popular topics of conversation on- or offline.  I don’t endorse splitting media budgets by amount of time given to each medium.  But I do endorse robust econometrics. What on earth else should we trust?

We are not lacking in evidence about other media.  Last year there were two major studies that looked at the effectiveness of all media. ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ by Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 26 years of IPA Effectiveness Awards entries and found that campaigns which included TV were about 25% more effective than those which did not.  They also found that TV is more effective today than 20 years ago. Of the campaigns analysed, around a quarter didn’t use TV as lead (and 15% didn’t use at all) and they tended to perform significantly worse than those that did; and this wasn’t econometrics but hard, market data like profit and market share.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (an econometric analysis commissioned by us, but totally impartial) looked at 706 brands in 7 markets over 10 years including plenty of non-TV users and mixed media campaigns and found that TV paid back 4.5 times the investment, more than any other medium. The PwC study also looked at brand value via conjoint – with no inherent bias towards medium used – and again TV showed the highest correlation with brand value. All the leading brand value owners had spent twice the % of their spend on TV than their competitors.

Econometrics is about analyzing sales – mostly across the course of a campaign period. These analyses show the power of TV despite its main strength not being short-term sales promotion, and despite the fact that 45% of TV’s value is generated in years 2 and 3. This attribute is missed out by econometric analyses apart from PwC’s.

TV spend comes at the start of a campaign because that is how the consumers’ brand journeys start.  The phrase ‘lead medium’ is totally justified for TV.  We recently launched a study with the Internet Advertising Bureau called ‘TV + Online: Better Together’ which features many consumers talking about how they were first introduced to a brand or motivated to go and find out more from TV ads. Recognition of online ads was more than doubled if people had seen the TV campaign initially – which makes sense when you think about how people receive full TV ads when they are relaxed but are always on a mission (and therefore need to make sense of an ad in moments) when they are online (or indeed reading a newspaper or magazine, driving past a poster etc.).

Almost always it is TV that starts off the process.  It doesn’t mean that other media which feature later, and which can build on that interest and close the sale, aren’t incredibly important.  But TV at the start makes lots of sense. We have examples of campaigns which started with other media, and the majority didn’t take off until the TV kicked in.  Do get in touch if you would like me to share more.                                                                                                                                                                                        

Best,

Dave Brennan

Research & Strategy Director

Thinkbox