A graph that made me laugh

I’m supposed to be having a day off.  Fat chance. 
 
You might have noticed a story put out by our cousins at the IAB that claims online advertising has now overtaken TV to become the ‘biggest single advertising medium in the UK’ (by spend).  We find the IAB’s story odd because the internet is not a single anything; it is a fantastic technology that is home to many different marketing activities that do different things.  It even delivers TV.  It is a pretty meaningless statistic but it has garnered plenty of headlines and no small amount of apocalyptic predictions.  Journalists expect us to respond, so here I am blogging instead of planting my daffs.
 
As I have said many times before, I love the internet. I love the way that it complements TV – nothing else works better. I love the way people can respond instantly to TV ads via search and websites; I love the way social media helps make the buzz around TV programmes so visible and so much more fun.  I’m happy for online advertising to increase - so long as it is not at TV’s expense.  And so far it isn’t.  (I can almost hear your eyebrows rising at this point).
 
That’s the depressing part of this story; the implication that online advertising is taking broadcast TV’s money is just not true.  Last year broadcast TV spot advertising declined 2.9% compared to total advertising declines of 4.2% and display declines of 5%.  Not the spectacular share growth of online maybe but growth nonetheless and in the horrific ad market that is 2009 the same pattern is emerging; TV and online are increasing their shares, mostly at the expense of print and DM, though print remains the biggest overall advertising medium, not online.
 
If the IAB can’t resist making comparisons with TV then the fairest would be to compare all forms of online display with all forms of broadcast TV - spot, sponsorship, AFP, Interactive etc. - not an easy number to get hold of because TV has never bothered to lump its own advertising revenues together. TV would never try to compare itself with any form of classified advertising, DM or search because it wouldn’t make any sense.  
 
Anyway, Thinkbox’s thoughts on this are already out there so I won’t repeat them all here.
 
But I would like to draw your attention to The Guardian’s coverage of the story today. They produced a little graph that made me laugh (it isn't online though). Along the x axis we had a list of advertising sectors, each with a bar representing revenue that got a bit taller as it went along. We had cinema, radio (spot only), business magazines, consumer magazines, directories, outdoor, national newspapers, press classified, direct mail, regional newspapers, press display, television (spot only), and then…internet. Just internet. No more explanation than that.
 
We think these numbers would be more meaningfully represented in one of two ways, either by technology/platform or by the genuine distinctive advertising sectors .  We’ve had a go, based just on the IAB’s figures.  Take your pick.

Judging from the sofa

David Reviews, the influential TV and film aggregation site, has recently started something called The Lunch Break. This is a selection of TV ads put together to watch as if in an ad break. The very good idea behind this is obviously to better replicate the experience that viewers have.

People rarely watch any advertising with devoted attention - unless they've specifically sought it out to view again. TV viewers watch a series of different ads from non-competing markets with varying levels of attention (all of which we now know are valuable to advertisers, thanks to neuroscience).

This is not astonishing; I'm clearly not breaking much new ground telling you this. But it occurred to me while I was on the jury for the Campaign Big Awards that when we judge ads they are dislocated from their natural habitat, and often alongside others in the same market.

Advertising is affected by many things, but one of its primary concerns is context; the TV programmes you're rubbing shoulders with, the pages of the specific magazines or websites you've bought, the posters in those particular locations.  And let’s not forget the emotional and physical contexts of rushing to work or relaxing in the bath and cuddling with your kids/cat on the sofa. But when judging awards normal contexts are lost and artificial ones imposed.  It is impossible to recreate the actual viewer experience when lined up alongside an eclectic bunch of people you don’t know well in a hotel room focussing solely on a screen and watching 60 TV ads in a row.

Where TV is concerned, the influence of the context in which we watch is incredibly significant. For sponsorship credits I would say it is impossible to judge them fairly when detached from the editorial context in which they appear and with which they are supposed to relate.

Later this year we're publishing new research into the influence of watching TV with other people, but initial findings show that it exerts a big influence on the impact and effectiveness of TV's advertising.

So, taking all this into account, perhaps it would be better for creative judging if ad judges convened at one of their palatial country houses to lounge around the living room watching Peep Show or The X-Factor, eating a takeaway curry and letting the short-listed ads appear serendipitously, just as the media planning Gods intended.  Let’s see what works best then.

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New ways, new wonga

Prepare for the whiff of burnt rubber in the air as the government begins its u-turn on product placement in UK TV programmes.

There is no doubt that this is a fair decision. Product placement is already on our screens in various forms within acquired programming and as legitimate prop provision.  We can trust that broadcasters, programme makers and advertisers will be culturally sensitive and won’t allow it to alienate British viewers. The difference to the viewing experience will be negligible and programmes will arguably become more authentic.

The introduction of product placement raises some interesting questions. Who will set the price and do the deals?  Who will benefit from the money (TV companies, agencies, producers…)? Will this tempt advertisers who traditionally haven’t used TV as much – Prada, Louis Vuitton – onto our screens and into scripts where they can be confident of the environment? Will it feature in sponsored TV shows; could Toyota sponsor a show where Skoda has been placed for instance? Could brands be allowed to indulge in negative product placement, like getting Frank Gallagher to wear your competitor’s sports shoe? How will its effectiveness be measured?

No doubt these questions and many more will be clarified during the consultation period.  But product placement also raises a concern that I’m keen to make very clear.

The estimated amount of revenue it will bring in is modest compared with spot advertising, but no less welcome for that. Figures between £35m over 5 years up to £100m a year have been bandied about.  Whatever it is, it will join the growing number of  sources of advertiser revenue additional to the £3.4bn of TV spot advertising.  Ofcom reported recently that TV sponsorship was worth £180m and interactive services £70m in 2008.  

This liberalisation has come about in order to attract extra, new money into original UK TV productions.  We must work together to ensure the revenue for product placement is new money and doesn’t cannibalise the existing ad revenue, much of which goes into UK production.

It would be unbelievably idiot of the TV industry to promote  placement by undermining the status of spot advertising.  Yet there are signs of that happening already within the placement and production communities.

There have been a few alarming statements made in response to the expectation of relaxation, re-igniting some of the common untruths about ad-skipping and attention.   We don’t need product placement because spot advertising doesn’t work; we have never watched so many TV spots at normal speed – 2.45 bn a day in the UK - and their effectiveness is growing.  Anyone who tries to sell placement by giving misinformation about TV spot advertising will enjoy Thinkbox’s full displeasure.  Don’t even think about it.

Product placement is a completely new TV commercial opportunity, complementary to other TV formats,  that deserves its own new cash.

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A real variety performance

Quality Street, the Olympics, the UN, The Krankies – aren’t variety and difference wonderful things?

This struck me when I had a look back over the winners of our monthly TV ad creative awards – the Thinkboxes – which have been up and running for just over a year now. It felt like a good time to step back and survey the ads that have won.

I wondered what the winners – voted for by the creative community via our Academy – would tell me about the last year or so in TV advertising creativity, if indeed they told me anything. What were the trends, the patterns, the creative motifs that captured the imagination?

There is clearly no formula for winning although one slight pattern was the use of longer than average ads and one-offs; these were over-represented in the winners than in what we generally watch on screen. But that was it. What most of the winners have in common is difference.

Certainly no one agency has been dominant. 12 agencies have shared 14 awards. This is, I think, a massive compliment to the diversity of creativity we can enjoy – and shows there was no block voting, which is very noble.

A full list of the winners so far is below, but a snapshot shows the variety we have seen.

We of course had wonderful examples of spot ads like Cadbury’s ‘Eyebrows’ or VW Golf’s ‘Enjoy the everyday’ or the Home Office’s ‘Know your limits’. But we also had extended spots like Hovis’s 122-second epic ‘Go on boy’; we had a one-off, live ad with Honda’s skydive; we had a one-off extended spot ad with Stephen Berkoff demonstrating a heart attack for the British Heart Foundation; we had T-Mobile’s ‘Dance' and the meerkat-shaped form of comparethemarket.com’s Alexandr, which both showed how TV can begin phenomena that can then be extended expertly through social media.

However, there are some ad formats conspicuous by their absence. There have been no sponsorship or branded content, no interactive TV, and no online TV campaigns that have won. This is largely because they haven’t been submitted, so it would be good to see more of these in the next year. You can enter work here.

2008
April: ‘Enjoy the everyday', VW Golf, DDB London
May: ‘Live parachute jump', Honda, 4Creative/W+K London
June: ‘Wanna be like you’, Tobacco control for Dept of Health, MCBD
July: ‘Know your limits’, Home Office, VCCP
August: ‘Heart attack’, British Heart Foundation, Grey London
September: ‘Go on lad', Hovis, MCBD
October: ‘You are powerful’, Amnesty, Mother London
November: ‘Break the cycle’, Barnardo’s, BBH

2009
December/January: ‘Dance', T-Mobile, Saatchi & Saatchi
February: ‘Eyebrows', Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Fallon
March: ‘Combine Harvester’, Boursin, RKCR/Y&R
April: ‘Sergei', Comparethemarket.com, VCCP
May: ‘Be natural', Robinsons, BBH
June: ‘Bottle', Heinz Tomato Sauce, AMV BBDO

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