The Thinkbox Blog

Action TV stations

2009-11-16T12:10:00Z

It is important to respond, to act. Ask Gordon Brown about biscuits and he’d better respond with something – anything – or else there will be trouble. Deafening silence rarely suggests success.

Advertising doesn’t always expect an instant response; often it is trying to change the way people feel or think about a brand. But if advertising doesn’t eventually lead to a response (ideally a purchase or a change in behaviour), then it is difficult to see its point.

But the issue of attribution is a tricky one; how can you identify everything that has contributed to a response? This is just as true in online media, despite their supposed easy accountability. The online world is trying to ditch the ‘last click wins’ model in order to assign value to other online ad exposures that precede the final response. Fair enough, but once the online world has opened that particular can of worms they must acknowledge the contribution of the radio ad, the PR coverage in the paper and, most significantly, the TV campaign that is running, or has previously run. Is, in fact, the supposed accountability of online more misleading than enlightening? This question of credit going where it is due is crucial if advertisers are to gain a better understanding of how advertising works.

So it is rather handy that a new econometric study from MediaCom, commissioned by Thinkbox, has measured TV advertising’s ability to send people online. It is the first time that the instant effect TV ads have on web response has been measured and made publically available.

Over a period of three months MediaCom analysed over 175,000 TV spots and the activity they caused on different advertisers’ websites in 10 minute intervals for seven leading brands across six different markets. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

Two of the headline findings from their analysis are:

* When TV’s correct share of online responses is added to phone responses, TV accounts for 30% of all short term advertising responses, and even more when TV’s contribution to the long term is considered
* Of that 30%, a third occurs within just 10 minutes of seeing the TV ad - 15% by phone and 20% via the internet

We knew anecdotally that TV advertising has a massive impact on internet traffic, sending people to brand websites, either directly or via search, retailer or comparison sites. Google have confirmed it themselves and they have kindly provided us with some fancy graphs showing the dramatic effect of TV on search. But to be able to put some robust headline numbers to it is a big step forward.

The study concludes that TV advertising has been undervalued because its ability to generate viewer response online is generally not accounted for. Until now, DRTV optimisation at spot level has been based largely on the patterns of telephone response, which has been declining as a response channel. Across the seven brands, phone response had declined from over 85% to less than 40% of responses in the last 8 years.

The wider context to the research is that the take-up of home broadband and increasing laptop ownership has effectively brought the High Street into the living room. There is so little now to stop people from shopping for a product immediately after seeing a TV ad. TV ads are now at the point of sale.

It is another example of TV and online media’s ‘special relationship’, as Google recently put it. TV advertising provokes both emotion and action; and internet media enable people to act on their emotions immediately.

A qualified hurrah

2009-11-12T11:40:00Z

No other awards do what the IPA Effectiveness Awards do – honour the actual, transformational effect that good advertising can have. For this reason above all they remain the gold standard in awards. And for that reason Thinkbox is extremely proud to sponsor them.

At Monday night’s awards do, all winners were deserving of praise. The campaigns had worked brilliantly and the brains behind them had gone the extra mile to show how they worked. They proved the influence of advertising on the bottom line and they deserve our thanks for that effort.

And there was also great jubilation to see history being made when Mediaedge:CIA won both the Grand Prix for Morrisons Let's Grow and Effectiveness Agency of the Year. I hope many other media agencies will follow them by taking more responsibility for effectiveness in the coming years.

However, there was one thing that puzzles me – why were entries restricted to campaigns that had cost less than a total of £2.5 million?

£2.5 million is still a hefty amount of money – especially at the moment – but isn’t effectiveness still effectiveness whatever the budget? A campaign spending £2.5m should have absolutely no problem demonstrating its effectiveness against a campaign spending £25m. Indeed, the way most entries seemed to define ROI (return divided by investment), the smaller the budget the easier the task I reckon. Let me explain.

Generally speaking, as you start to invest in advertising the efficiency of your spend will be very high, but as your brand matures, increases its market share and you spend more, the efficiency of your spend is likely to reduce leading to the phenomenon of ‘diminishing returns’. However, effectiveness is not the same thing as efficiency and respected gurus such as Tim Ambler, Les Binet and Peter Field have shown how, if we persist in defining ROI as Return divided by Investment it can lead to falling brand shares, declining profit and a disappearing marketing budget. Return minus investment should be our goal; by pursuing this definition brands will focus on what really matters which is increasing market share and profit growth.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with diminishing returns, as long as there is still a return, the brands that understand this become market leaders. However if you set your goal as ‘how can I get the most impressive ratio between what I spend and the incremental profit it generates?’ you are likely to spend less and remain a small brand (a bit like Arsenal).

Restricting the budget restricts those eligible to enter and, in an inadvertent way, sort of paints advertising as a cost rather than an investment. In a perfect world advertisers would invest more and more because they would make more and more profit. We don’t live in a perfect world, of course.

I’m also mystified by a few of the Special Awards. Why have an award for best integration, or best use of media? Either they were effective campaigns or not. 100% use of PR or outdoor or anything else would be unlikely to win either of those awards, but if it delivered the best business results then why reward other less successful campaigns.

There is obviously a bit of vested interest in all my concerns; the restricted budget meant that broadcast TV featured in fewer of the winners than in other years, though, despite this, the Grand Prix and two of the three golds went to campaigns with TV at their heart. For next year’s awards, it’s business as usual: all-comers and all shapes and sizes of campaigns will be eligible, so start gathering the evidence now.

Most irritating things in media. No. 3 in an occasional series: 'Passive'

2009-10-29T09:55:00Z

In media, we like to create either/ors. Different media are generally pushed (or pulled of course) into various binary oppositions. As well as push/pull, we have lean forward/ back; interruption/engagement; new/old; and, today’s niggle, passive/active.

Unless you are reading this from a print-out (which is either very dedicated or rather weird), you are probably leaning forward, switched on, plugged in and active. Either way, you should be explicitly conscious of my every word landing neatly in your pre-frontal cortex.

But tonight at home – so conventional media wisdom goes – most of you will have swapped your office swivel chair and mouse for a sofa and remote control to watch some telly. You will have moved away from active and towards passive.

TV is generally deemed a passive pursuit. It is indisputably a relaxed and enjoyable one - and especially on Monday evenings for me at the moment. I am overwhelmed with TV goodies: Murderland, Flash Forward, In Treatment, 30 Rock, Life. So, as I sit there gripped by Robbie Coltrane’s story, or struggling to piece together the clues dropped around Joseph Fiennes or consumed by lust for Alec Baldwin can I really be described as passive? I’m certainly not moving much, but it’s like Piccadilly Circus in my head. I shudder to think what my brain activity levels are when I watch Countdown.

As Robert Senior so elegantly put it, we’ve all got a PhD in film grammar these days, so adept are we at interpreting complex narratives from condensed audio-visual stimuli. Is ‘passive’ the right word to use when we’re guessing who did what, working out what will happen next or solving a conundrum? I prefer ‘receptive’.

Even if you think passive is the appropriate term, you should re-evaluate whether that’s good or bad. The state of mind we are in when we watch TV has a big impact on the influence and effectiveness of TV advertising.

In his book 'The Hidden Power of Advertising' (a must-read for all) Dr Robert Heath developed his theory of ‘low involvement processing’. He suggested that the way we absorb brand messages can be either 'high' or 'low' involvement.

In a nutshell, ‘high involvement processing' is conscious, active, explicit learning. You should be high-involvement processing now, reading this. High involvement messaging is normally rational, logical or time-sensitive information. Typically, print and online text are good at this.

TV can do this type of messaging too but is also processed at a low involvement level; a cocktail of conscious and semi-conscious activity. Much of it involves 'implicit' learning that takes place without you knowing that you are learning. You are currently low involvement processing what is going on around you – your colleague whistling that irritating tune again, the empty coffee cup on your desk, the smell of your colleague’s lunch - or even the smell of your colleague.

Information we receive via low involvement processing is squirreled away by our minds to our long-term memory without any conscious filtering which is when the risk of rejection is high. As such, it is an incredibly effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand and is well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term.

This more passive processing works best for brands where the purchase decision requires low involvement (little risk, little product differentiation; low cost; frequent purchase). But it can also be the best way to get a brand on the list for consideration for higher involvement purchases (like buying a car or choosing a holiday destination). We just don’t know it is doing that.

If you want to see this principle in action, just watch Derren Brown influence people’s behaviours without any active input from them. Watch him from your sofa, where your body will be passive, but your mind certainly won’t be.

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Rio Ferdinand, media futurologist

2009-10-07T15:09:00Z

In a surreal moment, the respected media analyst and futurologist Rio Ferdinand has linked the fact that the England-Ukraine match is going to be online pay-per-view to the recent claim that internet advertising has ‘overtaken’ TV advertising:

"I read that online advertising has taken over from TV”, he apparently said, “so that tells you something about where it's going in terms of the digital world…So I’m sure it'll be the way forward and in the future it'll probably be the reality. I think it's a good way to gauge how many people are interested."

If ever the IAB’s claims needed a dose of credibility, surely this is it.

But Rio is not alone, unlike how he sometimes finds himself in the box. Among others, Marketing took a deep breath and declared ‘England game heralds future of sport on web’.

On the flipside is this from Janine Gibson, Guardian.co.uk editor, who disagrees it is a prophetic moment and explained why The Guardian declined the offer to screen the match:

“You had to sign up to an enormous amount of editorial endorsement and promotion for something that we weren’t convinced was of particular value to our users and would feel like a fake endorsement of a one-off match. This isn’t heralding the beginning of a new dawn; it’ll never happen again and it feels slightly opportunistic.”

She obviously needs to have a chat with Rio.

But over and above all this is the fact that the match being delivered by the internet might be interesting and contentious now, but once TV sets are fully broadband enabled it won’t really matter. Viewers won’t care how it is getting to their screens. It is all TV and they will hopefully have the experience they want.

It is unsurprising that England football fans are in uproar over the fact that the match is being screened via an online TV service and not on broadcast TV. They can still see it if they want to, but not the way they’d like to.

Amid all the fuss, we should remember that the game was originally contracted to appear on broadcast TV (with Setanta) and, if it had been an important game with something at stake, it probably still would be. I can’t see a match England actually need to win or a World Cup Final going online only pay-per-view – although maybe a new series of Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups would be ok. It is a fairly unique set of circumstances that have lead us here.

The fan forums I’ve looked at are less concerned with the idea of paying to watch it, though, than they are with a delivery system that means they can’t watch it in the pub or on the big screen in the living room and have to crowd round their laptops or watch it individually instead.

They demand the shared experience that only TV can give them. But having failed to agree rights with a broadcast TV company, it is understandable (or maybe greedy) that the agency responsible for this match – Kentaro – looked for an alternative buyer. The end result might not be as good as broadcast TV but it is better than nothing. Still, that is scant consolation for fans.

The fact that newspapers are so keen to become broadcasters – with the Times and Sun being among those who will show the match – is really interesting but not new. They already have various bits of video content on their websites, but this football match is one of the few pieces of roughly ‘must-have’ TV content they can get access to. TV broadcasters show appointment to view programming all day every day and newspapers clearly would like a piece of the action.

I suppose the main concern for fans that do choose to pay to watch the match is how well the UK’s internet pipes will handle demand. The fact that the number of viewers has been capped at one million worryingly shows how unprepared the UK broadband infrastructure is for major transmission of big events. It needs upgrading, as Digital Britain pointed out, and TV companies are as anxious as anybody to get an additional digital network to digital broadcasting. How is it going to cope when the majority of people are watching TV in HD, or with the other resource-hungry innovations like 3D coming along?

A graph that made me laugh

2009-09-30T16:17:00Z

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

2009-09-18T12:10:00Z

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

2009-09-16T05:33:00Z

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

2009-09-09T09:16:00Z

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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TV goes app

2009-08-21T08:18:00Z

Now, here’s a lovely thing that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. The brilliant Barclaycard ‘Waterslide’ TV ad propelled its iPhone app spin-off to become the most popular free, branded game in the history of the iTunes App Store. This is a fine example of TV and interactive media cuddling up and making babies.

BBH’s Barclaycard's 'Waterslide Extreme' iPhone app has clocked up 4 million downloads from the iTunes App Store since its launch in mid-July. It became the top free app in 57 countries.

The Barclaycard TV ad was an instant hit and sparked lots of Twitterface activity. I loved it too; given that their previous campaign had featured a heartthrob from an all-time favourite TV series, that’s quite an achievement. Dare (the creative agency behind the app) also created a YouTube channel where people made their own versions of the ad for other to vote on (the excellent tea&cheese’s take on the ad got the most votes).

Apart from actually buying the product, in the ‘olden days’ (like 1998) we could only really show our love for TV ads or programmes by talking about them, imitating them, reading articles about them or buying some related merchandise, like a board game or a mug. We can and do still do all this both on- and offline but, as the existence of the Barclaycard app highlights, we can now do so much more with our TV creative.

We can be inspired to make our own versions, chat in real time about them with people on the other side of the planet, watch extra content, send them to friends, play games based on them or simply watch again. We can even have conversations with the fictional characters that TV ads give birth to, such as the half million Facebook friends and 24,000 Twitter followers of the pre-eminent meerkat of our time.

Of course not every app is as successful as Barclaycard’s but it does demonstrate how potent the TV + online combo can be. T-Mobile’s Life’s for Sharing campaign gets it right too. Nothing gets the party started like telly and interactive media extends the fun.

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Most irritating things in media: ‘digital’. No 2 in an occasional series

2009-08-18T05:43:00Z

You’ll have gathered by now that I am a bit of a pedantic old bag but I have nothing against the word ‘digital’ per se. It is a perfectly lovely antonym to ‘analogue’. It is, according to a dictionary, a ‘description of data which is stored or transmitted as a sequence of discrete symbols from a finite set, most commonly this means binary data represented using electronic or electromagnetic signals’. So that’s nice and clear.

My problem is how ‘digital’ has come to be used in media and marketing. It doesn’t do the job required of it. Even worse than imprecision, it causes confusion. Earlier this year I witnessed a very senior media figure stand on a platform and tell the audience that when digital TV switchover is complete in 2012 all UK TV will be delivered via the internet. Erm…sorry, but no. More and more media are becoming digital; we now have a date for radio broadcasting to go totally digital and outdoor has lots of exciting new digital formats. Even print media are compiled digitally, for heaven’s sake.

There are plenty of other people - Nigel Walley and Ian Darby among them - who object to how ‘digital’ is being used. It is at its most absurd and meaningless when it is used as an alternative to TV. Yet we hear and read it all the time; people talking about choosing between TV and ‘digital’. How on earth did that happen at a time when digital switchover is nearly 90% complete, with many more people enjoying digital TV than have digital broadband? TV could hardly be more digital.

What people mostly mean when they say ‘digital’ is internet or web-based media. What’s wrong with using those words? You could argue that they are too broad already, given that internet media covers a vast range from search and websites, to social media, email marketing and online TV. But if you are looking for a bigger umbrella word, that can embrace every medium with a built-in return path, including mobile and gaming, then I suggest the word we should all be using is ‘interactive’ media. This is my personal choice because it’s a truly accurate differentiator between those media and more linear formats; interactivity requires very specific creative thinking and skills.

I accept that language shifts and morphs as we use it to take on new meanings and shake off others, but it still needs to make sense along the way and, anyway, technical terms don’t tend to shift their meanings as much your average word. If we can’t agree what a supposedly technical term like ‘digital’ means then it probably needs a re-think.

Flo Heiss, creative partner at Dare - an agency which has won more ‘Digital Agency of the Year’ accolades than any other - talked at one of our recent events about how he’s bored with the digital word. Dare has dropped it from their name. Do you dare drop it too?

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Most irritating things in media: ‘long-form video’. No. 1 in an occasional series

2009-08-13T05:03:00Z

This is the first in an occasional and cathartic series where we pick one of the most irritating things at large in media at the moment. It could be anything; a word, a phrase, a person, some research, a trend or even an ad (probably not a telly one obviously as they are all beyond reproach). There will be no itch that won’t be scratched, no eyelash beyond the probe of our media fingers; anything is fair game. What is the point of a blog, frankly, if you can’t use it to swat the bees in your bonnet from time to time?

To kick off I offer you ‘long-form video’, used recently by YouTube to describe their recent tie-up with TV broadcasters which will finally get some proper telly programmes legally onto their platform.

People in media have a pathological need to abuse, water down, neuter, twist, murder or mutilate language to the edge of reason and beyond, right into the choppy waters of lunacy. ‘Long-form video’ is a perfect example of this, as used in a Media Week headline this week. It takes a perfectly lovely concept – television – and hammers it flat into bland, technical nonsense.

There is certainly a recognised format of online video; those little windows with moving images in them on text-based websites - that’s online video. More like digital outdoor than TV. Short user-generated a/v, the sort of thing YouTube depended on until now, are also video. We’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when TV goes online it doesn’t cease to be TV and become something else like ‘long-form video’. Do we say online video is short-form TV? No, that would be silly. Is watching a film online better described as watching ‘ even-longer-form video’? No. Ask the average consumer what they are doing when they watch Emmerdale, Peep Show or CSI via the web. They will almost all say “I’m watching TV on my computer/the internet.” No conflict there at all between the content and the distribution technology.

There are plenty of very solid reasons why we should kick ‘long-form video’ straight into the bins. TV is a shorter, quicker, neater and instantly understandable word for everyone on the planet. It is what real people call it. Even when they’re watching YouTube, if you ask them what it is they’re watching on YouTube, if it is proper TV they’ll say so.

Creating jargon can often be a means of taking ownership, of being a bit elite and smart-arse about things. We shouldn’t tolerate it. We don’t have to reinvent perfectly round and smoothly running wheels just to make them sound more complicated, new or thrilling than they already are.

Next…’digital’.

Unintended headlines

2009-08-05T12:56:00Z

While it is music to Thinkbox’s – and advertisers’ – ears that commercial TV has increased its share of viewing and that commercial broadcast TV viewing is continuing to grow, it certainly wasn’t our intention that this should be used as a stick to beat the BBC, as some have. There are quite enough sticks beating the BBC at the moment.

The fact is that, all things being equal, commercial TV’s share of broadcast viewing is likely to keep nudging forward - and the BBC’s diminish - for the next couple of years until everyone has digital TV and all the extra commercial channels that it brings. In that sense, commercial TV simply has a built-in, mathematical advantage.

But any advantage is pointless without skills to seal the deal. The strongest, fastest rugby player in the world is worthless if he or she can’t catch the ball. So it is all very well having the choice of more channels, but there has to be something on them to persuade you to watch. For this, commercial TV broadcasters deserve praise. After 2012, changes in channel viewing shares will be driven chiefly by programming and marketing, not distribution.

Other reasons for commercial TV’s success – which apply equally to the BBC – include a recession that makes free entertainment at home even more appealing, and new technologies – like digital recorders and HDTV – that make watching telly an ever better experience.

And we mustn’t forget that we are only talking about share of broadcast TV here. If you added on all the online TV people now watch, via the likes of the ITV Player, 4OD, Sky Player, Demand Five and most of all BBC iPlayer, then you’d see that the TV medium as a whole is growing on all sides. No sticks required.

Sounding off

2009-08-03T05:29:00Z

Our lovely cousins at the RAB have made an online TV ad to promote radio advertising. The cheeky blighters have based it around our TV ad, but, as they don’t say much we’d disagree with, we have decided to take it as a tribute. Don’t forget to put the sound up.

Our TV ad does strongly feature lines and catchphrases from TV ads but also important gestures and movements: the Cornetto gondola rowing, the R White’s dance, the JR Hartley head-nodding. No matter; the RAB has highlighted an issue we feel strongly about which is the importance of sound in TV ads.

Radio can indeed through sound alone provoke a visual memory from a TV ad; in one of our own research groups someone talked about the British Heart Foundation’s TV ad from a couple of years back where blood clots were seen moving sinisterly under the skin to the accompaniment of the Frank Sinatra classic ‘I’ve got you under my skin’. She said that every time she heard the music she could visualise those clots creeping along veins.

But unless that strong visual image had been linked to impactful sound via the TV ad the radio wouldn’t have worked as well. TV works that way with other media too. Seeing a still image in print or outdoor from a TV ad can remind people of the full glory of the original, but they can be confusing without the TV narrative.

Current fashions in TV favour some stylish action with either a voiceover or a music track; think Sony Balls, Guinness surfers or Cadbury’s eyebrows. And fabulous results can be produced in that way; the latest Budweiser and Hula-Hoops TV ads are part of that trend – even the Philips Carousel film. All of them could – and do – run in any market in the world, either as they stand or with a local voiceover.

But what we’re seeing less of is TV ads with dialogue, where we get to know and love characters through conversations. Some of the classics like Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins for Cinzano or the Gold Blend couple gave us ongoing mini-dramas that compelled us to watch the next instalment.

There are ways round this of course and one of this year’s most successful campaigns has created a loveable character, with a back-story, narrative thrust and great scripts.

His name is Aleksandr Orlov. VCCP has created strong emotional connections for the comparethemarket.com brand in a low interest crowded market with some classy anthropomorphism. If they did need to export the advertising I guess that the marvels of post-production could transport Aleksandr and Sergei anywhere in the world. It would work for the PG Tips monkey too, though Jonny Vegas wouldn’t travel so well I guess.

The combination of moving images with sound is one of the enormous advantages TV (and cinema) has over other visual media like digital outdoor or online video. Yes, online video has the capability for sound but the reality is that the speakers are only likely to be on if you’re watching TV or a film online. Music is a surefire solution to the sound element in TV ads; we have footage of people dancing, singing, clapping along to them. But hearing and seeing words come out of real people’s mouths – with or without music - is a special treat and provokes a deep emotional response. T-Mobile did it in Trafalgar Square. We’d love to see more.

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The eye magnet

2009-07-23T09:40:00Z

As I sometimes get called ‘Statto’ it is only fitting that I start with a stat.

99% of our time spent looking at AV content on screens at home is spent looking at the screen of a TV set (for digital natives only that figure is 98%). So says a new ethnographic study in the US by Nielsen/CRE. The screens of PCs, laptops, games consoles, mobiles etc. make up the remainder of our home screen time, says the study.

There are obvious reasons behind our preference for the largest of the small screens when it comes to watching TV. Among other things, you don’t have to hold it, squint at it, wear earphones to use it, refresh it, or uncomfortably crowd round it to share the experience. That 99% highlights that it is still a compromise to watch TV on a laptop, PC or mobile, although it is a compromise that will have to be made less often as online TV services arrive on TV sets.

But the main thing about TV sets are that they usually look the best and, with upwards of 40% of UK households owning HD ready sets, more are looking better all the time.

HD is just one of the technologies that have made the TV viewing experience more attractive and have magnetised viewing to the living room. Along with larger screens (growing about an inch a year), surround sound, digital television recorders…recent massive consumer investment in TV equipment has created a higher impact experience.

And so we watch more. The CRE study found that HD increases viewing by more than 5% (especially sports), backing up another US report – from Myers – that found claimed engagement with advertising on HD channels for viewers with HD sets was a whopping 10% higher than for standard definition.

And so to the future. As convergence gathers pace, new viewing developments like HD, Super-HD and 3D are likely to raise the bar in terms of what viewers expect of content formats. In doing so, I think there’s a good chance that they will maintain clear water between the standards of professional ‘TV’ content and the longer tail of niche or user generated video content.

It looks like a duck. It must be a horse.

2009-07-10T06:50:00Z

Has Samuel Beckett become a headline writer at The Guardian? I ask because one of their recent headlines was so absurd, so fist-bitingly contradictory that I spat out my snail porridge and had to have a lie down.

The piece was about Hulu launching in the UK. The headline was: 'With all this online, why watch TV?'

It might as well have been ‘With all this internet shopping, why shop?’ or ‘With all this blogging, why write?’.

It’s times like this I wish I could ban headlines, or at least vet those that have the words TV and online in them. Headlines are the boastful show-off who wants your attention and is willing to say anything to get it. This is fine with straightforward issues like ‘Man found hanging out of goat’ or ‘England cruise to Ashes victory', but most media and advertising issues are more nuanced. There’s no little irony in the fact that they can’t always be reduced to catchy slogans.

This particular headline evoked a definition of TV from the 1950s. But things have moved on a bit since then.

The problem is a misunderstanding of TV’s relationship with the internet. TV is about content; the internet is one of the ways we can now deliver it to anything with a glass screen. They are wildly, lovingly and blissfully complementary. They are not on two sides of a fence.

When TV content crosses into cyberspace, it doesn’t magically stop being TV (although some start weirdly calling it video). In fact, simple, free catch-up TV online is stopping viewers falling out of the broadcast stream. It’s a trampoline that bounces them back in.

Most importantly of all, if you ask non-media people what they’re doing when they watch Corrie, Peep Show or The Gadget Show online they’ll say they’re “watching TV…on the internet/my computer”.

If it looks like a duck...