The Thinkbox Blog

Looking at the agenda and overhearing comments about yesterday’s PPA (Professional Publishers’ Association – that’s magazines to you and me) conference it’s clear that they are entering the next phase of their relationship with the internet.   From denial, through despair, then resignation, to adoption and excitement, we saw the TV industry go through a similar progression of attitude about 4 years ago.  What the magazine industry – and other media sectors – now realise is that quality content and great brands have nothing to fear and lots to gain from new technology and there’s nothing to stop them expanding online.

I concede that the economic model is a bit harder to sort out for print online compared to TV and radio online; you can only charge for an ad on a page that’s actually served as opposed to getting paid for print ads whether the page is read or not.  But people still want to read great writing enhanced with good design, photography and illustration.  The internet has enabled some UK newspapers to reach millions more people both in the UK and internationally than their print circulations ever could, so it’s time to be optimistic about the prospects for magazines.

Andrew Rashbass, CEO of The Economist and one of yesterday’s PPA speakers, shared his fascinating views on the nature of reading online.  Some of you might have heard him in similar vein at the Guardian Changing Media Summit or the Festival of Media recently.  Put simply, in the early days of the Economist  website, research revealed that the experience was very lean forward and interactive but consumed in short snacking sessions, so they amended the content and format accordingly.  But the arrival of tablets has changed their view.  The Economist iPad app is consumed in very much the same way as the print original: lean-back, absorbed, immersed, read for extended periods – and crucially, properly paid for.  In this example, as with so many others, approaching their content in one way, according to the technology delivering it, would be wrong.  The lines need to be redrawn across platforms.

The fact that the same distribution method can offer such diverse contexts for the same content is instructive.  For us in TV, we delight in people catching up with Britain’s Got Talent clips on their smartphone on their way to work on the bus.  New times and places for watching TV can only be a good thing, but it’s clearly a very different experience from sitting at home with your family around you watching BGT via ITV Player on a 42” connected HD TV set.  Not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different.

Long gone are the days when a single device or technology defined the content; you can now listen to radio via pretty much any electrical gadget, including a TV set.  So, though quality of content is the most important consideration, we must also learn to understand and make a value judgement on the context – both physical and emotional – in which it’s consumed. How does it change the effectiveness of the advertising in it and its suitability for the task?  My guess is that lean-back is probably more effective for long-term memory, changing how you think and feel about brands at a deep level, whereas lean-forward might be better suited to provoking a short-term action.  Until the research exists we won’t know; something else to add to our To-do list.  In the meantime, our intuition will have to do.

“These days”, wrote Marketing’s Noelle McElhatton recently, “the sad fact is a lot of advertising is simply ignored”.  The basis for Noelle’s lament rests on the claim that fifteen years ago Marketing’s Adwatch feature, which tests TV ad recall, saw higher levels.  I have little doubt this is the case, but should we be surprised or concerned about a dip in recall?

There are two questions to ask: a) why might recall levels have dipped and b) does it matter?

Compared to fifteen years ago, there’s a lot more to recall by way of brand communications.  People are seeing nearly 70% more TV ads – at normal speed – for a start, compared to 1997.  Despite this, many brands are buying lower weights on TV per burst compared to yesteryear and are running more pieces of copy, so there is lower weight per execution. Gone are the days when a single piece of copy gets 1200 ratings a year as was the case when Fairy Liquid’s ‘hands that do dishes’ burned itself into our long-term memory.  So people are seeing more commercial messages overall and, even if brands were buying the same TV weight, ‘share of mind’ would probably have dropped.

Add to this the Adwatch methodology.  Fifteen years ago the survey would have been conducted face to face or via telephone, but now it is done online. This causes two problems. Firstly, 35% of people don’t go online in an average month so online surveys are biased to the heavy online users. Secondly, compared to a human, interactive interviewer, you are likely to get a lower level of agreement with an online survey.

But whether recall matters is the bigger, more interesting issue here.   Noelle might think it’s a  sad fact that advertising is ignored, but it’s been a fact that advertising has had to deal with for most of its existence.  We have to accept that, whatever the medium, most people don’t start off paying attention to advertising; it’s advertising’s job to seduce people and draw them.

Recall – conscious, rational and explicit memory – is becoming downgraded as a meaningful metric as we understand more about the brain. Conscious memory is less important than unconscious/long-term memory.  Professor Robert Heath has just published a new book about it called ‘Seducing the Subconscious’.  As with everything he writes, I urge you to read it. On the subject of recall it is quite reassuring; people certainly pay no attention to any form of advertising – and never have done – but there’s strong evidence that that is actually an advantage. Ads like to slip in under the radar without troubling our cognitive brain where there’s more risk of rejection.   Think of it as the Derren Brown effect.  There’s more on this here.  Our own research has also shown that recall had a much lower correlation to propensity to purchase or brand consideration than liking an ad or finding it relevant.

Finally, whatever recall figures might be, TV advertising’s effectiveness in the areas that matter, ie sales and profit, has been increasing in recent years and remains peerless.

Marketing has kindly offered to let us in to its Teddington archives to go back through 15 years of dusty copies to conduct a proper analysis into how things have changed in Adwatch, but in the interests of responding before Noelle’s comment is dusty, we’re saving that mission for a later date.  We promise to let you know what we find.  In the meantime, you can probably relax.

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 BA exec club card colour.

However, it did strike me that if you were a Martian or even just a stranger to the world of media and suddenly found yourself in the midst of it for 3 days, based on the scheduling of the conference, the themes chosen for each session and the people represented on stage, you might well have been left with the following impressions:

∙         There is this phenomenon that everyone is very preoccupied with and that is “digital”.  It is very hard to work out what this “digital” is as everyone uses the word differently but it seems to mean stuff to do with the internet and it’s causing a lot of excitement and anxiety.

∙         There are 3 groups of people who seem to be most significant in this industry (based on how much time they spend on stage) and they are: clients, heads of media agencies and “digital” entrepreneurs.

∙         Very few of them are women.

∙         Clients seem to be worried about transparency and arbitrage/trading desks. Agencies say they shouldn’t be worried. “Digital” entrepreneurs don’t seem to care either way.

∙         According to the “digital” entrepreneurs “digital” is going to kill lots of things. Well, maybe it hasn’t killed many things yet.  But, apparently it’s going to and the digital entrepreneurs think this is a “good” thing.

∙         There seems to be some sort of biscuit problem.  Cookies are being deleted more and more which seems (confusingly) to be leading to cookie proliferation. And apparently the danger is that this might make “digital” a bit rubbish so something needs to be done.

If you were a very astute Martian you might have picked up on a few other themes such as the ones below, but you’d have had to be listening very carefully as they weren’t on stage for long :

∙         Salman Amin, CMO of Pepsico said that the next big thing to happen in media is something called television.

∙         Television apparently is all about great content and great storytelling and this is what real people care about.

∙         Alain Damond of Initiative said that television has never been in as strong position as it is today.

∙         UM shared their wave research which showed that no matter how many additional electronic devices there are in the home, TV viewing remains the same.

∙         Nigel Burton of Colgate-Palmolive said it was important not to react to the latest thing as though it was the only thing.

Wouldn’t it be good if intergalactic, hand-luggage-only-1st-6-rows-fast-track-exec-lounge Martians at next year’s Festival of Media were to go home with a slightly more balanced view of the media industry we all work in?

Facebook fans; they’re fantastic. They’re every marketer’s fantasy. We all fancy as many as we can get. But not all marketers are fanatics; for some it is fandabbydozy, for others it is all still new-fangled and unproven.

That’s enough of that fandango.

The last week or so has seen the issue of how marketers should treat their Facebook fans debated from different angles.

We’ve had AB In-Bev’s Chris Burggraeve saying that his strategy is ‘Fans First’ and suggesting TV is now a ‘secondary’ medium (ahem, allow us and all the effectiveness evidence to disagree).

We’ve had Diageo’s Philip Gladman saying that brands without a major social media following (at least a million) shouldn’t bother and should invest in TV.

And we’ve had the incredibly brainy and forthright Professor Byron Sharp (speaking at a Thinkbox event last week) saying that Facebook is a ‘lower quality’ medium for marketers because it skews towards a brand’s heaviest users and, to be a big brand, you need to reach lighter users. You can watch him saying it here, as well as watch Richard Huntington of Saatchis and Martin Weigel of W+K Amsterdam get some things off their chests (warning: there is quite a bit of swearing).

For our part, it seems obvious that a brand should look after its fans; it should treat them accordingly, sometimes specially. They’ve come to you – often because of a TV ad, in fact – and unless they get fed new content they will drift away. Make them welcome, and try to attract more. But, focusing on fans alone and hoping they’ll attract more fans is not the most effective way to grow your business.

(Indeed, one way of thanking fans is to let them see your new TV ad a day or so early. Who’d have thought? A TV ad as a treat. But that’s not a substitute for letting the whole world beyond your fans see it; real viral will only begin when TV starts the ball rolling.)

As a cautionary tale, remember what happened to Pepsi. A couple of years ago it publically declared it was swapping TV for social media. As a consequence it picked up lots of fans, but it also saw its main brand drop to an unprecedented third in cola sales, behind Diet Coke for the first time ever, and experienced a sales slump of over 5% (worth up to half a billion dollars). Unsurprisingly it went back to TV (only without the fanfare it made when it left).

You might be relieved to hear that I’m not going to bang on about TV advertising’s revenue growth last year. I was, but I’ve decided not to.

I’m also not going to drone on about the near 900 new or returning advertisers who came to TV last year. I considered it, and various pathetic gardening analogies along the lines of ‘900 new bulbs planted in TV’s fertile soil’, but the enormous cringe I experienced persuaded me not to tread that path either.

Instead, I’m simply going to remind everyone that all the positive numbers for TV – and let’s not forget those record viewing figures – are built on one very important thing which we mustn’t lose sight of: creativity. That is the cornerstone of the TV industry – programmes and ads.  It is the reason why Britain is the world’s second largest exporter of drama series after the US with global sales of British TV worth £1.42bn in 2010 (up 13% on 2009).

So, here’s a link to some of the evidence about the power of creativity in advertising, and here is a link to the wonderful Justin Tindall talking about TV ad creativity at our recent event for new TV advertisers.

The irrepressible Tim Lefroy, CEO of the Advertising Association, achieved a near miracle in persuading so many leaders of our industry to take time off from solving the problems of other brands to focus on the state of our shared brand – ‘advertising’ – at Lead 2012.  After the inspiring speakers, thought-provoking discussions and quality gossip we left the morning fired up.   A week and a half later, and after examining our conscience here at Thinkbox, I thought I’d share some of our thoughts on the big issues and calls to action that emerged.

Be positive about the industry
We’re unlikely to get all the sceptical, perfection-seeking and ever-so-slightly paranoid citizens of advertising to become Pollyannas overnight, and who would want them to?   But we do resort to negativity and doom-mongering too readily.  If you’re constantly predicting your own demise, you stop doing the things that matter and you sink into grumbling inertia.  As in Cavafy’s poem,  the Barbarians might never even come, but by then we will have destroyed much of what we value.

There’s also a journalistic angle to this.  I’m never going to persuade Campaign to bin ‘Turkey of the Week’, I guess because it’s more interesting to position things as winners and losers.  But we should politely ask our industry journalists to be more referees than police, viz to approve of the game they are writing about.  None of us should use the phrase ‘junk’ food for instance; there’s nothing ‘junk’ about a pack of Lurpak or a bar of Green & Black’s.  And even national media, with their increasing dependence on advertising, should consider whether they are genuinely acting in the public’s interest before they write/film anti-advertising stories.

So how does Thinkbox perform on the positivity front? Could do better really.  We pride ourselves on never denigrating other media, and we promote integration and how TV works with other media in our research and events.  We celebrate success through the Thinkboxes and the TV Planning Awards.  But occasionally our vigorous defence of TV against the mountains of telly-bashing descends into tetchiness and sarcasm.  Sorry.

Prove the value of advertising to business and the economy…
Advertisers tell us this is what they need most of all from trade bodies.  Luckily the proof is there in bucket-loads.  I think the industry has done well on this issue, with special praise for the IPA’s continuous dedication to the cause of effectiveness.  Not only does the IPA encourage the sharing of advertising’s success stories through its Effectiveness Awards, it also takes them to the city, where the message is finally getting through.  Few analysts today approve of companies cutting their marketing investment to hit short-term profit targets.

But the industry can get over-obsessed with interim measures -  coverage, views, likes, and even recall – when ultimately it’s business outcomes that are the only meaningful metric.   We need to guard against championing the latest fashionable trend without subjecting it to adequate scrutiny.  This never-ending downturn has also prompted a misplaced emphasis on saving advertisers money (discounts, free/earned media etc.) rather than making them money.

I like to think we’re doing our best on this issue with several waves of really robust and impartial Payback research, which have shown that all media broadly generate extra profit for most categories of advertiser.  TV has consistently been proved to generate the most profit (effectiveness) and do it most efficiently (ROI) but we also advise what’s the optimum share for TV and that’s rarely 100%.

In fact, you can come along to an event that we are sponsoring and have organised that seeks to prove that all Government advertising saves the country money, and not just TV.  The Debating Group event is on March 26th at the House of Commons, where you can hear Stephen Woodford and Mark Lund make the case on behalf of all of us.  You can buy tickets for £12 here.

On balance, I think Thinkbox does its bit on this one.

…while promoting sustainability
This is the tough one.  We can undoubtedly prove that advertising generates profit and kickstarts economies.  But can advertising do that while persuading us to consume less?  Most of the responsibility for sustainability inevitably lies with manufacturing, but advertising can play its part by educating people about more sustainable alternatives and how to change behaviours like lowering the temperature of laundry-washing etc.

But can it do even more?  We know that advertising creates strong emotional rewards for people.  We genuinely enjoy the branded cola more than the own-label one despite few discernible, rational differences.  We enjoy the GÜ pudding more than one twice as big and half the price because of the layers of meaning that its packaging and advertising have created.   If the challenge for the planet is to get people to consume less – but happily while maintaining profitability – I frankly don’t think it can be done without advertising.   This is a noble challenge for our industry that we should grab.

We take some comfort from the fact that TV advertising helps pay for the news and current affairs programmes that highlight this issue and even some programmes that tackle it head on, like Hugh’s Fish Fight.  As for Thinkbox itself, we haven’t even begun to address this issue – apart from the normal recycling that goes on in any modern office.   But we promise to do so.

It’s been sobering to reflect on how well – or not – we live up to Lead 2012’s mission.   Do give your own company the AA audit.

Before Bruce Daisley chokes on his cornflakes, let me just say that the above headline is utter rubbish.  Even so, it’s considerably less rubbish than the recent rash of ‘Twitter saves TV’ headlines.  There was this article in The Guardian and then Anthony Rose’s widely reported ‘it’s not the ad-break, it’s a tweet-break’ comment and in the last week plenty of ‘Twitterbowl’ nonsense has been coming from the States.

Thinkbox loves how TV and social media interact, as we have demonstrated over the last three years with various research studies and events on the topic.  But maybe we all need to calm down a bit.  So, in my official capacity of cold-water pourer and stamper on dreams, let me offer some perspective on the subject.

The official UKOM (UK Online Measurement) numbers for January state that 10.4% of the UK visited Twitter at all last month each spending an average total of 43 minutes there. That includes people just following and not tweeting themselves.  The equivalent numbers for linear TV in January were 98% of the UK watched some TV and on average spent 125 hours doing it.

The final episode of Sherlock – which broke the UK record previously held by the X Factor – inspired over 300,000 live tweets. It is a big number on the face of it, but at an average of 2 tweets per tweeter that’s fewer than 2% of viewers tweeting for one of the shows with the biggest impact on Twitter.

This week’s record live TV audience for the Grammys in the US has been credited to the social media effect and maybe that’s part of it, but I’m inclined to think that the tragic death of Whitney Houston, Adele’s return after surgery and Chris Brown’s performance might also have had an effect.   The recent Super Bowl notched up 12 million social media comments from a TV audience of over 111 million, so maybe 5% of the audience tweeted.  The most tweeted about ad (David Beckham’s pants) generated 109,000 comments – i.e. 0.1% of the viewing audience.  Valuable and growing certainly, but no reason to lose sight of the most important viewer experience viz the one happening via the TV screen.  I’d include broadcasters in that warning.

The rather unexciting truth is that Twitter and other social networking services simply tell us people like to talk about TV. They enhance some TV programmes – and ads – for some people; they can encourage more live viewing – or, more likely, reinforce loyalty to a programme; and positive comments can boost TV catch-up.

If there were no social media, TV would still be thriving and we’d just continue to talk to each other about it like we always have and still do vastly more of the time than we talk about it on social media. (Keller Fay says 77% face to face, 6% online, 17% by phone)

TV doesn’t need saving, thanks, and nor does Twitter.  Twitter themselves have said that 40% of tweets in prime-time are TV-related.  That’s quite a lot, but it means that 60% aren’t about TV.  Can we let this rather lovely relationship develop naturally without casting either party as the white knight or the damsel in distress, please?

So, Reed Hastings, boss of Netflix, has aimed his bow and arrow at linear TV. Hastings thinks Netflix is the only future for TV and film consumption: on-demand and via broadband. Bye-bye channels. On Radio 4’s The Media Show he boldly predicted the end for ‘traditional TV’ as consumer behaviour evolves. I was invited on to respond; I disagreed then and I disagree now.  A few days later, in The Guardian, he plucked another arrow from his quiver and again loosed it at linear TV, comparing it to ‘the landline of 20 years ago’, Netflix being the mobile phone.

It maybe hadn’t occurred to him that Netflix won’t work well in homes without a landline, but, that aside, he is aiming at the wrong target. It won’t be linear TV cowering behind its shield but more likely competitor on-demand subscription services like Lovefilm and the DVD rental industry. Read More »

According to Campaign’s viral video chart, the new British Heart Foundation ‘Staying Alive’ ad, demonstrating how to do “hard and fast’’ CPR, was the most shared  ad last week, seen 53,000 times across Facebook, YouTube and the rest of the web.  Hurray for that; the more people who see it the better.   I am a prime candidate for having a heart attack, particularly if I keep getting annoyed at the way ‘viral’ is being used.    It’s also a wonderful ad from Grey London, who has used scary actors to deliver life-saving advice before (Vinnie Jones this time, Steven Berkoff in the past).

We urge TV advertisers ourselves to upload a quality version of their TV ad onto YouTube etc. before their TV campaign starts so they are prepared for the creative dividend they might earn; we were delighted that our own Harvey ad was watched nearly 2 million times on YouTube and Facebook.   It is significant when people choose to find and share your ad and it’s a meaningful measure of likeability, a quality that the IPA and others tell us is the best predictor of success.

So, why the irritation?  Well, I had hoped that the word ‘viral’, used the way marketers tend to (as a noun rather than the adjective it actually is), had gone. Lord knows I’m not the first to be irritated by it or to point out its flaws but I was hearing it used less and hoped a cure had been found. But no; it seems to be a virus that is very hard to kill.

It’s presumptuous to call something a ‘viral’.  You can’t make a ‘viral’; all you can do is make a cracking film and then hope it is liked enough to get distributed virally.   Those very rare films that go viral can achieve millions of viewers globally given enough time,   History of Dance being one of the originals and T-Mobile’s Royal Wedding the most recent commercial example.  But the vast majority earn a few thousand views, many of which originate internally or from their agency roster.

So it’s irresponsible to promote ‘virals’ as a substitute for paid advertising instead of what they really are, which is a delightful by-product, the best example of ‘earned’ media.  The biggest ‘virals’ usually have great creative but they also often have substantial media spend to get their particular balls rolling.

We also find that marketers and creative agencies often have a rather shaky grip on the comparable numbers of viral campaigns vs. paid for media for either reach or cost, through no fault of their own.    The jargon that is rife in media planning means advertisers are rarely told their TV ad will be viewed 260 million times in a standard TV campaign; instead we describe it as 400 TVRs or 80% reach with frequency of 5 which sounds puny compared to 53,000.  The other partial culprit is the internet world’s addiction to ‘numberwanging’ i.e. quoting the highest possible number without qualification or context.

The 53,000 viral views that the BHF received in their first week, were just about matched by the very first TV spot that they bought: Sky News at 6.30am.  It costs about £350 to get your ad 53,000 views on broadcast TV.  I’m prepared to accept that ‘shares’ are more valuable than ‘views’ but even if 10 times as valuable that means the most viral ad of the week earned about £3500 of media value.  I wonder what it cost to get them that, because that is the other myth about ‘virals’ – that they’re free.    How much pushing and placing and seeding went on at what cost and effort?  And if ‘shares’ are worth 10 times a view, what value does the broadcast ‘view’  have that begets the chain of ‘shares’?

Last year at the British Arrows awards ceremony I could have wept at all the brilliant pieces of film that hardly anyone in the room had ever seen, because those advertisers had been persuaded they should make a ‘viral’.

Of course, the BHF didn’t rely on viral distribution; its first peak time TV spot was seen 5 million times and in its first 3 days on air it was seen 73 million times.  A lot of people will owe their lives to that wise investment.

Every year, here at Thinkbox HQ, we like to do at least one blog that features a single graph telling a clear, compelling story about TV. Yes, I know we really shouldn’t spoil you like this but we still have the generous, giving spirit of Christmas flowing through our veins along with the last dregs of the mulled wine and the final green triangle.

This year we thought we’d do it early, partly in light of this story about online TV viewing via laptops, PCs and tablets appearing to ‘plateau’ (you can see our response below the piece – it may be growing more slowly on those devices, but then you’d expect it to, given they are something of a compromise – for in-home viewing at least -  as we wait for internet-connected TVs to truly arrive).

Anyway, here is the graph:

There. Pretty obvious isn’t it?

In case it isn’t, what this thing of graphical beauty shows is that as ownership of digital TV recorders has reached around half the households in the UK, the amount of their viewing people actually time-shift has remained remarkably stable.

Of the two lines on the graph, it is the red one that is the most significant. It represents the amount of time-shifting in homes that own a DTR. From the time of the earliest early adopters to now, when it is a mainstream technology, households with DTRs have on average watched about 15% of their TV time-shifted.

As more households get DTRs (the yellow line that is gradually rising towards its red cousin) and the longer people own them, we might have expected this to creep up a bit, maybe to 20%. But the dust seems to have settled and this is about the level we now expect time-shifted viewing to stay at. It would take something pretty dramatic and unforeseen to be otherwise.

And let’s not forget, while I’m here, that in that 15% of TV that is currently time-shifted, around 30% of it is still watched as though it is live (i.e. the ad breaks are watched at normal speed because people don’t fast-forward them). Also, when you get a digital recorder you watch more TV than you did before with the net result being (once you’ve taken into account any time-shifting) that you watch more ads at normal speed than before you had it (about 3%).

It is also worth pointing out, if I can beg a little more of your attention, that there are two very different attitudes to time-shifting which both go to make up the 15% total: deliberately choosing to record a programme to watch at another time and live pause. The latter time-shifts programmes for seconds or minutes, the former for hours or days. Each accounts for about 50% of total time-shifting.  Not surprising then that nearly half of the time-shifted 15% is viewed on the same day as the live broadcast (VOSDAL).

Anyway, I am getting carried away with the stats, researcher at heart that I am. Why have I shown you this graph? Because amid all the debate about how much people are doing this or that with regards to TV, we shouldn’t lose sight of human behaviour, which hasn’t really changed all that much. We prefer to watch most of our TV on the nice big TV set we’ve invested in, with other people physically present and at the same time as the rest of the world – ideally as it is broadcast, so we don’t miss out. The rest (about 15-20%) is with newer convenient technologies. Together these are helping people to watch more TV overall.