The Thinkbox Blog

There wasn’t a great deal of fuss made last week when the Advertising Association revealed the official UK ad revenue figures for 2012. It was quite a quiet revolution. But I think there should have been more fuss made. So here’s some I should have made earlier.

Firstly, the industry should congratulate the Advertising Association for listening to it – no mean feat when there are so many parties keen to express an opinion – and acting. This year they significantly changed how they report ad spend to better reflect the advertising landscape.

Big wow, you might say. The numbers have been cut slightly differently. Stop making such a fuss about it and tell me how awesome TV advertising is.

Well, TV advertising is awesome, but the change by the AA has made TV’s and other content media’s awesomeness more obvious. I’m putting words in their mouths here, but the AA has – tacitly at least – acknowledged that the internet is a technology, not a medium, and that it is used by many multi-platform media. So online revenue from newsbrands is now assigned to newsbrands, Broadcaster VOD revenue is assigned to TV, online magazine revenue is in the magazine brands pot.

They have made it far fairer and given credit where it is due. This makes sense. It is only right that the online ad revenues from high-quality content are given the right home, rather than living in the same cluttered box as search or social media advertising as they have previously. These are substantial and growing revenue streams now. We should all welcome the greater clarity. If nothing else, it makes it clearer how content media are expanding. The AA should be saluted for making the change.

Another reason for some fuss is the fact that UK adspend hit £17 billion again for the first time since 2007. This is a remarkable moment. In real terms it is still a little behind 2007, but let’s not be churlish. Advertising is on the right course, and the AA has proven itself in recent years to be a steady hand on its tiller – not least through its vigorous lobbying on our behalf, its investment in proving the value of advertising to the UK economy (£100 billion in case you didn’t know), and the confident industry platform that its annual Lead conference has become.

Anyone familiar with Thinkbox and some of the points we have raised in recent years will not be surprised that we think the Advertising Association could go even further and stop reporting ‘the internet’ as a single advertising number. But that debate is ongoing. For the moment, we should recognise that their new approach to reporting ad revenue may look like a small step at first, but it is a giant leap in the right direction.

Two things happened when I read this week’s report that Gavin Darby, chief executive of Premier Foods, had followed up his good financial results with the statement that his company would be “unashamedly sticking with TV advertising”.

Firstly, I gave a little inner cheer for Premier Foods and their supreme good sense at investing in TV advertising. But then I couldn’t help sighing over the word ‘unashamedly’ and the fact he felt the need to use it.

Why should he feel even a tad guilty at using TV when it has never been cheaper in real terms or as effective or as technologically dynamic. Why does he need to apologise to anyone?  He should be celebrated for being clever and sensible and immune to fashion.

Sadly we work in an industry that gets worryingly close to ignoring sensible because it is a bit boring. Tried and trusted is not earth-shattering enough. It doesn’t impress your friends and it wins fewer awards, partly because most award schemes these days seem to delight in adding special categories just for mobile, social etc in a way that they would never dream of doing for, say, in-store marketing or customer publishing.

Internet ‘fundamentalists’ are still deriding marketers for using TV.  It’s about time we turned the tables on them and deride them for their tunnel vision.   Intermediaries are panicking creative agencies, excluding them from pitch lists if they don’t put ‘digital’ at the heart of their offering, whatever that means.   Andrew Melsom even went so far as to recommend that advertisers specifically rule out TV in their briefing.  My advice: explain that TV is the biggest ‘digital’ medium in the UK.

And there are even some advertisers who love to make agencies feel guilty for recommending TV.  And if those agencies are not sure of their facts they can get cowed into recommending a less effective lead medium. Maybe the advertisers deserve that outcome.  But this is where we can help.  We have the facts, we have the evidence.  We delight in being pushed to prove how effective TV advertising is, on its own or integrated with other media.

The short-list for the Thinkbox TV Planning Awards has just been announced; 21 inspiring papers proving why marketers should be confident and proud of using TV to drive their business – and there are another 77 TV-tastic entries that didn’t quite make the short-list but are full of great ideas and evidence.

So come on, don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about using TV.  Get the facts under your belt so you can push back when some idiot says that TV is dead.  Let’s all be shameless in declaring our love for TV.

‘It only takes a second to score a goal’ is one of the most exasperating things people say. Obviously you hope they are saying it during a football match rather than, say, in the throes of passion, but in any context it’s annoying. It ignores all the effort that has gone into creating the opportunity for the goal to be scored: the passing, the movement, the persistence, the skill, the training – and the luck of course.

I was reminded of this when advertising’s provocative centre forward Trevor Beattie recently announced the death of the 30 second spot. He wasn’t the first to do this and he won’t be the last sadly, but his ‘death’ was different. It wasn’t about the level of TV advertising as a medium but about its unit of consumption. His argument was that, for the “tapas generation”, 30 seconds has become “boring” because “our absorption of information these days is so fast”. His solution was that 5 seconds should become the new basic unit of consumption in TV advertising.

He gave an example. He showed a 5 second ad for Persil which featured a white shirt on a washing line blowing in the breeze on a sunny day with the Persil logo in the corner. It was actually rather lovely and effective, but I’m not entirely sure this approach would be so meaningful for a new detergent brand that hadn’t invested many hours of 30-seconds over decades to become associated with white shirts blowing in a summer breeze on washing lines. Persil has played the beautiful game of advertising for decades to enable it to score that particular goal.

But Trevor’s idea was not, as some have reported, that all ads should be 5 seconds. You could do that now if you wanted to – 2 seconds even; we’ve had blipverts for many years. But why would you want to?

Being anally retentive as we are, we thought we’d check to see what the trends in ad lengths have been in TV over the last 10 years – the supposedly ‘tapas’ years. The most telling thing from the analysis is how little change there has been. Yes, the number of TV ads that are 5 seconds long has increased slightly (but then all ads have increased) but they still make up just 0.1% of total TV advertising.

The number of 30 second ads, however, has dramatically increased, from 3.7 million in 2002 to nearly 19 million in 2012, from 44.7% of all TV ads to 50.9%.

The idea that 30 second TV ads are dead is as ludicrous as saying all TV ads should be 30 seconds long. Advertisers create the ad they need to do the job they want to do. Broadcasters are pretty flexible about this; Hovis’s original ‘Go On lad’ famously was 122 seconds long. In fact, if there’s any trend around time-length it would be that many of the most successful TV ads – the ones that people want to share and talk about and which deliver amazing business results – are longer than 30 seconds: John Lewis, The Guardian’s 3 Little Pigs, Virgin Atlantic, C4’s Superhumans, 3’s dancing pony all spring to mind. Cadbury’s had plenty of people complaining when they started to run the cut-downs of Gorilla and so reverted to running more 90 seconds.

But effectiveness is, as ever, key here. All the major effectiveness studies of recent years – the most recent is Binet and Field’s ‘Advertising Effectiveness: the long and short of it’ – have shown TV advertising getting more effective over time as the number of 30 second ads has grown.

If we want to start a campaign about TV advertising let’s not make it about time-lengths but about quality. I hope Trevor will join me in wishing an end to bad and boring ads, however long they are. Maybe we could all start with TV sponsorship break bumpers (lots of 5 second units in there).

I don’t buy the ‘tapas’ premise; people are prepared to devote considerable time – 3 hour films, entire box sets and doorstep novels – if it is merited. TV is more flexible and less prescriptive than ever. If you want tapas one day, you can have it. If you want six-courses with matching wines the next, it is there for you. You decide.

‘It’s good to talk’, Bob Hoskins used to say in TV ads for BT. Well, if it was good then, it’s bloody marvellous now. We have probably never ‘talked’ more in the widest sense of the word. As technology has expanded, so have our means to talk. So the chatter on pillows, at bars, and over watercoolers that we always did has been supplemented by the chatter we now commit to the internet or via the ‘phones that are rarely more than a thumb’s reach away. Our day-to-day tête-à-têtes and heart-to-hearts don’t have to be conducted eye-to-eye or face-to-face anymore (although at least 90% of brand conversations take place offline).

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In the ‘80s film ‘Groundhog Day’, Bill Murray wakes each day to discover that he is trapped in time and place, doomed to relive the same events over and over again. Love and understanding save him in the end.

I am reminded of this because TV suffers from its own form of Groundhog Day; every so often something happens which leads to headlines about a revolution in TV viewing or the end of TV as we know it or farewell to the schedule. Often the word ‘death’ is unleashed like a rabid, half-witted groundhog – even now, when the death of TV died so long ago. Read More »

Almost exactly a year ago, Netflix boss Reed Hastings joined many a failed prognosticator before him and predicted the end for ‘traditional TV’. Consumer behaviour was supposed to inevitably change thanks in part to his company and its on-demand wares. Who needs linear when you’ve got on-demand?

Well, it turns out pretty much everyone.

As we pointed out a year ago, he was aiming at the wrong target. We said that it wouldn’t be linear TV that the likes of Netflix could ‘disrupt’ but more likely competitor on-demand subscription services like Lovefilm and the DVD rental industry. Read More »

Maybe you’re not all such big fans of musical theatre as we are at Thinkbox, so I’d better tell you that the quote above is the title of a song from My Fair Lady, in which the ruthlessly rational Professor Higgins bemoans Eliza Doolittle’s absurd need for emotional expression.  It’s one of those annoying generalisations akin to Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus; annoying because it provokes a flash of recognition.

It’s a fact that males are about four times more likely to sit along the autism spectrum than females.  Autism is not a disease that needs to be cured; it is a condition that confers special qualities on people, many of them highly prized – and increasingly so in a world of dynamic technologies.  Check out your IT department; it’s likely that the majority will be male, many with a passion for the Lord of the Rings and playing World of Warcraft. Read More »

Any regular reader of this blog will know two things: that our Research Director receives the occasional threatening wedgie, and that Thinkbox’s love for Twitter knows few bounds – and not just because of the divine Bruce.  Twitter recently held an event called ‘Twitter TV’ at which they invited Thinkbox to speak.  At the event, Bruce Daisley proclaimed that ‘Twitter loves TV and TV loves Twitter’ (might have been the other way round but you get the point; it was a love-in).

The mutual respect is real and all around the world TV companies and Twitter are having grown-up conversations about working together.  Thinkbox has been promoting the benefits of social media for TV and TV advertising for some time; TV provides lots of the inspiration for social media which in turn amplify TV. Our research study, ‘Screen Life: the view from the sofa‘, examined the multi-screening phenomenon and the implications for TV programmes and advertising, which were overwhelmingly positive (it’s won some awards too, which we’re sickeningly boastful about). Read More »

Last week I attended a stat-packed presentation by Oliver & Ohlbaum on the future of TV. As it is Christmas and a time for giving generously, here are some of those stats, gift-wrapped and placed beneath the Christmas tree of advertising knowledge.

Before I stat you up I, I’ll point out that, as usual, the O&O event was a fantastic use of time, full of genuine, impartial insight, and I would urge you to clamour to get to their future events.

O&O were full of cheer for the future of TV – and not only in the UK, but globally too. They highlighted TV’s ‘robust’ position within the display advertising market and predicted ‘slow but steady growth’ for TV ad revenues (their forecast went as far as 2017). This is fair enough and Thinkbox will be announcing the figures for UK commercial TV revenue in 2012 early next year. They’ll have to go some to improve on 2011’s record-breaking high of £4.3 billion – and some forecasts predict a small drop from the record high – but we’ll have to wait and see. Let’s not count our chickens before we carve our turkeys. Read More »

I know that when you all think of the 17 December 1996, you inevitably think of the 14 Peruvian guerrillas from the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement who on that day took hundreds of people hostage at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima.

However something else happened that day: the United Nations passed Resolution 51/205 and proclaimed today (21 November) World Television Day.

I’m embarrassed to say that this fact has only recently come to our attention, so I’m guessing it must be news to you too.  Why did the UN decide the world needed a Television Day? Well, in its own words: Read More »