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Discover the power of TV advertising: how TV advertising works and why
There are all sorts of reasons why television advertising is so brilliant at creating success for brands and businesses both in the short-term and the long-term. |
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Here are the top ten:
For all the evidence click here. |
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Thinkbox's TV ad: some quick links for you
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There has never been a better time to start adding the power of TV to your marketing, as scores of new-to-TV advertisers are finding out. This link will give you some guidance on how to get started and also who to get in touch with, both at Thinkbox and at the TV companies -
Harvey the dog, star of Thinkbox's current TV ad, is back, and this time the stakes couldn’t be higher as his best friend Rabbit dangles perilously over the waste bin. Will the power of TV advertising be able to save the day? Thinkbox's new TV ad has been created by The Red Brick Road and directed by award winning directors Si & Ad of Academy. Here you can have another look at the Harvey & Rabbit ad and find out more about the people behind it. -
Thinkbox and the Marketing Society have collaborated on this new handbook to explain why TV advertising can make a powerful difference to your business. It features key findings from the major recent studies of advertising effectiveness to create a compact guide on how advertising works and, in particular, TV’s place at the heart of the most successful campaigns. Here you will find concrete proof of how TV can work for you and how it pays back, whatever the time scale or budget. You can also download the handbook in handy PDF form, or navigate through to some nickable PowerPoint slides with notes that will help you make a watertight case for investment in TV. Find out more right here -
As a nation of animal lovers, the combination of a great TV ad with a cute, intrepid or comedic creature is a powerful one. Some of these characters only make a brief 30 second appearance in the life the advertiser, whilst others go on to become much-loved brand mascots in an association that lasts for years and years. To celebrate the release of Thinkbox’s new TV commercial, staring the multi-talented Harvey and his best friend Rabbit, we thought you might like to see some other great TV ads – classic and new - where creatures of all shapes and sizes have entertained and engaged us on behalf of their advertisers. From acrobatic squirrels on impossible missions to forthright meerkats and nimble-footed bears, we hope you enjoy this selection of brilliant commercials. -
Our latest ad dramatises the powerful effect that TV can have. We thought you might like some "at a glance" examples of brands that have recently used TV and experienced business-transforming effects, against all sorts of objectives from launching or building a brand to increasing web-traffic, footfall and sales: we hope there is something here to inspire. -
Harvey & Rabbit are friends forever. They go together like tea and cakes, which got us thinking about other famous TV advertising double acts that have kept us entertained over the years. So, here’s a quick bit of fun for you based on some of these timeless TV twosomes, with some excellent prizes going to the first entries drawn out of our electronic hat. Good luck! -
The 30 second TV spot remains the cornerstone of TV advertising (we watched a record 2.7 billion of them at normal speed in 2011) and there is no sign we are about to stop watching, talking about, and sharing them with others. Importantly, the mighty spot is at the heart of most IPA effectiveness award winning campaigns. However, there are so many different ways to use the spot together with a host of other commercial innovations on TV that work alongside them. These are offering advertisers new ways to create inventive and original campaigns. Here are a few of the ways advertisers and agencies innovated on TV in 2011. -
We want everybody, from agencies to advertisers to use us for help and advice and facts. So, we've put together a collection of fact-packed and thought-provoking presentations that explore the effectiveness of TV and the different ways that advertisers can maximise its many benefits. Each presentation is based around a theme and provides an overview of the subject as well as some key insights from major research projects.. If you'd like to find out more, or book a presentation for you and your colleagues, there's a full list of potential subjects here and all the contact details you need.
What's New
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On Thursday, 28 June from 9am to 1pm at the Soho Hotel, London we’ll be exploring the contemporary issue of 2-screening and reveal the exclusive findings from our new ethnographic study, which looks into this subject in more depth and captures real-time evidence of actual programme and ad break engagement. Learn more about the event and sign up here. -
This free, full day’s training workshop is designed to give new starters to the business an overview of what television has to offer advertisers. It is primarily aimed at trainee media planners and buyers or junior marketing personnel. The course looks at the many and varied strengths of television as a communications vehicle and examines the different roles that TV can play. It also covers how to plan a TV campaign, how to go about buying TV and how TV is traded. The next workshop is scheduled for Friday 29th June 2012. You can find out what subjects we’ll be covering and how to reserve a seat right here. -
BLOG: I have become something of professional conference attender over the last few years – my how I love a lanyard – but this was my first time at the international Festival of Media at Montreux. It is rare for me to be rubbing shoulders with the international media hand-luggage-only-1st-6-rows-fast-track-exec-lounge brigade. The Media Festival is actually a brilliant meeting of international media movers and shakers. It’s in a stunning location and one of the things they do well is allow plenty of time for the aforementioned shoulder rubbing. Each break is at least 45 minutes long so in spite of the numbers there’s lots of opportunity to meet, chat and ask people about their... -
The shortlist for the TV Planning Awards 2012 has been announced with a record breaking number of entries this year across all categories and up by 20% from the year before. 17 agencies have made it through. The Thinkbox TV Planning Awards are about celebrating brilliantly effective uses of today's TV and recognising the people behind them. They consistently show us that TV has a great future. Winning one shows that you do too. The Thinkbox TV Planning Awards 2012 are held in partnership with Campaign and Mediaweek.co.uk and are completely free to enter. Click through here to see the full list.
Welcome
Thinkbox is the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, in all its forms. Its shareholders are Channel 4, ITV, Sky Media, Turner Media Innovations and UKTV who represent over 90 per cent of commercial TV advertising revenue through their owned and partner TV channels. Thinkbox works with the marketing community with a single ambition: to help advertisers get the best out of today's TV.
Our Shareholders
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Associate Members
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Have you seen this?
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With the arrival of Europe’s first 3D channel in UK homes, and people starting to enjoy a new immersive viewing experience, we take a roundup of who’s doing what in the world of 3D TV and look at how advertisers can engage with it at the moment. -
Over the past few years we've been out and about with cameras and lights, filming award-winning brand stories from the IPA Effectiveness Awards, the Thinkbox TV planning Awards and elsewhere. These bite-size documentaries are a rare chance to hear from some of the advertisers and agencies responsible for these inspiring and effective campaigns. Recent additions to our ‘case studies on film' gallery include Audi, PG Tips, Tesco, Orange and Tobacco Control. Here are some quick links for you; they’re well worth a look. -
This film, with Robin Wight, President of Engine and Laurence Green, Chairman of Fallon, tells the story of the transformation of fledgling 'Hutchison Microtel' into the multinational success story that is Orange today, creating a whole new style of advertising along the way. The original case study at the heart of this film has been voted by past conveners as one of the very best case studies from 30 years of the IPA Effectiveness Awards: these are brilliant campaigns that still have much to teach us about planning effective communications today. If you want to find out more about the power of emotional advertising, great brand building or the direct effect advertising can have on shareholder value, then this is a must see. -
This film looks at PG Tips marketing communications from its launch to the present day and features contributions from Paul Feldwick, Consultant; Nigel Jones, UK Group Chairman and Chief Executive, Publicis: Les Binet, European Director, DDB Matrix and Dylan Williams, Partner & Head of Strategy, Mother, amongst others. It explores DDB’s Grand Prix winning paper from the 1990 IPA Effectiveness Awards; which has been voted by past and present Convenors of Judges as one of the very best case studies in the IPA Databank. The brand’s enduring success story is bought up to date by Mother, who tell us about the thinking behind their current Al & Monkey campaign. If you want to find out more about added value; brand resilience; commanding a price premium; the value of consistency in both share of voice and creativity, then this film is well worth a look. And of course, it’s packed with classic ads too. -
This film tells the story of Audi's advertising from 1981 – when Audi became the first piece of business that BBH won – to 2007, a period in which an overhauled communications strategy delivered a payback of £7.50 for every £1 spent alongside creating the UK's fastest growing prestige car brand. Contributors on film include Peter Duffy, Head of Marketing, Audi UK, Sir John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director, BBH and Fiona Walford, Director, Mediacom. The original case study at the heart of this film has been voted by past conveners as one of the very best case studies from 30 years of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. If you work in the automotive sector, or would just like to explore the link between continuity, creativity and effectiveness, then this is well worth a look. "Vorsprung durch Technik", as they say in Germany. -
This research, commissioned by Thinkbox and the IPA, and undertaken by independent marketing consultant Peter Field, analysed the correlation between campaigns' performance across a wide range of the worlds' most respected creative awards determined by The Gunn Report, and their performance in hard business terms recorded in the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank. Updated in 2011, the analysis now covers 435 campaigns over a sixteen year period between 1994 and 2010. It reveals a direct correlation between strong advertising creativity and business success, and that high levels of creativity make advertising campaigns some 12 times more efficient at increasing a brand’s market share. Here you can find out about the project’s background, read the management summary and download the IPA’s full report. -
Product placement has been on our screens for some years, appearing within acquired programming from overseas or as legitimate prop provision. Since February 2011, British films, TV series, entertainment shows and sports programmes made for UK audiences have also been able to contain product placement as long as they comply with Ofcom’s rules. Here you can find out more about this new TV opportunity, including an overview of what you can and can’t do with it. -
This Grand Prix award-winning case study on film, from the 2009 IPA Effectiveness Awards, shows how a new marketing programme generated significant returns at a time when competitors were concentrating on price. The 'Let's Grow' campaign was a voucher redemption scheme, providing schools with gardening equipment and seeds, and encouraging both teachers and children to enjoy growing their own food. Communications included a partnership programme with schools and then a national campaign to consumers, featuring TV, print and DM among others. In its first year, 85% of primary schools registered, 39 million vouchers have been redeemed and Let's Grow has generated payback of £21.57 per every £1 spent. -
Argos and ITV have come up with a clever piece of ad innovation to launch the Argos catalogue. It involves contextual ads across a range of ITV programming and a competition spot in Emmerdale that references the broadcast content. This was all part of a campaign designed by media agency Mindshare to encourage people to interact with the catalogue and is the first time ITV has ever made soap scripts available ahead of time for a brand. You can read more about it, see how the ad looked in the Emmerdale break and view the other contextual ads here. -
We’ve just given our Nickable Quotes page a complete overhaul. This section is a treasure trove of brilliant things said by brilliant people from our industry with lots of new material and an updated search function. You can jump to a category by using the drop down menu, select quotes from a particular industry legend, pop a key word into the search box or simply have a poke around at your leisure. -
The case studies section of the Thinkbox website is one of our most visited and valued online resources. There’s lots of good stuff there, but you can’t have too much of a good thing. So, if you’ve worked on an inspiring or effective campaign that you’d like to see featured, we’d love to hear from you. Here you can get the low down on the information you need to provide, how we would go about researching and writing up your case study, and also who to talk to about making it happen. -
This film tells the story of HSBC’s ‘The world’s local bank’ and how a powerful brand idea helped the bank establish a strong global identity, generating an estimated incremental growth of $69.87 billion worldwide between 2002 and 2008. Based on an award winning paper from 2010 IPA Effectiveness awards, it includes contributions on film from Chris Clark, Global Head of Marketing HSBC, Ian MacDonald, Head of Brand and Advertising, HSBC, Axel Chaldecott, Global Creative Director at JWT and Ben Brown, Global Account Director at Mindshare Worldwide. If you work in the financial sector or would just like to find out more about successful Global advertising campaigns then this is well worth a look.
Highlights
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Here’s the top line of where to go and what you can find and do when you get there … -
Access all areas and sign up to get all the latest from the world of TV advertising. -
Commercial TV impacts in March 2012 were down very slightly by 0.3% on March 2011 but after years of record growth it is up 4% compared to five years ago, according to figures from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board.