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. Here are the top ten, plus supporting evidence and links.

1. TV is the best profit generator
2. TV has unbeatable scale and reach
3. We’re watching more TV than ever before
4. TV is the most talked about medium both on and offline
5. All TV ads are response ads
6. TV is the new point of sale medium
7. TV is the dominant youth medium
8. TV is THE emotional medium and emotional campaigns are more effective
9. TV is the catalyst for other media
10. TV builds brand fame

1. TV is the best profit generator

Thinkbox is able to point to two major and impartial studies 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 remained 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
• Payback 3, an independent study commissioned from Ebiquity by Thinkbox, is an econometric analysis of 3,000 ad campaigns across nine advertising sectors between 2006 and 2011. It compares, on a like-for-like basis, the sales and profit impact during the last five years of five forms of advertising: TV, radio, press, online static display and outdoor.  It shows that TV advertising created the most profit (an average return of £1.70 for every £1 invested) and that its return on investment (ROI) has increased by 22% in the last five years. Ebiquity found that TV advertising is 2.5 times more effective at creating sales uplift per equivalent exposure than the next best performing medium
• The IPA Study – ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ – showed that 66% of campaigns using TV as a lead medium reported very large business effects compared to 49% for campaigns that didn’t
• In addition 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 has unbeatable scale and reach

Television has always had the capacity to reach a massive audience. Commercial TV now offers a plethora of channels and programmes and can reach over 70% of people in one day. It is TV’s ability to deliver these numbers and in a short space of time that is a key USP for the medium.

In addition ‘Event TV’ and programmes like X Factor and Champions League Football are bringing in even bigger audiences, particularly for hard-to-reach viewing groups (like young men aged 16-34), as well as making famous the advertisers associated with them.

This capacity, unique to TV, can also serve to make brands seem bigger than they really are, instilling a sense of authority and stature and re-enforcing that TV is the biggest game in town.

Supporting Evidence

• You can reach 73% of people in a day on TV, within a week you can reach 92% and within a month, 98% - no other medium can better that Source: BARB
• X Factor peaked at 12.8 million people on 4 September

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3. We’re watching more TV than ever before

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 (over 27 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 3 (6,050 sample; media usage monitored in real time; all media exc outdoor ) shows people spend far more time watching TV than with any other medium; (TV 50%, Radio 26%, Internet 19%, Newspapers 4% and Magazines 1%)
• Looking at just commercial media usage (exc BBC TV, BBC radio and online email time) TV’s share of media time actually increases to 52%!
• 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 2010

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4. TV is the most talked about medium both on and offline

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 a past Television Opinion Monitor survey. 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

• In 2008 TV was 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. Comparethemarket.com’s Alexandr the Meerkat has over 700,000 Facebook fans. 1.49m people are fans of The X-Factor on Facebook. And we can’t forget ‘Cadbury’s Drumming Gorilla’ where there were more than 50 Facebook groups, with a combined membership of almost 100,000 people
• 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 occurs when people are watching together – Thinkbox’s Engagement Study demonstrated just how important the shared viewing phenomenon is; it is growing (as more people congregate around a wide-screen telly in the main living room) and it accounts for an estimated 70% of viewing occasions
  

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5. All TV ads are response ads

We all know that TV makes people do things, from voting for our favourite reality contestant to ordering something online, and the advancement of technology has made it even easier to respond to television. Driving viewers to do something (increasingly online) is now a key objective for many advertisers.

Thinkbox commissioned MediaCom to examine this further and study the link between TV spots and web activity conducted within a 10 minute timeframe of the TV ad broadcast. What they found is that all TV ads will create an online response, even if response is not the primary objective, and because they can now be instantly searched for, shared, copied and appraised at the click of a mouse, this is adding a whole new dimension to response advertising.

Supporting Evidence

• All TV activity will illicit an online response. For example, 94% had gone online as a result of seeing something on TV in the last year (Source: Online Journeys with The Best Organisation)
• Over half with internet access claimed to concurrently watch TV & browse the net every day (Source: Online Journeys with The Best Organisation)
• The majority who view concurrently (57%) spend 1hr+ per day (Source: Online Journeys with The Best Organisation)
• As a result of seeing a TV ad, 57% agree they have conducted an online search, 36% agree they have visited a brand’s website to find out more, 28% have searched the net to find out where to buy the brand and 21% have purchased online - Source: TV+Online: better together (a joint study with the IAB commissioned from Q Research)
• TV ads trigger online activity. Approx 60% of all immediate response to TV ads is via an online route. This has increased from c15% 10 years ago - Source: The new rules of TV response  (commissioned from MediaCom)
• Even pure brand ads with no call to action generate an immediate web response. - Source: The new rules of TV response (commissioned from MediaCom)

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6. TV is the new point of sale medium

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. 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 concurrent consumption of TV and online is fast becoming a regular event
• 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 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 a majority (43%) 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 3 showed that young adults spend more time watching television as they do 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 3 shows that TV accounts for 43% of the media day of 15-24 year olds – compared to 36% for internet and 19% for radio
• 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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8. TV is THE emotional medium and emotional campaigns are more effective

For most of us, television is intertwined into the very fabric of our lives – and TV advertising is all the more powerful for it. TV stimulates the parts of the brain that other media don’t reach as effectively – namely the emotions and the long term-memory. That’s why we can remember ads we loved from decades ago and why TV ads can make us fall in love with brands (just think of Honda, Cadbury, M&S or Guinness for example). Although we tend to think of ourselves as rational beings, developments in our understanding of the human brain have taught us that advertising works most successfully when it moves us emotionally. 

The fact that TV is a veritable feast of moving images and sound maximises the opportunity for advertisers to emotionally engage their audience. Work by the IPA has revealed that emotional campaigns are more effective than those that have a rational focus. 

It is TV’s ability to create deep, long-held emotional brand associations that is one of its most unique benefits.

Supporting Evidence

• Neuroscience demonstrates that the two parts of the brain most stimulated when watching audio-visual material (like TV and cinema) are the amygdala (emotion) and the hippocampus (long term memory encoding). Emotions and long term memory = where brands live.  Thinkbox’s own neuroscience study showed that TV elicits a higher level of engagement
• The work of Professor Robert Heath as well as our own neuroscience findings explore low involvement processing in greater depth
• Creatively awarded campaigns are much more likely to be ‘emotional’ than ‘rational’ (44% vs. 19%). This partly explains the prevalence of TV in creatively awarded campaigns as TV creates emotion better than other media (source: ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’, IPA)
• Pound for pound, creativity makes ad campaigns more efficient; on average, creatively awarded campaigns (i.e. in major awards competitions recognised by The Gunn Report) are at least 11 times more efficient (IPA & Gunn Report study)
• 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”
• 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

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9. TV is the catalyst for other media

TV is not the only medium available to advertisers. In fact the IPA say that multi-media campaigns are the most effective. But putting TV at the heart of an integrated campaign will make every other medium work better.

TV establishes key elements of the brand - logo, strap-lines, music etc – in a rich media context so that when any individual component is used in another medium it can evoke memories of the fuller TV communication. Using music from TV ads in radio can provoke a visual memory, as long as it's there. Similarly static print and poster campaigns are more impactful and make better sense after being established through moving images. For example, the Comparethemarket.com campaign has used radio featuring Aleksandr the Meerkat. If you hadn't seen the TV ad, the radio campaign would have made little sense.

This is why TV makes the ideal campaign foundation, freeing up other media to do what each is good at but ultimately working together to drive successful business results.

Supporting evidence

• MediaCom conducted an econometric analysis of integrated campaigns across a variety of market sectors using a broad mix of off and online channels examining cost per acquisition (CPA) by channel. It has uncovered that Direct Response TV, far from being one of the most expensive channels, is in fact cheaper than online and broadly matches search costs for CPA
• According to the IPA TV and online are the optimum media combination
• Respondents to the TV+Online: better together study indicated that when they had seen a TV ad first, they were more than twice as likely to have recognised a supporting online ad
• Using TV and online together results in 47% more positivity about a brand than using either in isolation Source: TV+Online: better together (a joint study with the IAB commissioned from Q Research)
• The likelihood of buying or using a product increases by more than 50% when TV and online are used together Source: TV+Online: better together (a joint study with the IAB commissioned from Q Research)
• Both TV and the internet are used for entertainment (TV, 80%; online 56%) and both have a significant influence on driving purchase (75% and 52%) Source: TV+Online: better together (a joint study with the IAB commissioned from Q Research)

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10. TV builds brand fame

Quite simply TV is the best medium for making and keeping brands famous. From Hovis to Sony to PG Tips, we recognise the truth of this intuitively, and nearly all of the most famous brands have famous TV campaigns.

Investing in creativity is a powerful way to achieve fame (i.e. buzz and talkability). Brands can buy awareness but not fame; and fame is proven to be at the heart of the most effective advertising

Furthermore and through the most thorough and impartial examination of the last 27 years and 880 Advertising Effectiveness Awards (the best of the best), the IPA has proved that no matter what size your budget, TV makes campaigns more effective and it also outperforms all other media channels.

Supporting evidence

• Campaigns which used TV were on average 25% more effective than ones which did not (source: ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’, IPA)
• Emotion and fame (at which TV excels) were the most effective creative strategies (source: ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’, IPA)
• The link between creativity and effectiveness research 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 between 2000 and 2008. It reveals a direct correlation between strong advertising creativity and business success and that high levels of creativity make advertising campaigns at least 11 times more efficient

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