Is television advertising still an effective way of getting consumers?

Is television advertising still an effective way of getting consumers? Now that we have sky and sky plus where people no longer have to sit through advert breacks but can now fast foward is it still effective in producing consumers? I also believe that people no longer sit and watch adverts they flick over and see what else is on. Do you agree? The other factor is that we now have the internet where we can catch up on programs and episodes that we have missed, it is no longer vital to be sitting on the sofa at the right time, with programs like itvplayer and 4OD which do not use as many adverts, is advertising on the television still an effective way of attracting audiences to consumer products?

I’d like to nip this in the bud straight away! There’s no need to question TV advertising’s effectiveness. TV is proven to be the most effective advertising medium. Ask Meerkats, ask Hovis, ask Drench, ask Magners, ask the British Heart Foundation…ask pretty much any brand that’s been on TV recently or in the past. But it isn’t just gut feeling, big campaigns and me saying it. Among the reams of evidence we now have are several major impartial studies into advertising payback over the last 18 months…

PricewaterhouseCoopers, in two studies a year apart (based on over 700 brands over 13 years), proved that TV advertising delivers more incremental business for brands per pound spent than any other medium and that higher brand values are strongly correlated with above average use of TV. The IPA’s book ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’, an analysis of 880 IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies from the last 27 years, found that campaigns using TV significantly outperform those that do not and concluded that TV is becoming more effective over time.  A recent Data2Decisions analysis that showed a year off TV takes a brand 5 years to recover from.  More anecdotally, 22 of the 23 IPA Effectiveness Award winning campaigns last year had TV at their heart. Thinkbox has a whole area of its website devoted to TV’s effectiveness. Please have a look for more: www.thinkbox.tv.

You also shouldn’t worry about the impact Sky+ and other digital TV recorders are having on advertising effectiveness. Research by Thinkbox and others has shown that people get a DTR because they love watching TV, not becasue they are desperate to avoid advertising. It isn’t surprising then that once they get one, they watch more TV as a result. According to the latest Skyview figures, Sky homes watch 17% more TV once they convert to Sky+; 82% of viewing is to live broadcast TV; and, even in the 18% of viewing that is time-shifted, viewers with a DTR still watch 30% of ad breaks at normal speed.  Overall, the extra viewing encouraged by owning a DTR results in viewers watching 2% more ads at normal speed than they did before they got one.

And the fact that we can now watch TV on-demand on the internet is also not a cause for concern. It is extra TV, not replacement. 2008 was a record year for broadcast TV viewing (over 26 hours a week per person) at the same time as watching TV online exploded into our lives. We can’t have record years every year, but it shows how the two ways of watching co-exist and have grown together. This is because they fulfill different viewer needs. Thinkbox’s recent Me-TV research found that most online TV is in order to catch-up with broadcast. Online TV is reinforcing loyalty to broadcast schedules. That may be why Susan Boyle's 100 million+ hits on YouTube resulted in an increase of 2 million viewiers the following week!

 
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