TV will continue to be so central to the future of advertising. Here are 7 reasons why this is so, plus supporting evidence and links.

1. TV is the best profit generator
2. TV hardwires brand memories
3. We’re watching an hour more commercial TV a week than 10 years ago
4. TV is the dominant youth medium
5. New technologies help people watch more TV – programmes and ads
6. TV is the new point of sale
7. TV is the most talked about medium

1. TV is the best profit generator

Thinkbox is able to point to two major and impartial study into the effectiveness of advertising to make this assertion with confidence.

Supporting Evidence

• The PWC Payback Study 1 – the most extensive of its kind ever undertaken – found TV paid back an average 4.55 times in increased sales; 30% more than press, the only other media channel to show consistent payback
• TV advertising pays back for longer.  PwC found that TV delivers almost the same value (80%) to the brands in the year following any investment as in the year of investment itself.
• The PWC Study also showed that TV is the most effective generator of brand value and what distinguished the brand value leaders in every market we studied was a dominant TV share of voice
• The PwC Payback Study 2 , conducted a year later in late 2008, added more insight into what happens to people’s willingness to pay for brands in a downturn.  Although the importance of price and value rose the importance of the brand emained by far the most important attribute for most markets.  And brands’ relative value was even more strongly correlated to high shares of TV spend.  PwC concluded that if brands cut their TV advertising budget there is a 73% chance of damaging brand value; but increase investment in TV and there is a 67% chance of increasing brand value.
• The IPA Study – ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ – showed that campaigns focusing on fame and emotion were far more effective in driving the bottom line (sales, market share, profit and loyalty) than more rational campaigns based on information and persuasion – and that TV is the most effective medium at delivering these
• The study also revealed TV was the most efficient medium at increasing market share in relation to share of voice
• It also showed that TV is getting more effective over time; it has increased its lead over all other media channels in each of the last three decades. In fact, the report concludes “don’t neglect TV. Far from being dead, TV advertising remains one of the most effective and efficient media. New technology and increased competition for viewers may actually be making TV more efficient, not less”
  

Further links: Effectiveness

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2. TV hardwires brand memories

A bit of science behind this fact. TV is typically processed at a low involvement level, which means the content is less critically analysed but this makes it well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term. Information which enters the memory through low involvement processing gets stored directly via the emotional centres of the brain straight to the long-term, implicit memory without any conscious filtering. TV is an incredibly effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand. It literally hardwires brands into the brain.

Supporting Evidence

• fMRI scans demonstrate that the two parts of the brain most stimulated when watching audio-visual material (like TV and cinema) are the amygdalla (emotion) and the hippocampus (long term memory encoding). Emotions and long term memory = where brands live.  Neuroscience studies from a variety of media companies (Viacom, GMTV and PHD) have confirmed this finding.
• The work of Professor Robert Heath into low involvement processing is worth reading.
• Thinkbox’s sponsorship work (TV sponsorship: a brand’s best friend, with Duckfoot research) showed that the associations linked to the sponsoring brand amongst fans of the programme were strongly related to the associations created by the programme itself
• Thinkbox’s Engagement Study showed that it was ad liking – not recall or brand attribution – that had most relationship with brand perceptions and intention to purchase. This finding reflected the IPA Study conclusion that “it is liking of an ad, not traditional measures like recall or awareness,  that is the best indicator of future brand performance”
• TV ads are the most liked of all media advertising (although levels have reduced in recent years)
• The brand engrams – the associations linked to a brand – in our Engagement Study were highly (and noticeably) influenced by the advertising.  For many brands, it was the tagline of the TV ad that was the strongest association
  

Further links:  TV and the brain and TV and the Brain: How Creativity Wins

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3. We’re watching an hour more commercial TV a week than 10 years ago

Over an hour more every week, that’s how much commercial broadcast TV we watch compared to 10 years ago, according to BARB. We now spend more than a day a week (26 hours) watching broadcast TV.  And don’t forget that this doesn’t include all the TV BARB doesn’t yet measure, like out of home, online or mobile TV. An hour extra is the least we’re watching.

Supporting Evidence

• Broadcast viewing is rock solid; we’re watching as much broadcast TV as ever.  The good news is that commercial TV’s share of viewing has grown consistently for a number of years.
• Commercial impacts have consistently risen at an even higher rate, across all of the main demographic segments
• Touchpoints 2 (5,000 sample; media usage monitored in real time; all media exc outdoor ) shows people spend far more time watching TV than with any other medium; and also that TV has shown the highest level of increase per user of all media between this study and Touchpoints 1
• Looking at just commercial media usage (exc BBC TV, BBC radio and online email time) TV’s share of media time actually increases!
• Time spent with a medium is a poor way of assessing its effectiveness; most people would accept that a minute of TV advertising is more powerful than a minute of, say, radio.  However, if we compare time spent with each medium against their shares of advertising revenues, TV is significantly undervalued.
• The growth of commercial viewing has helped create a TV market where prices are at 1980s levels in real terms – spectacular value for advertisers.

Further links: TV Briefing and Broadcast TV viewing in 2008

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4. TV is the dominant youth medium

No, it isn’t the internet, keen though today’s youth are on it. TV is the medium that young people spend nearly half (47%)  of their media time with. MTV and Microsoft research, along with Thinkbox’s own has shown how TV is young people’s favourite activity (along with listening to music) and the IPA’s Touchpoints 2 showed that young adults spend nearly twice as much time watching television as they spend online.

Supporting Evidence

• Young people (16-24s OR 16-34s) are increasing their viewing to commercial television and increasing the number of impacts they see.  And in addition their growing online consumption is in part fuelled by watching TV on-demand. – despite all of the evidence that they are also massively increasing their consumption of TV across non-measured platforms
• Touchpoints 2 shows that TV accounts for 47% of the media day of 15-24 year olds – compared to 26% for internet and 24% for radio – and that young people have increased their time spent with TV compared to Touchpoints 1
• Generation Whatever demonstrates that TV is their favourite activity for relaxing and when they are bored. Playing a DVD is their favourite activity when they are hanging out with friends, indicating the potential for on-demand TV services. On all  counts, TV was a preferred activity to going online
• But it’s not just about time spent.  TV is the most significant cultural influence on young people attitudes and aspirations.  Generation Whatever research identified a number of roles that TV plays in the lives of young people – ‘emotional central heating’, social currency, stature and legitimacy, and glamour & entertainment 
• The same research showed young adults talk about TV than any other (digital) medium
• Young people are also far more positive about TV advertising than their older counterparts – they are 2.5 times more likely to say they enjoy TV advertising and significantly more likely to say they want to buy the products being advertised and that they talk about TV advertising with others

Further links:  The Secret Life of Students and TV and young people

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5. New technologies help people watch more TV – programmes and ads

TV remains people’s favourite entertainment whatever the technology involved in delivering it.  Whenever there is a major new technological change people often hail its arrival with the prediction that it will kill whatever existed previously.  But it’s worth remembering, TV didn’t kill newspapers, video didn’t kill cinema and the ipod didn’t kill radio. What tends to happen with the arrival of new technologies is that things shift and change but the predictions of the demise of what was there before rarely come true.

The arrival of  DTRs (digital television recorders) like TiVo and Sky+ in the early days fuelled fears that all ads would be skipped, but the concern is proving unfounded. DTRs are great for TV; people end up watching 17% more TV at normal time speed and more ads. Only about 15% of viewing is time-shifted and of that about 30% is still watched at normal speed. Thinkbox’s own research shows DTRs change the way viewers feel about their television – and the advertising they now control – and it is all for the better. And DTRs let people pause or rewind ads they really like, or share them with others.  Technologies that enhance the quality of the broadcast experience, HD and 3D, are also likely to increase the effectiveness of TV advertising, even if not necessarily the quantity of viewing.

Supporting Evidence

• According to the Skyview panel, when households acquire a DTR, they watch significantly more TV, but the majority (85%+) is still to live broadcast schedules – and as they only fast forward around 70% of the time, this means they watch approx 2% more commercials at normal speed than they did before they got the DTR
• According to Duckfoot Research, even when ads are fast forwarded at 30x speed, recall is still around 65% of the level when they are played at normal speed as long as the ad has already been seen.
• This is indicative of the fact that the technologies that are supposed to kill TV end up nurturing the medium. We have seen similar examples for IPTV (supposedly the death of the schedule – in reality people use it to keep up with the schedules!) and web TV (YouTube etc. were supposed to cannibalise TV audiences but instead act as an informal PR machine e.g. Susan Boyle)
• As Thinkbox’s TV Bites on DTR Owners demonstrates, these technologies create better engagement with TV programming, which extends the loyalty of the viewers to their favourite programmes and helps them discover new programmes they might otherwise have passed by
• This is being reflected in viewer attitudes to online TV. Thinkbox’s recent Me-TV study shows that


• This is a fast growing phenomenon – one of the fastest growing web activities
• The broadcasters are responsible for most of that growth via their own services – and the broadcasters now dominate this market
• Access is diversifying – we are seeing rapid growth in viewing TV at work, on mobile devices and in a range of situations
• People use online TV predominantly to catch up to the broadcast stream – that is the main reason why online TV is not cannibalising broadcast TV audiences
• However, online TV is also introducing many light TV viewers to content they would not normally find time to watch – therefore bringing them back into the broadcast audience
• The attitudes towards advertising in this environment – unlike much of the net – are generally very positive – viewers understand the commercial contract. Although they prefer more familiar formats like pre-rolls and sponsorship, they are also remarkably positive about some of the newer, interactive formats

Further links: Digital Television Recorders (DTRs / PVRs)

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6. TV is the new point of sale

Thinkbox’s recent TV + Online study, with the IAB (TV & Online: Better together), demonstrated that, for the 25% most digitally enabled people, TV is often concurrently consumed with the laptop open and online, and people are increasingly ready and able to use it to find out more or communicate about the content they are watching on TV, both programming or advertising content. There are many examples of TV leading directly to online search, comparison and purchase and strong evidence that, without TV, online activity would be less effective.  The journey from TV to purchase is now much shorter – even immediate – thanks to the internet.

Supporting Evidence

• Amongst the TV + Online sample (the 25% most digitally-enabled section of the population) concurrent consumption of TV and online is fast becoming a regular event – almost half of them do it at least once a day and two thirds  once a week or more
• We saw in the study anecdotally how that can lead to people following up what they see on TV with immediate online action, via search, website visits, purchase.  A brand can go from initial awareness to sale all within the same commercial break
• People who were registered on retail websites could immediately place items they had seen in a TV ad on their shopping list.
• In total, 75% of the sample could recall acting on at least one TV commercial, compared to 52% who could recall acting on an online ad
• They are generally more positive about TV advertising across all its roles, but particularly at the start of the consumer journey
• Consequently, more of them say they have been persuaded to purchase online by a TV ad than by online advertising
  
  

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7. TV is the most talked about medium

TV is cultural glue. People love talking about TV, off- and online, almost as much as they love watching it. In fact, the only subjects we want to discuss more than TV are friends and family, according to Television Opinion Monitor. Just a glance at the immense number of groups on Facebook dedicated to TV shows and ads, or the number of TV event Tweets or the responses that Guardian live-blogs on TV events receive, demonstrates its cultural importance.

Supporting Evidence

• TV is the 3rd most talked about subject (after 'cost of living' and ‘family and friends’) across the 30 years lifespan of the Television Opinion Monitor. The internet now allows us a privileged peek at these conversations. 
• There are numerous TV-related groups on Facebook. In July 2008, there were more than 50 Facebook groups dedicated to the ‘Cadbury’s Drumming Gorilla’, with combined membership of almost 100,000 people. Marketing recently reported that comparethemarket.com’s Alexandr the Meerkat had 350,000  Facebook fans. 
• Susan Boyle videos on Youtube have been seen by over 150 million people worldwide
• User generated content online is mostly inspired by professional TV content, including the ads. 
• Most discussion about TV goes on when people are watching together – Thinkbox’s Engagement Study demonstrated just how important the shared viewing phenomenon is; which is good as it is growing (as more people congregate around the 42” flat screen in the main living room) and it accounts for an estimated 70% of viewing occasions
  

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