Is TV advertising dying? How about brands? There is, I think, a connection.
It is now commonplace to announce the death of TV advertising. The new marketers are positively noisy on this theme. The assumption is that ads will move from TV to product placement, internet, gaming, blogging, etc.
And it’s not just an assumption. In the UK, Heineken is shifting a £6.5m budget from television to sports sponsorship. Ford now spends about 30%-40% of its ad budget on traditional advertising, compared with around 80% five years ago. The move to online advertising is happening more quickly than expected. According to Heath Terry of Credit Suisse First Boston, the market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion in 2006.
So is this a good idea? Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not an idea. It’s blind rush from one side of the marketing vessel to the other. We are abandoning TV advertising with scant regard for larger costs.
And there are larger costs. According to the BusinessWeek Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard, Heineken has falled from #82 in 2001 to #100 in 2005. It is, in other words, hanging on to Top 100 classification by its fingernails. This might not be the time to move from spots to sports.
My argument is (a) that of all the old media devices at the marketer’s disposal, TV advertising created the most potent meaning and value for the brand, (b) that the new media forms of advertising are pretty modest meaning and value makers, and none competes with TV ads, and (c) that the move from TV to other forms of advertising may be expensive for the brand.
Today, I happened to stumble upon the Account Planning Group awards for 2003. (I was searching for the exemplary Ben Malbon.) Here are some of the things I found.
Rebecca Morgan of Bartle Bogle Hegarty got shortlisted for work she did for Barclays. (She may well have won the award. I write this under a little time pressure.)
This market tries to build trust by making banks likeable – we think the job is to make Barclays seem more knowledgeable about money.
This is an interesting marketing proposition and it is impossible for me to imagine that it is something that could be accomplished outside the world of TV (and print) advertising.
Here’s another. Fern Miller of JWT got shortlisted for work he did for Nestle and Kit Kat.
Kit Kat was being forgotten by consumers and nothing about the famous "Have a Break" campaign was helping them to remember. The solution is to reinvent the break territory, turning it from a platform for little more than well-branded entertainment into a powerful opinion about the importance of the break in this, the country with the longest working hours in Europe.
Good luck communicating this in any of the new alternatives. I venture to say none of the campaigns that drew mentions (and awards) from APG could be undertaken in new media advertising (or old media variations).
Summing up
I know what everyone believes: that people TIVO through ads, that television is losing its audience to gaming and the Internet, that television audiences are fragmenting, that TV channels are multiplying, that the game, is, in effect, up.
This, too, is true: that the alternatives to TV advertising are abysmally bad. Product placement is now regarded with suspicion. From a meaning manufacture point of view, this was always a kind of hitchhiking, effectively borrowing the power and the narrative of the TV show or movie in question.
Google advertising! This is ought to be a punch line. If advertising could be reduced to the classifieds, newspaper advertising would have been plenty, and Madison Avenue would just happen to be a street in Manhattan.
And those colorful, motionful ads that compete for my attention on the websites of New York Times and Wall Street Journal. That’s the problem, isn’t it? I am trying to read!
I don’t doubt that television is dying. But when was the last time you discussed an ad you saw on line, or a product you saw placed in a movie? No one cares about these ads because they do not have powers of metaphor or narrative. The 30 second spot is a precious resource in the world of brand building. To dispense with it is a very bad idea.
References
For the Account Planning Group Awards for 2003, here.
Anonymous. 2006. Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard. BusinessWeek. here.
Berman, Saul J. Niall Duffy and Louisa A Shipnuck. The end of television as we know it: a future industry perspective. Publication of the IBM Institute for Business Value. here.
Martinson, Jane 2005. Agency says goodbye to Walter. The Guardian. February 18, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Product placment as marketing malfaesance. The Blog Sits At…. January 17, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Madison Avenue and Google: no contest. This Blog Sits At … November 1, 2o05. here.
Thaw, Jonathan. 2005. Online Ad Growth Accelerates, Outpacing Newspaper, TV Spending. Bloomberg.com. December 28, 2005. here.
Wonderful post! Up until this post I rode right along with the idea that television advertising was dead – due to DVRs, the mute button, etc. But I think you made a great point that no other advertising method (product placement, online advertising especially, etc) can deliver as much value, emotional attachment, and likability as a television ad. And I think the main reason is that other advertising mediums do not deliver any connection emotionally.
Product placement does little except get the product, brand colors and logo in front of our eyes. Online advertising, I believe, is slated for to only be a good medium to promote offers and present sales deals. Neither deliver anything emotionally. But, when I watch a hilarious and clever television commercial, or an inspiring and touching one, I become emotionally attached to that brand and their product. I immediately feel better, and think more highly of the company and its offering. And that’s why television is not going to die. Or at least, that’s why television will not die until another medium comes along that can deliver as highly on an emotion level.
Great post! Bravo!
The last time I discussed an ad I saw online was November 29th 2005:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_epeus_archive.html#113331469749679883
The ‘bouncy balls’ ad got lots of online discussion going, as did the Guinness Evolution one. Strong brand statements like these will get distributed outside the TV system.
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And let’s not forget that the (TV) ads are still the only good reason to watch the Superbowl. 🙂
I think the problem with TV advertising, the reason people skip it most of the time but spend hours recording an event in which they have no interest, just to see what the most expensive ads of the year look like, is that most advertisements on TV don’t use the medium to anything like its creative potential. They’re the contextual equivalent of google ads or banner ads, except with video and sound. And so just like we employ ad-blocking technology to help us ignore google ads and banner ads on the web, we employ ad-skipping technology to help us bypass content-free ads on television.
To the advertisers of the world, my only advice is this: if you don’t have anything interesting to say, STOP TALKING…or at least stop paying huge sums of money to make sure we all KNOW you have nothing interesting to say
I’m not too sure about the bank example – I think that it’s highly doable to create a more trustworthy brand through being more ‘knowledgeable’ about money mainly because more and more people are researching financial products online and ‘doing’ banking that way. And it’s not just the context and the time spent that are key – the internet allows users to follow the rationale of any ad by reinforcing the message with a more engaged experiential use of the brand.
But, i agree there’s a mad rush to ‘new media’ that smacks of a gold rush [all hype from the early runners], without any real thought as to how appropriate or cost effective it may be.
Grant,
Great post. It seems the question, though, is not IF the 30 second will die, but WHEN it will become extinct. What will take it’s place as a vehicle of creating and communicating brand meaning? Word of mouth, open-source, various online/interactive hybrid models, experiential etc are all held up as modern alternatives but you are absolutely right: they don’t come close to TV ads. Most likely, it’ll be a case of “don’t know what you have till it’s gone”.
Certainly, TV ads still have a role to play in marketing. For exmaple, it would be hard to launch a CPG brand nationally without some.
However, I am not sure I agree with the exmaples you give. Advertising, big companies and marketing overall lacks credibility in people’s eyes. They have disappointed to many times. It is probably more important than Barclay’s show that they are knowledgeable at the branch level, or on their web site, before (or maybe at the same time as) they launch TV. Kit Kat’s campaign about the importance of a break would be more credible if it tried to win over the blogosphere first (after all, I doubt Nestle gives people that many breaks).
The problem is not that TV ads are bad per se, but that there are to many of them, and to many really bad ones at that.
Certainly, TV ads still have a role to play in marketing. For example, it would be hard to launch a CPG brand nationally without some.
However, I am not sure I agree with the examples you give. Advertising, big companies and marketing overall lacks credibility in people’s eyes. They have disappointed too many times. It is probably more important than Barclay’s show that they are knowledgeable at the branch level, or on their web site, before (or maybe at the same time as) they launch TV. Kit Kat’s campaign about the importance of a break would be more credible if it tried to win over the blogosphere first (after all, I doubt Nestle gives people that many breaks).
The problem is not that TV ads are bad per se, but that there are to many of them, and to many really bad ones at that.
I think ALL media have their place in a marketing communication strategy, it just depends on the objectives and the context. I think we should avoid fads, moving like lemmings to the latest cliff. We should instead learn simply to use the right tool for the right job. One thing is true, ALL media are evolving; everything can be improved. There are still times when a TV ad is the best tool for a job. Even what is novel today will be wrinkled and athritic tomorrow. Plus, personally, I hate internet clutter even more than mass media clutter. Consumers block stuff that bores them or impedes their access to what they are looking for in the first place, no matter where they are looking for it at, whether it’s boring 30 seconders, annoying pop-ups, ugly billboards or intrusive ambient placements. At the end of it all, what separates the sheep from the clutter is CREATIVITY.
Creative planning, creative content, creative execution that meets the consumer at his/her point of need.
Hello,
Very good post. I believe it varies from brand to brand, depends on the public to be achieved to add value to major brands, whether web, tv, print.
The big Brazilian brand.
What is the feeling with this acquisition? Burger King.