Why isn’t TV advertising dead yet?

Well the answer is kind of obvi­ous. Many mar­keters still see TV adver­tis­ing as the best place to reach the mass­es and cre­ate aware­ness around their brand. Large­ly dri­ven by big com­mer­cial events such as The Olympics, The Super­bowl, World Cups and region­al cham­pi­onships, TV is still the sin­gle largest adver­tis­ing invest­ment by com­pa­nies today.

But the fact is that TV adver­tis­ing is under pres­sure. For years, invest­ment in dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing has been play­ing catch-up with the same in TV. Accord­ing to a sur­vey by eMar­keter, this year the dif­fer­ence between spend­ing on TV ads and spend­ing on Dig­i­tal ads is pro­ject­ed to be a mere one per­cent­age point in favour of TV. Next year dig­i­tal ad spend­ing is pro­ject­ed to sur­pass TV for the first time and by 2020 TV’s share of ad spend­ing is pro­ject­ed to drop below one third of total ad spend­ing, after hav­ing hov­ered around the 40% mark for a long time.

So why are we see­ing this change in ad spending?
Because peo­ple are grow­ing weary of mass mar­ket­ing and demand more per­son­al­ized and rel­e­vant offers, in the right place, at the right time. Peo­ple don’t want to be dis­turbed any more, while they are watch­ing a movie, a sports event or their favourite TV show. Even online the “ad-fatigue” is obvi­ous. Just look at the explo­sive rise in the num­ber of peo­ple that use ad-block­ers today. From 21 mil­lion users world­wide in 2010 to 198 mil­lion users in 2015.

The rise and growth of on demand ser­vices like Net­flix also shows that cus­tomers are more than will­ing to pay for their con­tent and that con­tent comes to them ad-free.

But does all that real­ly make TV obso­lete for mar­keters as a chan­nel? The short answer is no, it doesn’t. TV is still a valu­able chan­nel for most com­pa­nies to build, pro­mote and extend their brands.

The habits are changing
What is chang­ing are the habits of the view­ers, which is why TV-net­works as well as ad-buy­ers need to get in front of this. The best in the busi­ness are already apply­ing pro­gram­mat­ic TV-ad buy­ing to their strat­e­gy, where focus is shift­ed from rely­ing on show-rat­ings as an indi­ca­tor for desir­able audi­ences, to pro­gram­mat­ic tech­nol­o­gy where audi­ence data is used to chan­nel mes­sages to the right audi­ence at the right time. Hence liv­ing up to the demand of more per­son­alised adver­tis­ing from consumers.

With that in mind TV, as a mar­ket­ing chan­nel, falls com­plete­ly in line with the emerg­ing trends with­in Omni Chan­nel Mar­ket­ing. The mar­ket demands a con­sis­tent and rel­e­vant mes­sage across all mar­ket­ing chan­nels, includ­ing TV, which is why TV-ad buy­ers and sell­ers must rethink the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence that they are offer­ing the audiences.